Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity

by Sharon Patricia Holland

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death’s relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.

Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.

Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Theory, Queer, Philosophy, African American, LGBT, Feminism

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Sharon Patricia Holland is Associate Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, and a co-editor of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably a 3.5. Holland posits Blackness as death and queerness as death and Blackness as queerness as death. She explores several literary texts (Morrison, Silko, Baldwin, Kenan) as well as general cultural cruciform with Consolidated and literary and art reviews.