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Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner's Racial Imaginations

Violent Disruptions contends that the works of Richard Wright and William Faulkner are mirror images of each other and that each illustrates American race relations in distinctly powerful and prescient ways. While Faulkner portrays race and American identity through sex and its relationship to the imagination, Wright reveals a violent undercurrent beneath interracial encounters that the shared imagination triggers. Violent Disruptions argues that the spectacle of the interracial body anchors the cultural imaginations of our collective society and, as it embodies and symbolizes American slavery, drives the violent acts of individuals. Interracial productions motivate the narratives of Richard Wright and William Faulkner through a system of displacement of signs. Though these tropes maintain their currency today, they are borne out of cultural imaginings over two hundred years old. Working within the framework of the imaginary, Violent Disruptions places these now historical texts into the twenty-first century's discourse of race and American identity. / African and African American Studies

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/11169797
Date10 October 2014
CreatorsChavers, Linda Doris Mariah
ContributorsSollors, Werner
PublisherHarvard University
Source SetsHarvard University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Rightsopen

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