Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (New Americanists) - Softcover

Holland, Sharon Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822324997 ISBN 13: 9780822324997

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2000

Synopsis

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death’s relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.
Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.
Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

About this title

Review

“Raising the Dead is a tour de force filled with provocative, original, and imaginative observations and insights. Sharon Holland draws on a dazzling range of influences and interprets an impressive array of diverse cultural forms as she asks and answers crucial questions about ancestry, origins, and heritage in African American and Native American life and culture.”—George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego

“A thorough, challenging, and compelling investigation of the themes of subjectivity, death, and their interrelation in twentieth-century American literature and culture.”—Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside

“A work of theoretical power and brilliant interpretive prowess.”—Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University

From the Author

Sharon Patricia Holland is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0822324997
• ISBN 13: 9780822324997
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248