{"product_id":"9780415968355","title":"Real Negro","description":"Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called \"the real negro\" - in 20th-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 to 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 t","brand":"Shelly Eversley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45774587199806,"sku":"9780415968355","price":9924.97,"currency_code":"ZAR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4357\/7662\/products\/9780415968355_15f3351a-ae85-4738-96b8-78d2fe5af361.jpg?v=1707254566","url":"https:\/\/exclusivebooks.co.za\/products\/9780415968355","provider":"Exclusive Books Online","version":"1.0","type":"link"}