Conjugal Union by Robert F Reid-Pharr

Conjugal Union by Robert F Reid-Pharr

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Summary

Arguing that gender and sexuality have always played a role in questions of black national identity, the author identifies the origins of a "national" African-American literature in 1827 and the beginnings of a novelistic tradition. He shows how various forces shaped the ideal of the black family.

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Conjugal Union by Robert F Reid-Pharr

In Conjugal Union, Robert F. Reid-Pharr argues that during the antebellum period a community of free black northeastern intellectuals sought to establish the stability of a Black American subjectivity by figuring the black body as the necessary antecedent to any intelligible Black American public presence. Reid-Pharr goes on to argue that the fact of the black body's constant and often spectacular display demonstrates an incredible uncertainty as to that body's status. Thus antebellum black intellectuals were always anxious about how a stable relationship between the black community might be maintained. Paying particular attention to Black American novels written before the Civil War, the author shows how the household was utilized by these writers to normalize this relationship of body to community such that a person could enter a household as a white and leave it as a black.
Reid-Pharr, by contrast, takes pains to 'belabor' his points, resulting in a much more succint, and ultimately more satisfying piece of scholarship* American Literature *
Reid-Pharr, Robert F.: - Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780195104028
ISBN 10 0195104021
Title Conjugal Union
Author Robert F Reid-Pharr
Series Race And American Culture
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Year published 1999-08-19
Number of pages 192
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.