Geographies of Flight : Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler

Decker, William Merrill

ISBN 10: 0810142325 / ISBN 13: 9780810142329

Edité par Northwestern University Press, 2020

N° de réf. du vendeur 40535533-n

Synopsis :

African American writing commonly represents New World topography as a set of entrapments, contesting the open horizons, westward expansion, and individual freedom characteristic of the white, Eurocentric literary tradition. Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler provides the first comprehensive treatment of the ways in which African American authors across three centuries have confronted the predicament of inhabiting space under conditions of bondage and structural oppression. William Merrill Decker examines how, in testifying to those conditions, fourteen black authors have sought to transform a national cartography that, well into the twenty-first century, reflects white supremacist assumptions. These writers question the spatial dimensions of a mythic American liberty and develop countergeographies in which descendants of the African diaspora lay claim to the America they have materially and culturally created.

Tracking the testimonial voice in a range of literary genres, Geographies of Flight explores themes of placement and mobility in the work of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler.

À propos de l?auteur:

WILLIAM MERRILL DECKER is a professor of English and American Studies at Oklahoma State University. His previous books include The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, and Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood.

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : Geographies of Flight : Phillis Wheatley to ...
Éditeur : Northwestern University Press
Date d'édition : 2020
Reliure : Couverture souple
Etat : New