Reading, writing, and re-writing : the black body in contemporary African-American literature

• Main Author: Djawoto, Olivia
• Other Authors: Kevin Andrew Riordan
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73860
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Through an examination of three contemporary African-American writers, this thesis seeks to explore the ways the black body is constructed through their negotiating of their own corporeal vulnerability to racial discourse. Turning to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, this thesis will examine the ways in which these writers have attempted to craft the black body as a site of challenge to these discourses, and how it, even in its failure, still engenders new ways of thinking about blackness. If racism is a rhetoric that has been written upon the black body, I argue that contemporary African-American writers, in complicating the relationship between the reader and the black writer, re-negotiate the power dynamics involved in the reading and writing of black bodies to engage in an unceasing re-writing of it.