Black Anaesthetics: African American Narrative Beyond Man

FAIN: FT-286400-22

Shaun Myers
University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6133)

Research and writing one chapter of a book on Black women writers and the techniques they used to obscure blackness in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Black women writers gained unprecedented visibility in a US cultural marketplace shaped, on the one hand, by the Black Arts Movement’s demand that Black artists represent lived racial experience and, on the other, by the historical white demand that blackness reliably take its appointed form: embodied and spectacular. Yet, even as these contending forces intersected, certain black women writers refused these expectations. Black Anaesthetics: African American Narrative Beyond Man argues that writers such as Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Andrea Lee invented techniques of obscuring blackness to trouble the racial logics requiring that it always be uttered or seen. Studying their narrative racial experiments, Black Anaesthetics tells the story of how their integration of the mainstream publishing world conditioned the development of black anaesthetics, narrative practices figuring blackness as imperceptible, but always in the shadow of the racialized world.