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Norman, Brian. Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. Atlanta: U of Georgia P, 2010.
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 neosegregation 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...