Sede Amministrativa: Università degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari CORSO DI DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN: Scienze Linguistiche, Filologiche e Letterarie CICLO: XXXI Post-Authenticity: The Collapse of Authentic Blackness in the Post-Soul Memoir Coordinatore: Ch.mo Prof. Rocco Coronato Supervisore: Ch.ma Prof. Anna Scacchi Dottoranda: Monia Dal Checco Table of contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 4 Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 5 Riassunto ............................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 7 1. Post-Soul and Authentic Blackness .................................................................................... 15 1.1 Post-Soul, Post-Black, Post-Racial: A Terminological Distinction ................................................ 15 The “impulse to posterize” ............................................................................................................ 15 Dealing with the legacy of soul: tentative definitions of post-soul ............................................... 18 Emergence and Critical Reception of “Post-Black” ....................................................................... 23 Conclusions: Lack of a “Post-ˮ Label for Twenty-First Century African American Literature ....... 32 1.2 Black Identity and Artistic Production: Authentic Blackness in Literary Criticism from the New Negro to the New Black Aesthetic .................................................................................................... 35 Authenticity and Representation .................................................................................................. 35 The Debate on the Role of Black Artists in the Harlem Renaissance ............................................ 37 The Protest Novel and the Question of Realism ........................................................................... 47 The Black Arts Movement and the Shift to Post-Soul ................................................................... 50 Trey Ellis’s “New Black Aesthetic”: Ideals and Critical Responses to “Cultural Mulattism”.......... 56 Blaxploration and Allusion-Disruption Gestures: A New Take on Authentic Blackness ............... 66 Black Artists or Just Artists? Black Authenticity in Thelma Golden’s Conception of Post-Blackness ....................................................................................................................................................... 75 Becoming Post-Black: Self-Determination and the Racialized Self ............................................... 79 2. Literary Antecedents: Authenticity and the Reception of African American Life Narrative .. 85 Authenticities ................................................................................................................................ 85 The Primal Test of Authenticity: Phillis Wheatley ......................................................................... 89 Putting on the African Mask: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? ............................................ 93 The Exceptional as Representative: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs ................................ 98 Authenticity and Self-Representation after Slavery .................................................................... 106 Manchildren and Revolutionaries: Black Autobiography in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements ................................................................................................................................. 113 3. Post-Soul and the Memoir Boom: The Crisis of Authenticity ............................................. 126 From Authentic to Fluid Blackness .............................................................................................. 126 Preference for the Memoir Form: Fragmentation and Relationality .......................................... 131 1 “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down:” Precariousness and Shakiness ..................................... 136 The Floating Signifier: The Importance of Fluidity ...................................................................... 140 Tests of Blackness and Conscious Performativity ....................................................................... 144 Mobility, Reverse Migration and the Reconstruction of the Family Tree ................................... 149 4. Cultural Mulattism .......................................................................................................... 156 Not Blacker, but More than Black ................................................................................................... 156 Fluid Blackness in James McBride’s The Color of Water (1995) ...................................................... 162 Reading The Color of Water as Post-Soul Literature ................................................................... 162 Blackness as Fluid as Water ......................................................................................................... 165 Fluid Whiteness and Cultural Mulattism ..................................................................................... 171 The Role of Mobility: Identities in Transition .............................................................................. 178 Conclusions: Liquid identity as “Orchestrated Chaos” ................................................................ 182 Multiracialism and Black Authenticity in Danzy Senna’s “To Be Real” (1995) and Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009) .................................................................................................................. 183 Performing Realness .................................................................................................................... 183 Blaxploration: “To Be Black Is to Contain All Colors” .................................................................. 187 Miscegenation as Blaxploration .................................................................................................. 192 Conclusions: Post Post-Soul and Self-Definition ......................................................................... 196 5. Blaxploration .................................................................................................................. 198 Post-Soul Ambitions: Social Mobility and Black Authenticity ......................................................... 198 Ambitions of a Black Nerd: Nelson George’s City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post- Soul Success (2009) ......................................................................................................................... 200 Post-Soul and the Emergence of New Identity Types ................................................................. 200 Between Soul and Post-Soul Masculinity .................................................................................... 203 Interrogating Representations of Blackness ............................................................................... 207 Cultural Mulattism and Class Mobility: Post-Soul v. Ghettocentricity ........................................ 209 Conclusions: Embracing Post-Soul Success ................................................................................. 215 To Transcend the Circumstances: Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013) ................................... 216 Post-Soul Aesthetics and the Critique of Anti-Blackness: A Viable Interaction? ........................ 216 The Role of Fragmented Chronology in Men We Reaped ........................................................... 218 Blaxploration, Geography and Class Mobility: Nostalgia for the South as a Site of Authentic Blackness ..................................................................................................................................... 222 Gender Dynamics and Allusion-Disruption Gestures: The Critique of the “Strong Black Man” Archetype .................................................................................................................................... 230 Conclusions: Learning to Survive ................................................................................................. 235 2 6. Allusion-Disruption Gestures .......................................................................................... 237 The Critique of the Nationalist “Race-Man” Father ........................................................................ 237 The Focus on Embodied Blackness in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (2008) ...................................................................................... 240 The Problem with Post-Soul: Embodied Blackness and the Threat of Disembodiment ............. 240 Performing the Black Cool as a Strategy for Survival .................................................................. 244 The Conscious Black Patriarch ..................................................................................................... 248 Conclusions: Coming to Consciousness and The Refusal of Prescriptive Notions of Blackness . 251 Post-Post Soul Babies: New Racism and Generational Fractures