{"product_id":"the-real-negro-shelly-eversley-9780415968355","title":"The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature","description":"In 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Shelly Eversley\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0415968356\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780415968355\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Routledge\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/29\/2004\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 112\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.77lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.34h x 6.10w x 0.56d","brand":"Shelly Eversley","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48064979009791,"sku":"9780415968355","price":210.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_0bf38a8e-3dba-4c9b-b3e7-bc7925debf92.jpg?v=1768672324","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-real-negro-shelly-eversley-9780415968355","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}