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In Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetics (2002) Mark Anthony Neal describes an intellectual and aesthetic crisis spreading among contemporary authors and audiences of Black popular culture – a crisis triggered by a profound sense of alienation from the hopeful spirit of rebellion and political struggle that had united African American writing since the Civil Rights Movement. In this research-oriented BA seminar, in which the doctoral candidate Martin Stöckmann will put his knowledge on postmodern literature to the test, we want to discuss this political, intellectual and literary crisis by investigating exemplary novels by two writers, Percival Everett and Colson Whitehead, which turn away from the Soul tradition in African American literature. In novels such as Glyph (Everett, 1999), I am not Sidney Poitier (Everett, 2009) and The Intuitionist (Whitehead, 1999), postmodern forms of speculation, satire, parody and irony are used to move away from straightforward demands for and faith in social justice. The novels investigate instead new and old affiliations with a broader philosophical faith in the human soul. This faith does not stop at the boundaries of African American soul traditions; instead it does not shy away from extending its field of acceptable ancestors to include the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Participants need to purchase and read the following texts:
Everett, Percival. Glyph: A Novel. 1999. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014.
Everett, Percival. I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009.
Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. 1999. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Scholarship to be discussed includes:
Ashe, Bertram D. "Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction." African American Review 41.4 (2007): 609-23.
Ellis, Trey. "The New Black Aesthetic." Callaloo 38 (1989): 233-43.
Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. New York: Oxford UP, 2016.
Moriah, Kristin Leigh. “I Am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Black Aesthetic in Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier.” Understanding Blackness Through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anne Crémieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 221-36.
Warren, Kenneth. What was African American Literature? Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. |
