1. Death and the Nation’s Subjects

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction: Raising the Dead 1
5. PART ONE. Imaginative Places, White Spaces: If Only the Dead Could Speak
6. 1. Death and the Nation’s Subjects 13
7. 2. Bakulu Discourse: Bodies Made ‘‘Flesh’’ in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 41
8. 3. Telling the Story of Genocide in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead 68
9. PART TWO. Dead Bodies, Queer Subjects 101
10. 4. (Pro)Creating Imaginative Spaces and Other Queer Acts: Randall Kenan’s AVisitation of Spirits and Its Revival of James Baldwin’s Absent Black Gay Man in Giovanni’s Room 103
11. 5. ‘‘From This Moment Forth,We Are Black Lesbians’’: Querying Feminism and Killing the Self in Consolidated’s Business of Punishment 124
12. 6. Critical Conversations at the Boundary between Life and Death 149
13. EPILOGUE ‘‘I’m in the Zone’’: Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur, and the (Queer) Art of Death 173
14. Notes 183
15. Selected Bibliography 209
16. Index 227