{"product_id":"9781138806450","title":"The Real Negro : The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Routledge","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48730222133483,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":135.49,"currency_code":"SGD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0758\/4484\/5803\/files\/9781138806450-1.jpg?v=1781659058","url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.sg\/products\/9781138806450","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Singapore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}