There's a riot going on! Race and rebellion in contemporary African American culture
Abstract
In James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), he contends that the only resolution to the "racial nightmare" in American society is for conscious whites and blacks to teach others about racial intolerance. If this effort fails among conscious citizens of both races, the fire next time Baldwin prophesizes will be increased social unrest, as African Americans' protest against the rhetoric that has classified them as less than human and the unchanged policies that have treated them as inferior will surge. My dissertation project addresses the discontent of which Baldwin speaks, as I argue that the "racial nightmare" of the 1960s extends into the 1980s and 1990s in the form of an extension of the African American protest tradition. I take for study Henry Dumas' "Riot or Revolt," John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire: A Novel, Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Each writer and filmmaker argues that civil unrest must be read beyond its conventional representation in American society. In particular, their metaphoric use of riots and rebellion makes "intelligible" certain disjointed narratives in American history often dismissed as merely violent and disorderly. To support this analysis, I use as centerpieces certain literary and political moments from the Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movements to discuss issues of race and rebellion that these contemporary African American writers and artists articulate in their works. Reading riots and rebellion in later twentieth-century works exposes the ways in which black writers and artists of the later twentieth-century redress the unequal social wrongs in contemporary historical incidents that represent the continuing plight of African Americans in a society that engenders such inequalities.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Patton, Purdue University.
Subject Area
African American Studies|American literature|Ethnic studies|Film studies
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