Details

Subject(s)

• South African literature—Black authors—History and criticism [Browse]
• South African literature (English)—Black authors—History and criticism [Browse]
• American literature—African American authors—History and criticism [Browse]

Series

New Black studies series [More in this series]

Summary note

Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Sťphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning. -- Amazon.com.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-225) and index.

Contents

• Introduction: imagining a transnational ground
• Race, place, and the geography of exile
• Remapping the (black) nation
• Cultivating correspondences; or, other gestures of belonging
• Constructive engagements.

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ISBN

• 9780252039478 ((cloth ; : acid-free paper))
• 0252039475 ((cloth ; : acid-free paper))
• 0252084829
• 9780252084829

LCCN

2015010759

OCLC

905600319

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