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Lorraine Hansberry’s late segregation narrative and Toni Morrison’s early neo–segregation narrative concentrate on what happens when people cross the color line,whether physically or psychologically.The stark racial lines of Jim Crow can serve other purposes too.Many neo–segregation narratives do not primarily concern interactions across the color line, but rather those on one side of it, though segregation still looms large on their horizons.These narratives focus on issues internal to black communities, especially around class,sexuality,gender,and ideology,while framing them with the shadow of Jim Crow and a shared knowledge of racial injustice and the impact of white supremacy on black lives. In this manner, writers sort through intraracial tensions around gender and black kinship in a post–civil rights era.They are informed by the Black Arts movement and its critique of white-oriented aesthetics and also responsive to Black Power doctrines of self-determination, but they do not necessarily call such movements home. They also remain committed to the legacy of the civil rights movement, which took up universal language and appeals for integration and unity. Ensuing identitarian movements were skeptical about the prospects of inclusive visions of an integrated nation-state to foster cultural pride or to speak to inequalities within black communities. By setting up camp primarily on one side of the color line,neo–segregation narratives explore what kinds of alternative social spaces are possible when defined by, for, and about black people, whether such communities are externally imposed or self-segregated. Armed with suspicion of universalist designs and open to considering the merits of self-segregation, post–civil rights writers turn to the era of chapter฀2 Jim Crow returNS, Jim Crow remaiNS Gender and Segregation in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple compulsory race segregation to engage debates between black feminism and masculinist Black Power. For instance, Ishmael Reed taps Jim Crow to take a swipe at contemporary (white) feminism in Reckless Eyeballing (1986). In the novel, black writer Ian Ball attempts to get off the “sexlist” (feminism’s version of a blacklist) by writing an all-female play that exhumes Emmett Till’s corpse to testify in a posthumous rape trial.Reed finds the high stakes, stark racial lines,and perceived moral clarity of theTill case useful for a satire of feminism and what the book casts as not only its betrayal of black men but also its outright defilement of them.That is,he worries that Black Power has been neutered.On the other hand,Till also figures prominently in black feminist projects, such as Audre Lorde’s feminist meditations on the racial and sexual lessons we all inherit from Till in her 1982 poem “Afterimages,” which extends the work of Gwendolyn Brooks’s famous retelling of the white female accuser’s story through fairytale tropes in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (1960).Lorde portrays her black female speaker’s experiences in a post–civil rights era as an “afterimage” of that which led to the brutal murder of Till. “I inherited Jackson, Mississippi,”the speaker declares.“His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year.”1 Further, Lorde casts the female body itself as an afterimage of Till’s corpse. She writes,“Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling / 24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman / and a white woman has grown older in costly honor.”2 These projects invert neo–segregation narratives by bringing the figure of Till into the present.3 Their intertextual lobs are part of a struggle not only for how to narrate Jim Crow in a post–civil rights era but also to enlist him in contemporary black nationalist or feminist movements. This chapter turns to David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) as particularly good windows onto how neo–segregation narratives lend themselves to black feminist–Black Power debates, which crested in the late 1970s and 1980s.These two novels are lauded for their reclamations of U.S. history from the point of view of black people. In The Chaneysville Incident, historian John Washington reluctantly returns to his home in North County, Pennsylvania, to access his family’s past. He finds that his family story crosses the border into South County and dates back to Jim Crow and a vigilante lynching, then slavery and a failed...

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