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Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature
In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson.

By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women’s writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

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Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature
In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson.

By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women’s writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

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Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

by Ayesha K. Hardison
Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

by Ayesha K. Hardison

Overview

In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson.

By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women’s writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813935935
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Publication date: 05/13/2014
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Ayesha K. Hardison is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Defining Jane Crow 1

1 At the Point of No Return: A Native Son and His Gorgon Muse 25

2 Gender Conscriptions, Class Conciliations, and the Bourgeois Blues Aesthetic 54

3 "Nobody Could Tell Who This Be": Black and White Doubles and the Challenge to Pedestal Femininity 85

4 "I'll See How Crazy They Think I Am": Pulping Sexual Violence, Racial Melancholia, and Healthy Citizenship 117

5 Rereading the Construction of Womanhood in Popular Narratives of Domesticity 144

6 The Audacity of Hope: An American Daughter and Her Dream of Cultural Hybridity 174

Epilogue: Refashioning Jane Crow and the Black Female Body 203

Notes 221

Works Cited 249

Index 271

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Literature
Social Sciences
African Americans
Literary Criticism
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African American Literature - Literary Criticism
Literature
Social Sciences
African Americans
Literary Criticism
African American Arts & Entertainment
American Literature
African American Literature - Literary Criticism

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