Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (review)

Recently, one of the students in my African American Literature course remarked offhandedly, "Well, you know, there isn't racism anymore." Perhaps I should have found this declaration—from a black, male student—refreshing and liberating. His statement suggested that he does not feel constrained by racism; moreover, that he does not see racism as real today. But I felt uneasy—as uneasy as when I overheard a group of white, middle-aged women at my gym gushing over Kathryn Stockett's The Help. What are the dangers of believing that we live in a "post-racial" era? What troubling contradictions need we overlook to declare racism "over"?

Brian Norman's lively and ambitious study, Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature takes up these important questions of periodization. Norman identifies a new subgenre of African American literature, the neo-segregation narrative, which he defines as "contemporary fictional accounts, often historiographic, of Jim Crow" (3), written in the decades following the Civil Rights Movement. For Norman, co-editor of the collection Representing Segregation (2010), the neo-segregation narrative's retrospective vantage point distinguishes it from literature produced by writers living through Jim Crow, such as Nella Larsen and Richard Wright. The neo-segregation narrative, Norman asserts, explodes the self-congratulatory myth of linear racial progress that enables us to compartmentalize Jim Crow segregation safely in the past and see ourselves as "beyond" those less enlightened times. In troubling the chronological dividing line between "then" and "now," neo-segregation narratives reflect on the successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement, and draw attention to the persistence of de facto segregation today.

The neo-segregation narrative, like the neo-slave narrative, looks back at an institution that persists beyond its supposed end. In theorizing this new subgenre of African American literature, Neo-Segregation Narratives is indebted to the substantial scholarship on the neo-slave narrative. Norman argues that, unlike the neo-slave narrative, the neo-segregation narrative has gone unremarked because we lack sufficient historical distance. While we keep pushing segregation into the past, it is too frighteningly recent for us to see it clearly. Norman argues that to access the literary terrain of slavery, contemporary writers must pass through Jim Crow segregation; thus, the neo-segregation narrative bridges nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century representations of the color line. As Norman acknowledges, his approach to historical time raises doubts about the "neo" in his title, given that "there is no bright line between pre- and post- civil rights eras" (6). For Norman's purposes, "neo" signals the slippery distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. Paradoxically, Norman's periodization of his new genre depends on the chronological dividing lines that he attempts to deconstruct.

Each chapter of Neo-Segregation Narratives pairs a canonical text with a lesser-known text. The unexpected pairings encourage readers to read forwards and backwards, drawing surprising connections between chapters; this layered reading experience is fitting given Norman's investment in historical palimpsest. Chapter 1 identifies Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) as foundational texts in the genre. Hansberry's play and her unfilmed screenplay demonstrate the challenges of representing discrimination in the urban North. The differences between the play and screenplay show Hansberry reconsidering how best to "picture segregation" (28). By including exterior scenes of the Youngers navigating Chicago's "racialized geography" (32) in the screenplay, Hansberry makes clear the effects of de facto segregation on African American's private lives. Norman draws a surprising parallel between Hansberry and Morrison, noting that both authors "put a poor black family's living room on public display" (23). Norman argues that Morrison couches her representation of the 1940s in the "Black is Beautiful" rhetoric of the 1970s. After the gains and failures of the Civil Rights movement, a writer like Morrison could use slavery or segregation to "make sense of the persistence...