Full Description
Radical and provocative, Racism and the Black Subject is not another objectivist history or sociology of racism, but an historically informed exploration of the effects of racism on Black bodies, minds and spirits - where structures, meanings, violence and power have their most insidious effects. It is a disturbing journey guided by voices from the slave ship, the plantation, the lynching tree and the ghetto. The main sources are narratives, autobiographies, poetry, spirituals, blues and visual art, and the author's own experience as an African-American.Racism and the Black Subject rejects outright the orthodoxy that sees subjectivity as the product of language. It argues, with some assistance from Fanon and Foucault, that Black Subjects have been constituted as much through violence and brutality as through words and meanings. This book is essential reading for those who want to understand racism and its victims.
Contents
Preface. Table of Contents. Introduction: The Subject of Racism. Part I: Creation: 1. Sharks, Shipmates and the Middle Passage: The Invention of Black Folk. Part II: Messas Children: 2. Seasoning, Breaking and Niggerfication. 3. We Who Were Raped. 4. Valley of Tears and Sorrow Songs. 5. Slave Culture as Resistance. Part III: The Terror of Jim Crow: 6. Lynching, Sadism and Other Forms of White Christian Charity. 7. Knowing How to Talk: Language, Power and Jim Crow Etiquette. 8. Lifting the Race. . . and It Letting Down. 9. We Wear the Mask. Part IV: Ghetto Blues and True Americans. 10. Apocalypse Now: Alienation, Nihilism and Macho Death. 11. Cadillacs in the Ghetto (Or Why Black People Love Big Cars). 12. Black Rage. Part V: Burdens of Blackness: 13. Cockroaches, Paranoia and Everyday Life. 14. Double-Consciousness. Fractures Identities and the Veil. 15. Language - Value - Power. 16. The Burden of History. 17. Deferred Dreams, Suffocated Hopes. Part VI: Redemption: 18. Turning the Tables: Whose Side is God On? Coad. 19. Lessons for Theorists. Bibliography. Index.
