Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

TYRONE R. SIMPSON II is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Urban Studies, Africana Studies, and American Culture at Vassar College, USA.

• Introduction: Living for the City: Reading Twentieth Century Ghettoes in Postmodern Times "The Love of Colour in Me": Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1928) and the Space of White Racial Manufacture "To Make a Man Out of You: Masculine Fantasies and White Failure in Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930)" "Jammed in Hemispherical Blackness": Looking Through Campy Transvestitism in Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn   "'Enough to Make a Body Riot': Chester Himes, Melancholia, and the Postmodern Renovation" "In a World with No Address": Rescuing Ghetto Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place And the Arc of His Witness Explained Nothing: Black Flanerie and Traumatic Photorealism in Wideman's Two Cities Conclusion: Beyond the Manichean Literary Ghetto?

"Taking the ghetto as a race-making institution dependent on technologies of im/mobility, Tyrone Simpson offers a lucid analysis of the urban ecology of twentieth century U.S. fiction. Giving new meaning to the fine art of close reading, he approaches the spatial as a dense psychic territory, one that requires an interdisciplinary array of knowledges to adequately parse. This is a vibrant literary engagement with critical race theory." - Robyn Wiegman, Professor, Literature and Women's Studies, Duke University, author of American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender and Object Lessons 'Tyrone Simpson gives us a compelling portrait of the historic pain and hope seared into America's rust belt ghettos. Under Simpson's deft prose, a new voice to understanding these racialized spaces the engaged writer is powerfully revealed.' - David Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign