Violence, Body, and "The South"

Special Issue of American Literature

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Edited by Houston A. Baker and Dana D. Nelson

Duke University Press

Due/Published June 2001, 243 pages, paper

ISBN 0822365006

Violence, the Body, and "The South" is a boldly innovative contribution to a new Southern Studies, which provides a model of collaborative, intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary scholarship. This special issue of American Literature challenges the traditional division of the United States between "North" and "South," revealing that the complexities of violence and pleasure, representation and illusion, innocence and guilt, gender and race exist in infinitely inflected combination in the Americas, not simply in the "South."

 This collection represents examples of gender, critical race, genre, and material culture studies. Topics ranging from epistemological and authorial rebellions marking Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition to the twentieth-century labors of writers, such as Francisco Goldman and Helena Mar’a Viramontes, who work to make visible the complexities of "North" and "South" with respect to subordinated Latino/a bodies. William Faulkner is revisited in an essay on the internalization of "race" in Light in August. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night are analyzed in a framework of homopolitical desire. Genre and regional studies combine in an essay resituating Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with respect to "Northern" fiction. Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Jeannine DeLombard, Laura Doyle, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Andrea Levine, Dana D. Nelson, Ana Patricia Rodr’guez, Bryan Wagner

Contents

Preface: Violence, the Body, and "The South"--Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson
"Eye-Witness to the Cruelty": Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative--Jeannine DeLombard
The "Mysteries and Miseries" of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl--Jennifer Rae Greeson
Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence--Bryan Wagner
The Body against Itself in Faulkner's Phenomenology of Race--Laura Doyle
Sidney Poitier's Civil Rights: Rewriting the Mystique of White Womanhood in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night--Andrea Levine
Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the U.S. Latino Imaginary--Ana Patricia Rodr’guez