Why Are You So Angry?

Anne Potjans

Why Are You So Angry?

Anger and Rage in Black Feminist Literature

by Anne Potjans (Author)
©2024, Textbook, XII, 200 Pages
Education

Series: Counterpoints, Volume 550

This is a study of Black women’s anger, its attempted silencing, and its cultural effects. It grounds the discussion of the political and cultural function of Black feminist anger in several points of inquiry, tying it to the conditions of Black life mired in the structures that characterize the afterlives of slavery and colonialism.

Turning to anger can do important work with regards to unraveling epistemic and hermeneutic injustices, the role of negative affect in public spaces, as well as in everyday communicative situations, and how emotional standards integral to dominant definitions of the human and of subjectivity function to maintain and reify human difference and discrimination. By analyzing integral works of Black literature, this book explores how the messiness of anger and rage is navigated and represented in literary texts, but also commended and valued as part of Black feminist lived experience.

Cover
Title
Copyright
About the author
About the book
This eBook can be cited
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
If You Are Not Angry by Now, You Have Not Been Paying Attention: Analyzing Black Feminist Anger
1. “… so it is better to speak?”: Anger as Black Feminist Practice
2. Theorizing Blackness and Affect: A Possibility for Reconciliation?
3. An Archive of Abjection: Black Feminist Anger, Liberal Humanism, and the “Powers of Horror”
“This Hell Where I Live”: Anger in the Poetry of Wanda Coleman
1. Coleman and the Methodology of Black Feminist Anger
2. “Always on the Attack”: Reestablishing Lyric Authority Through Anger
3. Abject Geographies
4. “No Woman’s Land”: Tracing Black Women’s Sexual Agency
Beloved Anger: The Affective Limits of Liberal Humanism
1. Slavery and the Abjection of Black Humanity
2. Of Handsaws, Hummingbirds, and Insurgent Mothers
Tensed from Being Gentle, or Why You Always Fit the Description
1. “Waiting to Exhale”: Invisible Visibility and the Impossibility of Black Citizenship
2. Anger vs. Sass
Conclusion: “What Happened, Miss Simone?”

Pages:

XII, 200

Year:

2024

ISBN (HARDBACK):

9781636672205 (Active)

ISBN (EPUB):

9781433196133 (Forthcoming)

ISBN (PDF):

9781433196126 (Forthcoming)

DOI:

10.3726/b21490

Language:

English

Keywords:

Literature, Intersectionality, Black feminism, anger, rage, abjection, Black humanity, Blackness and affect, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Where I Live, Wanda Why Aren’t Your Dead, Women of My Color, The Woman and her Thang, Beloved, Citizen, Black feminist poetry, neo-slave narrative, lyrical essay, Why Are You So Angry?, Anger and Rage in Black Feminist Literature, Anne Potjans

Published:

New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2024. XII, 200 pp.

Anne Potjans has been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator grant project "Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since October 2022 and currently works on a postdoctoral project tentatively entitled "Night Shift – Queer Subcultural Spaces and the Black Diasporic Experience." Earlier in 2022, she completed her dissertation "‘Why Are You So Angry?’" – The Uses of Rage and Anger in Black Feminist Literature." From 2015 to 2022, Anne Potjans has been a lecturer at the American Studies program at Humboldt, where she has taught a variety of classes in North-American Literature and culture. In 2019 she took part in a faculty exchange with the HONORS program at the University of Washington, where she taught a class on Black German and African American cultural and political connections. She is a joint winner of Peter Lang’s Emerging Scholars Competition "New Perspectives in Black Studies."

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