Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction

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Exploring literary possibilities, Politics and Affect reads black womens textin particular Frances Harpers The Two Offers (1859), Julia Collinss The Curse of Caste (1865), Nella Larsens Quicksand (1928), and Danzy Sennas 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.

Reviews

Politics and Affect intervenes in affect, queer, philosophical, and cultural studies by calling readers to an epistemological project grounded unabashedly in the radicalizing forces of love and the range of emotions joy, sorrow, excitement, shame, grief, and all the others that render us human. By applying affect and reader response theories to race, black fictions, and embodied blackness, Politics and Affect becomes an astute study surpassing theorizations by some of the most prominent affect, queer, and feminist philosophers. Glass convincingly argues that African American womens fictions from the antebellum period to the present establish intense emotions including love and empathy as fundamental to the cultivation of antiracist sociopolitical activism. -- Joycelyn K. Moody, University of Texas at San Antonio
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. -- Linda Furgerson Selzer, Penn State University
Politics and Affect in Black Womens Fiction offers sophisticated interpretations of African American women writers attention to female spirituality, agency, and action. In this perilous political moment in history, Glass animates how black womenacross place and timewiggle, push, shove, and reason their way outside of small enclosures. The sweep of Glasss historical reach offers generous, generative interpretations of womens commitments to loves innovations. Through careful philosophical and sociopolitical reflection, she rescues love from the dustbin of sentimentality, illuminating the beauty that emanates from seeing Black womens writing with loving eyes. That, itself, can change the world. -- Becky Thompson, Simmons College

Author Bio

Kathy Glass is associate professor of English at Duquesne University.