Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature
"A very impressive book. Wardi’s redefinition of the African American pastoral and her treatment of the themes of death, blues, and the collective memory are original and exciting."--Charles Scruggs, University of Arizona\ This book examines the preponderance of death and its accompanying funerary and mourning rituals in the African American expressive tradition. Focusing on the relationship between geography and death in African American literature, Anissa Wardi argues that the...
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List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Signifying Gestures, or the Mark of Cane in African American Literature11Graveyard Dirt: The Embodied South in A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved272Cotton Fields and Cane Stalks: Labor and Death in Of Love and Dust and Song of Solomon523"His House Is a Dead Thing": Home and Exile in Linden Hills774"A Crooked Kind of Mourning": Migration and Loss in Jazz, The Men of Brewster Place, and In My Father's House1055Conversations with the Dead: Echoes of "Kabnis" in Mama Day135Conclusion: "Our People's Graves"159Notes167Bibliography187Credits201Index203
