Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature
Daylanne K. English
Abstract
Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” charact ... More
Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” characterizes the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and the two movements’ investment in present-day political potentialities, as in Hughes’s and Baraka’s use of the jazz of their respective eras for their poetic form and content. Overall, Political Fictions argues that across genre and era, African American writers have shown how time and justice work together as interdependent “political fictions,” to adapt a useful phrase from Pauline Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces, wherein her African American hero declares, “Constitutional equity is a political fiction."
Keywords:
African American literature,
Time,
Timekeeping,
Strategic anachronism,
Strategic presentism,
Citizenship,
Justice,
Political fictions,
Legal history,
Pragmatism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816679898 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816679898.001.0001 |
