(Further) Figures of Violence

The story of Ann Petry's The Street is one in which the insistent, yet often surreptitious, cultural violence permeating the American landscape is ultimately rendered graphic and immediate, and in which the forgery of radical difference between African-American ghettos of New York, or any American city, and the stately wealth of Connecticut, or any all-American suburb, is articulated and exposed. The Street recounts a story in which the mastering and masterful traditional voice in the American landscape finds itself challenged by the sly alterity of the singing voice, a voice assuming much more than mere traditional speech. Accordingly, a fundamental premise of my analysis is that AfricanAmericans, only ostensibly, appear mastered by and distant from a masterful and privileged Anglo-American population and culture. Taking Petry's recently reissued novel as its focus, my analysis reiterates that the initiatives of cultural production and lordship in the United States, initiatives urgently in need of revision, extend insidiously beyond a myth of black inferiority that first took shape on the deck of a slaving ship (Davidson 25). Extend

Archaeology · Geography · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

• The "Walking Wounded"

  Craig E Henderson, Carol E Henderson•MFS Modern Fiction Studies•2000

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• Black Chant

  John Gery, Aldon Lynn Nielsen•American Literature•1998

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• Black Chant

  Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen•African American Review•2000

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• This Strange Communion

  Heather Hicks•African American Review•2003

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• Slave Culture

  Sterling Stuckey•Slave Culture•2013

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• The Strange Career of Jim Crow

  C Vann Woodward•The strange career of Jim Crow•2001

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• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe

  Hortense J Spillers•diacritics•1987

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• Contingencies of Value

  Barbara Herrnstein Smith•Critical Inquiry•1983

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