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How Their Living Outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature
| Author: | Luczak, Ewa Barbara | |
| Year: | 2010 | |
| Pages: | 336 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-3748-7 978-0-7734-3748-7 | |
| Price: | $219.95 | |
The book examines fictional responses of African American expatriate writers to Europe in the 1960s. It analyzes the change in the African American perception of Europe and seeks to reveal how African American writers of the 1960s responded in imaginative ways to the European scene.
Reviews
“. . . provides us with richly textured readings of important but shamefully understudied novels and also calls into question any tendency to dismiss the bulk of African American literature of 1960s as hamstrung by a naïve or misguided nationalist impulse.” – Prof. Richard Yarborough, University of California at
Los Angeles
“To my knowledge these writers have never been studied as a group, nor has their influence upon their elders, and thus the way in which they extended and transformed both the expatriate vision of America and the African American vision of Europe, ever been as thoroughly analyzed as it is here.”– Prof. Eric J. Sundquist, University of California at Los Angeles
“Luczak’s book breaks away from the pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism that has plagued some of the existing approaches to these writers. Importantly, it also shows that even Baldwin, Smith, Yerby, Demby, Brown, and Williams were not free from stereotypical thinking about race and gender as they lived their lives as ‘twentieth-century black American writers in European exile.’ ” – Prof. Magdalena J. Zaborowska, University of Michigan
“To my knowledge these writers have never been studied as a group, nor has their influence upon their elders, and thus the way in which they extended and transformed both the expatriate vision of America and the African American vision of Europe, ever been as thoroughly analyzed as it is here.”– Prof. Eric J. Sundquist, University of California at Los Angeles
“Luczak’s book breaks away from the pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism that has plagued some of the existing approaches to these writers. Importantly, it also shows that even Baldwin, Smith, Yerby, Demby, Brown, and Williams were not free from stereotypical thinking about race and gender as they lived their lives as ‘twentieth-century black American writers in European exile.’ ” – Prof. Magdalena J. Zaborowska, University of Michigan
Table of Contents
Preface by Prof. Richard Yarborough, University of California at Los Angeles
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. From Enchantment to Criticism of Colonial France: James Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” and William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face
2. Escaping Racial Determinism: Frank Yerby’s Parisian Romance Speak Now
3. From Skepticism to New Humanisms or When Europe and Africa Converse in Rome: William Demby’s The Catacombs
4. Resisting the European Seductress in Copenhagen: Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
5. The Quality of Hurt: European Exile and John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am
6. When the United States Becomes a Point of Unavoidable Return
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. From Enchantment to Criticism of Colonial France: James Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” and William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face
2. Escaping Racial Determinism: Frank Yerby’s Parisian Romance Speak Now
3. From Skepticism to New Humanisms or When Europe and Africa Converse in Rome: William Demby’s The Catacombs
4. Resisting the European Seductress in Copenhagen: Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
5. The Quality of Hurt: European Exile and John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am
6. When the United States Becomes a Point of Unavoidable Return
Bibliography
Index