Raising the Dead

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of deaths relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through the space of death gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide. Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other minorities in society is, like death, almost unspeakable. She gives voice toor raisesthe dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenans A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory. Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.