{"product_id":"black-refigurations-kimberly-w-benston-9781785278730","title":"Black Refigurations: Facing, Naming and Voicing in African-American Literature, Volume III","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBlack Configurations\u003c\/em\u003e is the first volume of a three-volume study that offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking pathways (each to be pursued in the Impact Series format): by charting figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison (Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming; facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary expression (Volume 3). The critical trilogy presents thereby a narrative of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process, blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for expressive transformation. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of literary history--that is, the relation between discourse and its referents--is itself such a politically and thematically charged issue? On one hand, the ideological exclusion of the African-American subject from authorized spheres of meaning and signification gives value to narrating black literary tradition as the progressive emergence of a fully articulate presence, and seems to find warrant in black writing's persistent thematization of literacy, public performance, and self-definition. On the other hand, such a narrative of fully realized agency and consciousness risks replicating the dominant ideology's own reductive vision of identity as a predetermined totality, thus imagining some singular and final form for African-American being. The study asserts instead that African-American literature is fueled by the simultaneous workings of a desire for a totally realized subject and the constant displacement of that desire by a willingness--in contrast to the oppressive system that would deny its agency--to put its own mode of being into question. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Kimberly W. Benston\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1785278738\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781785278730\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Anthem Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 12\/31\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 250\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.00lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.02h x 6.02w x 1.02d","brand":"Kimberly W. Benston","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46465570734335,"sku":"9781785278730","price":110.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_a8cd8073-75ac-465f-9a35-b9e2d248db06.jpg?v=1736346639","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/black-refigurations-kimberly-w-benston-9781785278730","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}