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This open access book examines how selected African American authors Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space. On the one hand, they bear witness to the structural production of Black emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, they reveal meaningful and subversive interlinkages between Black emotional experiences and Black spatial practices. Weaving together insights from psychology, narrative theory, African American studies, affect theory, and Black Geographies, Marijana Mikic interrogates fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to the racial-geographic projects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their continued legacies. Mikic draws attention to the narrative strategies contemporary African American authors employ to prompt their readers engagement with both the pain and the possibility that continues to shape Black lives in the twenty-first century.
List of contents
Chapter 1:Introduction.-Chapter 2:Fear, Hope, and Geographies of Slavery in Colson Whitehead s The Underground Railroad and Edward P. Jones s The Known World.- Chapter 3:Shame, Guilt, and Separatist Geographies in Toni Morrison s Home and Brit Bennett s The Vanishing Half.- Chapter 4:Anger, Outrage, Race, and Space in Percival Everett s Erasure and Maurice Carlos Ruffin s We Cast a Shadow.- Chapter 5: Grief, Grievability, and Environmental Disaster in Sherri L. Smith s Orleans and N.K. Jemisin s Broken Earth Trilogy.- Chapter 6: Conclusion.
About the author
Marijana Mikić completed her PhD at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She is coeditor of Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Her essays have appeared in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Orbis Litterarum, and Anglia.
Summary
This open access book examines how selected African American authors—Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin—narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space. On the one hand, they bear witness to the structural production of Black emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, they reveal meaningful and subversive interlinkages between Black emotional experiences and Black spatial practices. Weaving together insights from psychology, narrative theory, African American studies, affect theory, and Black Geographies, Marijana Mikić interrogates fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to the racial-geographic projects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their continued legacies. Mikić draws attention to the narrative strategies contemporary African American authors employ to prompt their readers’ engagement with both the pain and the possibility that continues to shape Black lives in the twenty-first century.
