Introduction: Class Lines: Look Both Ways Before Crossing -- African American Literature. The Wrong and Right Side of the Tracks: Mapping the Intraracial Class Dynamics in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Dawn Turner's Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven ; Cheap Behavior and Costly Secrets: Taboo Topics in Toni Morrison's Love -- Caribbean Literature. Beyond the "Class" Room: The Entanglements of Class and Education in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey and Olive Senior's Dancing Lessons ; Human Rights and Wrongs: Violations to a Decent Standard of Living in Diana McCaulay's Dog-Heart -- Epilogue: Romance Across (Class) Borders & Have Some Post-Class.
Summary:
"As downward mobility continues to be an international issue, Robin Brooks makes a timely intervention between the humanities and social sciences by examining how Black women's cultural production engages debates about the growth in income and wealth gaps in global society during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this innovative book employs major contemporary texts by both African American and Caribbean writers--Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dawn Turner, Olive Senior, Oonya Kempadoo, Merle Hodge, and Diana McCaulay--to demonstrate how neoliberalism, within the broader framework of racial capitalism, reframes structural inequalities as personal failures, thus obscuring how to improve unjust conditions. Through interviews with authors, textual analyses of the fiction, and a diagramming of cross-class relationships, Brooks offers compelling new insight on literary portrayals of class inequalities and division. She reconceptualizes the scope of the Black women's literary tradition since the 1970s by repositioning the importance of class, and she explores why the imagination matters as we think about novel ways to address long-standing and simultaneously evolving inequities"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.