Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “An antiphonal game” and beyond: facing Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth
- 2 “Jew me sue me don't you black or white me”: The (ethical) politics of recognition in Chester Himes and Saul Bellow
- 3 “Words generally spoil things” and “Giving a man final say”: facing history in David Bradley and Philip Roth
- 4 Literaturized Blacks and Jews; or, Golems and Tar babies: reality and its shadows in John Edgar Wideman and Bernard Malamud
- 5 Black–Jewish inflations: face(off) in David Mamet's Homicide and the O. J. Simpson trial
- Postface: Déjà-vu all over again; or, mirrors and the face – Anna Deavere Smith after Levinas
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “An antiphonal game” and beyond: facing Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth
- 2 “Jew me sue me don't you black or white me”: The (ethical) politics of recognition in Chester Himes and Saul Bellow
- 3 “Words generally spoil things” and “Giving a man final say”: facing history in David Bradley and Philip Roth
- 4 Literaturized Blacks and Jews; or, Golems and Tar babies: reality and its shadows in John Edgar Wideman and Bernard Malamud
- 5 Black–Jewish inflations: face(off) in David Mamet's Homicide and the O. J. Simpson trial
- Postface: Déjà-vu all over again; or, mirrors and the face – Anna Deavere Smith after Levinas
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The space between Black and Jew
But then life always makes you choose between two possibilities, and you always feel: One is missing! Always one – the uninvented third possibility!
Robert Musil, The EnthusiastsThe data of daily use gently but insistently repel us; day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances – not only the overt ones – that they put in our way, we have an immense labor to perform.
Walter Benjamin, One Way StreetThe task of criticism remains essential, even if God were not dead but only exiled.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow”Bright sparks and divine sparkles
From the first section entitled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” to the last on the “Sorrow Songs,” Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk is framed by an arresting image of “falling stars.” It appears in the spirituals “My Lord, what a mourning” (whose last line reads, “when the stars begin to fall”), “Stars in the Elements” (whose first line reads, “Oh the stars in the elements are falling”), and “Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard.” It also surfaces in Du Bois's prose itself when he writes, “Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their consciousness.”
At a strictly symbolic level, the trope signifies sacrifice and redemption. Eric Sundquist has pointed to a semantic underground that discloses African resonances beneath the Christian, notions of race unity and a buried life.
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- Facing Black and JewLiterature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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