Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

by Melanie Benson Taylor
ISBN-10:
0820331120
ISBN-13:
9780820331126
Pub. Date:
08/15/2008
Publisher:
University of Georgia Press
ISBN-10:
0820331120
ISBN-13:
9780820331126
Pub. Date:
08/15/2008
Publisher:
University of Georgia Press
Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002

by Melanie Benson Taylor

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Overview

In Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, Margaret Leonard says, “Never mind about algebra here. That’s for poor folks. There’s no need for algebra where two and two make five.” Moments of mathematical reckoning like this pervade twentieth-century southern literature, says Melanie R. Benson. In fiction by a large, diverse group of authors, including William Faulkner, Anita Loos, William Attaway, Dorothy Allison, and Lan Cao, Benson identifies a calculation-obsessed, anxiety-ridden discourse in which numbers are employed to determine social and racial hierarchies and establish individual worth and identity.

This “narcissistic fetish of number” speaks to a tangle of desires and denials rooted in the history of the South, capitalism, and colonialism. No one evades participation in these “disturbing equations,” says Benson, wherein longing for increase, accumulation, and superiority collides with repudiation of the means by which material wealth is attained. Writers from marginalized groups—including African Americans, Native Americans, women, immigrants, and the poor—have deeply internalized and co-opted methods and tropes of the master narrative even as they have struggled to wield new voices unmarked by the discourse of the colonizer.

Having nominally emerged from slavery’s legacy, the South is now situated in the agonized space between free market capitalism and social progressivism. Elite southerners work to distance themselves from capitalism’s dehumanizing mechanisms, while the marginalized yearn to realize the uniquely American narrative of accumulation and ascent. The fetish of numbers emerges to signify the futility of both.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820331126
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 08/15/2008
Series: The New Southern Studies Series
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 280
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR is an assistant professor of English and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002 and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (both Georgia).

MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR is an assistant professor of English and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002 and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (both Georgia).

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: The Fetish of Number, Narcissism, Economics, and the Twentieth-Century Southern Ego     1
The Fetish of Surplus Value: Reconstructing the White Elite in Allen Tate, William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe     27
Stealing Themselves Out of Slavery: African American Southerners in Richard Wright William Attaway, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston     59
The Measures of Love: Southern Belles and Working Girls in Frances Newman, Anita Loos, and Katherine Anne Porter     94
Contemporary Crises of Value: White Trash, Black Paralysis, and Elite Amnesia in Dorothy Allison, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy     129
Re-membering the Missing: Native Americans, Immigrants, and Atlanta's Murdered Children in Louis Owens, Marilou Awiakta, Lan Cao, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, and Tayari Jones     164
Conclusion: Disturbing the Calculation     202
Notes     207
Bibliography     233
Index     253
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