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3 Reading Race and Place Boston Book Clubs and Post-Soul Fiction For the members of Oprah’s Book Club, discussion takes place within the disembodied and dislocated worlds of television and the Internet, but it is important to remember that books are most often read, interpreted, and talked about in the context of a reader’s particular locality—his or her “reading habitat.” In the previous chapter, I drew evidence from a variety of texts and reading sites in order to ground my hypotheses about cross-racial empathy fostered by African American literature. This chapter takes a localizing turn by comparing two novels, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003) and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and their reception among eleven book clubs in the Boston metropolitan area. Out of the eleven groups, I visited seven with only white members, one black women’s book club, and three multiracial clubs. The questions motivating my analysis of these book-club conversations are simultaneously literary and sociological , knitting together issues of form and reception: How do differences among black-authored texts—such as style, genre, setting, and ways of conceptualizing race—affect empathetic reading? And how is the reading of a racially charged text influenced by the reader’s locality, by the particular places and communities in which he or she lives or participates? By focusing on readers consuming and discussing African American fiction in segregated and multiracial spaces, I examine the relationships between reading, race, and place. While African American literature often foregrounds racial issues, not all texts written by African Americans treat the concept of racial identity in the same way. Caucasia and The Known World provide rich opportunities for analysis because they destabilize binary ideas of blackness and whiteness and invite audiences to rethink race. Taking on the controversial topic of the existence of free blacks who owned slaves for profit in the antebellum South, The Known World complicates 112 . chapter 3 the familiar plots of slavery narratives, which often focus upon black solidarity and resistance in the face of abuse and dehumanization perpetrated by whites. Jones’s subject matter itself—black slave owners—is disturbingly oxymoronic in the eyes of many readers. Set in a more recent historical moment, Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia similarly upsets rigid notions of racial difference by focusing on a girl who is neither black nor white, but both. Caucasia tells the tale of a lightskinned biracial adolescent, who passes not only as white but also as black, as she struggles to find belonging in the segregated landscapes of Boston and New Hampshire in the 1970s and 1980s. Because these texts critique essentialist notions of blackness and expose race as a socially constructed fiction, both novels could be classified as “post-soul” texts. Trey Ellis, Nelson George, and Greg Tate were among the first critics to use the term “post-soul” to refer to African American writers born after the civil rights movement and thus distanced from the legacy of black nationalism. The term’s usage shifted from a simple generational label to a description of a new aesthetic, which Tate and George call the “African-American equivalent of postmodernism .”1 More recently, in his introduction to an African American Review special issue on “post-soul” texts, Bertram Ashe has characterized post-soul fiction writers as engaged in a process of “blaxploration” by depicting fluid “cultural mulatto” protagonists who trouble essentialist notions of a static black identity. Post-soul writers create central characters who defy stereotypes, confound racial categories, express allegiances to many cultures, and expose chinks in the foundations of black nationalism.2 Despite their goal of troubling the color line, these writers often retain a strong commitment to black communities and to detailing the continuing effects of racism. Even within this recent special issue on post-soul literature, no scholars have yet explored how such anti-essentialist texts are received by readers, both black and white. Do they succeed in challenging people to read race in a new way? How is the cross-racial empathy of white readers affected when the very idea of race is complicated and questioned? Throughout this chapter, I employ the term “reading race” as a figurative concept that invokes multiple significances of the verb “to read”: to interpret, to evaluate, to see through, to understand something, or to position oneself as superior in understanding. When the text being read is the “textual body” of an African American character, a power dynamic arises between the...

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