African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life

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African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life explores the undoing of whiteness by black people, who dissociate from scripts of black criminality through radical performative reiterations of black vulnerability. It studies five novels that challenge the embodied discursive practices of whiteness in interracial social encounters, showing how they use strategic performances of Blackness to enable subversive practices in everyday life, which is constructed and governed by white mechanisms of racialized control. The agency portrayed in these novels opens up alternative spaces of Blackness to impact the social world and effects transformative change as a forceful critique of everyday life. African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era shows how these novels reformulate the problem of black vulnerability as a constitutive source of the right to life in their refusal of subjection to vulnerability, enacted by white institutional and individual forms of violence. It positions a white-black-encounter-oriented reading of these neo-resistance novels of the Black Lives Matter era as a critique of everyday life in an effort to explore spaces of radical performativity of blackness to make happen social change and transformation.

Reviews

In a masterful way and using all of the current theoretical and critical tools, Professor E. Lale Demirturk in The African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era explores the everyday interior and complex lives of vulnerable black male individuals as they resist whiteness and signify a different and more just American society. It is a truly significant undertaking. As expected, Professor Demirturk, again, demonstrates how her critical eye is brilliantly and precisely focused on the heartbeat of the contemporary African American novel and the American society. -- W. Lawrence Hogue, University of Houston, author of "Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives"

Author Bio

E. Lle Demirtrk is professor in the department of American culture and literature at Bilkent University.