Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

Row, Jess

Paperback

Literary Criticism

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 1555978320
ISBN13: 9781555978327
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Aug 6 2019
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.90
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

A bold, incisive look at race and reparative writing in American fiction, by the author of Your Face in Mine

White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties white flight--the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns--to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.

White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction to approach each other again? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All