The blackness of blackness . . . reading the typography of invisible man

Theatre Journal

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 679-698

  DeVere Brody, Jennifer ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949637666     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2006.0006     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Suzan-Lori Parks, "From Elements of Style," in The America Play And Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 13.
2. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 71. Subsequent references are noted in the text.
3. See, for example, Anthony Hammond, "The Noisy Comma: Search for the Signal in Renaissance Dramatic Texts," in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McCleod (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 203-49.
4. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, produced by Jerome Agel (New York: Ginko Press, 1967), 117.
5. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), especially 16-29.
6. Ed Bulling, The Theme is Blackness: The Corner and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1973).
7. See also Richard Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Toronto: Hartley and Marks, 1992);
8. and Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. Schneider, "Driving," 115,
10. Elizabeth Yukins, "'An Artful Juxtaposition on the Page': Memory, Perception, and Cubist Technique in Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth," PMLA 119 (2004): 1248.
11. Scott Irwin, "A Bugler of Words: Ellison's Musicality and the Jazz/Blues Tradition in Invisible Man," Oakland Journal (Winter 2004): 110.
12. Robert G. O'Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 7.
13. American Masters Series: Ralph Ellison: An American Journey, dir. Aaron Kirkland, PBS, 2002.
14. Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Vanni Press, 1947).
15. Nathaniel Mackey, "Other: From Noun to Verb," in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 265-85.
16. See also Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Sonic Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
17. Robert O'Meally, ed. "Introduction," in New Essays On Invisible Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11.
18. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70.
19. Anne Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 172.
20. See for example, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Blues People;
21. Robert Ferris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit;
22. Houston H. Baker, Jr., Blues Ideology and African American Culture;
23. Aldon Nielson, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
24. For a reading of queerness in Ellison's text see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations of Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
25. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 8. Except as noted, all material cited is from this edition and will hereafter be cited in the text.
26. Mieke Bal, Quoting Carravaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 195.
27. One thinks of Hortense Spillers' "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" here as well. See Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
28. Blount, "Preacherly Text," 582-93.
29. Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 9.
30. Edwards, "Syntax," 645.
31. Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1865;
32. Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic-Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 36.
33. Here one may think of Peter Stallybrass's work on Renaissance conceptualizations of the term "individual," which Raymond Williams explains once was synonymous with "indivisible." See Peter Stallybrass, The Cultural Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1991), 594.
34. Ralph Ellison, "The Little Man at Chechaw Station," in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 503.
35. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Fall 1989): 1-34.
36. Eric Partridge, You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies (London: Routledge, 1953), 8. Subsequent references to this work are noted in the text.
37. Jason Merchant, The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 94.
38. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1993);
39. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
40. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6.
41. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.
42. Quoted in Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 21.
43. Hill, After Whiteness, 67-68.
44. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 42.
45. Ellison, "Introduction," xvii-xix.
46. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132.
47. See Jeffrey Masten, Nancy Vickers and Peter Stallybrass, Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997).
48. William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (1959; rept. New York: McMillan Press, 1979), 80.
49. James Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Min-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 213-30.