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

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Description

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

Demirtrk (American culture and literature, Bilken Univ., Turkey) has written five books and numerous articles on black and feminine identity. In the present useful study of contemporary African American novels she analyzes (and includes plot summaries of) Daniel Black's Listen to the Lambs (2016), Sister Souljah's A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015), Victoria Murray's Stand Your Ground (2015), and Walter Mosely's Charcoal Joe (2016) and Down the River unto the Sea (2018). Demirtrk demonstrates that these novels provide examples of and strategies for transgressing white supremacy with positive social and political action, healthy personal behavior and identity, and strategic resistance. As an extension to the Black Lives Matter Movement these novels portray black characters who are not so much objects of victimization but people who make their everyday violent environment habitable. An afterword looks at the "Kaepernick moment" as an example of "strategy for change." Kaepernick's political performativity enacts an alternative form of defiance in a culture that makes blacks vulnerable.

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

* CHOICE *

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.