‘A little room in a house set aflame’: form, affect, and cultural memory in contemporary African American literature

Abstract

This thesis studies the work of writers Teju Cole, Tyehimba Jess, and Terrance Hayes to consider the representation of racial politics and the structures and experiences of antiblackness in the contemporary United States. It draws on scholarship from the fields of affect theory, critical race theory, and Afropessimism to consider the racialisation of feeling in public life and its effects upon national and cultural identity.

Through consecutive chapters on each writer, it explores their respective applications of innovative formal structures to establish novel methods for dealing with political impasse. In turn, it considers how the constraints of literary form act as a metaphor for the confines of self-expression within a ‘post-race’ society that positions racism as a historical phenomenon, and obfuscates its recurrence in the present. It argues that each text variously contends with both the creative opportunities and restrictions of its form to symbolise the tension between the desire for political change and the limits of freedom in the twenty-first century US. By bringing together this selection of highly contemporary and formally unique texts, it sheds light on the aesthetics and politics of literature in a time defined by the radical cultural upheavals of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trump administration.