Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction
By (author) Kathy Glass
Not available to order
Publication date:
15 December 2017Length of book:
134 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498538404
Exploring literary possibilities, Politics and Affect reads black women’s text—in particular Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859), Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste (1865), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as richly creative documents saturated with sociopolitical value. Interested in how African American women writers from the nineteenth century to the present have mined the politics of affect and emotion to document love, shame, and suffering in environments shaped by race, Kathy Glass gives sustained attention to the impact of racist affect on the black body, and examines how black women writers deploy emotional states to engender sociopolitical change.
One of the first scholars to apply affect studies to black women's fiction, Kathy Glass persuasively argues that affect should be understood not in terms of mere sentimentality, but as a potentially radical evocation of social action. Offering important new readings of Frances Harper, Julia Collins, Nella Larsen, and Danzy Senna, Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction skillfully analyzes the multiple operations through which affect poses a transgressive challenge to racist ideology and practice.