Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American / Edition 1

by Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Overview

In Conjugal Union, Robert F. Reid-Pharr argues that during the antebellum period a community of free black northeastern intellectuals sought to establish the stability of a Black American subjectivity by figuring the black body as the necessary antecedent to any intelligible Black American public presence. Reid-Pharr goes on to argue that the fact of the black body's constant and often spectacular display demonstrates an incredible uncertainty as to that body's status. Thus antebellum black intellectuals were always anxious about how a stable relationship between the black community might be maintained. Paying particular attention to Black American novels written before the Civil War, the author shows how the household was utilized by these writers to normalize this relationship of body to community such that a person could enter a household as a white and leave it as a black.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195104028
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/22/1999
Series:	Race and American Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	9.54(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.82(d)
Lexile:	1490L (what's this?)

About the Author

Johns Hopkins University

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	xi
	Introduction	3
Chapter 1	Engendering Race	15
Chapter 2	American Panorama	37
Chapter 3	Clean House, Peculiar People	65
Chapter 4	Black, White, and Yeller	89
Chapter 5	Conjugal Union	111
	Epilogue	129
	Notes	133
	Select Bibliography	153
	Index	165

Editorial Reviews

"Reid-Pharr, by contrast, takes pains to 'belabor' his points, resulting in a much more succint, and ultimately more satisfying piece of scholarship."-American Literature

"Conjugal Union's greatest strength lies in Reid-Pharr's willingness to complicate, in necessary ways, not only classic treatments of modern narrative, but his own analysis as well. Roberts Reid-Pharr's book clearly helps fulfill the need for further analysis o the emergence of a Black American novelistic tradition and of the ways that scholars have habitually constructed that tradition." — Callaloo

From the Publisher