Frydman, Jason, 1976-
Charlottesville London : University of Virginia Press, [2014]
Added to CLICnet on 09/08/2015

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Part of the series New World studies;New World studies.
Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-175) and index.
• Introduction — World literature and antiquity : classical surrogates in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Belt — World literature in hiding : Zora Neale Hurston, biographical criticism, and African diasporic vernacular culture — Whiteness and world literature : Alejo Carpentier, racial difference, and narrative creolization — Dialectics of world literature : Derek Walcott between intimacy and iconicity — Material histories of world literature : intertextuality and Maryse Condé’s historical novels — Healing world literature : Toni Morrison’s Conflicts of interest — Conclusion.
• The idea of world literature has served as a crucial though underappreciated interlocutor for African diasporic writers, informing their involvement in processes of circulation, translation, and revision that have been identified as the hallmarks of the contemporary era of world literature. Yet in spite of their participation in world systems before and after European hegemony, Africa and the African diaspora have been excluded from the networks and archives of world literature. In Sounding the Break, Jason Frydman attempts to redress this exclusion by drawing on historiography, ethnography, and archival sources to show how writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and Toni Morrison have complicated both Eurocentric and Afrocentric categories of literary and cultural production. Through their engagement with and revision of the European world literature discourse, he contends, these writers conjure a deep history of literary traffic whose expressions are always already cosmopolitan, embedded in the long histories of cultural and economic exchange between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is precisely the New World American location of these writers, Frydman concludes, that makes possible this revisionary perspective on the idea of (Old) World literature. — Publisher’s website.

Subjects:

• American literature — African American authors — History and criticism.
• American literature — 20th century — History and criticism.
• Caribbean literature — 20th century — History and criticism.
• Race in literature.
• Group identity in literature.
• African diaspora in literature.
• Literature and history.

Requested by Wanyama, M.