Product Description: The social and cultural agendas developed in the 1970s continue to haunt and inspire. Grassroots feminist culture blossomed, taking cues from activists, writers, and scholars. This special issue of WSQ invites scholars, artists, and activists to reflect on the decade's wide-ranging accomplishments, its unfinished agendas, and its influence on the contemporary moment...read more

In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.

Product Description: The mid-1970s feminist critique of the female body, sex, and pornography ignited a debate that has continued to this day. Through critical essays, fiction, poetry, and images, this provocative issue of WSQ probes this territory in the light of emerging areas of study...read more

Relates the experiences of an African prince who was kidnapped into slavery in 1755 and followed his various masters from the Americas to Europe and through the Caribbean.