Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction

Exploring literary possibilities, Politics and Affect reads black womens textin particular Frances Harpers The Two Offers (1859), Julia Collinss The Curse of Caste (1865), Nella Larsens Quicksand (1928), and Danzy Sennas Caucasia (1998)as richly creative documents saturated with sociopolitical value. Interested in how African American women writers from the nineteenth century to the present have mined the politics of affect and emotion to document love, shame, and suffering in environments shaped by race, Kathy Glass gives sustained attention to the impact of racist affect on the black body, and examines how black women writers deploy emotional states to engender sociopolitical change.