Representing Segregation

Scholars of English from across the US, most specializing in African-American literature, examine the literary representation of racial segregation in the country. Their overall themes are the aesthetic challenges of Jim Crow politics, imagining and subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt's segregation fiction, inside Jim Crow and his doubles, exporting Jim Crow, and Jim Crow's legacy. Their topics include the social life of segregation signs, Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the culture of segregation, remapping segregation in Angelina Weld Grimké's "Blackness" and "Goldie," Latin America and the transnational in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this Way, and abolitionist memory and spatial transformation in civil rights literature and photography. Earlier versions of some of the essays appeared in a special issue of African American Review 42.1 (2008).