Hard-Boiled Reinvestigations of African American History in Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994)
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Barbara Neely’s first two hard-boiled novels manifest features of contemporary narratives of slavery. The paper investigates the hybrid and seemingly ambiguous co-presence of two generic traditions in Neely: the hard-boiled crime novel’s lonely detective hero and scepticism are contrasted to the neo-slave narrative’s trickster protagonist and hopeful stance. The paper demonstrates that the hybrid presence of the two generic traditions withstands a binary logic of social scepticism versus hope. Neely’s novels trace a personal strategy of social resistance performed by Blanche White, Neely’s black female detective, who fights institutional racism via individual acts of speaking out and producing alternative knowledge. (ÁZSK)
Author: Ágnes Zsófia Kovács
Institution: University of Szeged
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4417243726