Department of American Culture and Literature faculty member Prof. E. Lâle Demirtürk has a new book. “The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life: Blackness as Strategy for Social Change” was published by Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield) in May 2016.
As described on the jacket, Prof. Demirtürk’s book “examines the post-9/11 African American novel, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through
personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people.”
Scholars have called this new book one that “underscores the interiority of Black existence as a testimonial ground for laying claim to Black agency” and declared that “[f]or those who refuse the seductions of a ‘post-racial’ America, which is contested by the literary Black counter-gaze, Demirtürk’s new text is a must read.”