Black women, identity, and cultural theory : (un)becoming the subject / / Kevin Everod Quashie

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910959010003321
• Autore: Quashie Kevin Everod
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, c2004
• ISBN: 0-8135-5540-X; 0-8135-3536-0
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (241 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9/9287/08996073
• Soggetti: American literature - African American authors - History and criticism - Theory, etc; American literature - Women authors - History and criticism - Theory, etc; African American women - Intellectual life; Women and literature - United States; African American women in literature; Identity (Psychology) in literature; Women, Black - Intellectual life; African American photographers; Group identity in literature; African American aesthetics; Women, Black, in literature; Women photographers
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-219) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction : what becomes -- The other dancer as self : notes on girlfriend selfhood -- Self(full)ness and the politics of community -- Liminality and selfhood : toward being enough -- An indisputable memory of blackness -- The practice of a memory body -- Toward a language aesthetic -- My own, language -- Conclusion : what is undone.
• Sommario/riassunto: In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the "girlfriend" as a new way of ; understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes. The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.