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“They could be killing kids forever!”: The Atlanta Child Murders in African American Literature
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2020
- pp. 315-332
- 10.1353/afa.2020.0043
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta (2002) represent the unspeakable as they respond to the Atlanta child murders of 1979–81. These writers use textual strategies including listing, excess, reportage, incantation, and shifting point of view and voice to narrate—and to show the impossibility of narrating—racist violence. Their writings about the Atlanta child murders exemplify the ways in which African American literature since the civil rights movement refuses to offer a linear narrative of increasing racial justice in the United States.