(Inter)Racial Relationships as Accompaniment in Twenty-First Century African American Novels

(Inter)racial Relationships as Accompaniment in Twenty-First Century African American Novels explores the acts of accompaniment to disrupt the embodied discursive practices of whiteness and Black vulnerability as a way to change social relations across racial difference in the novels. The novels analyzed in the book explore those Black male characters, who work through the norms of whiteness in their relations with Black and white wo/men while at the same time enacting the practices of accompaniment to subvert the embodied practices of whiteness. At a time when there is the rise of interest in activist work such as the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement against the systems of white supremacy in the post-Trump era, these novels shape an understanding of Black characters’ struggle against discursive violence as a radical social praxis to transform the everyday life. The book consists of four chapters on Kalisha Buckhanon’s Speaking of Summer (2019), Kalisha Buckhanon’s Upstate (2005), Ben Burgess Jr.’s Defining Moments: Black and White (2020), and Walter Mosley’s Every Man a King: A King Oliver Novel (2023). While these novels depict a critique of racialized everyday life, they interrogate whiteness as a political act of devaluation of Blackness and Black life by establishing relations through accompaniment. The act as such stretches the boundary lines between who is the accompanier and the accompanied in shifting configurations of whiteness and blackness in the positioning of the vulnerable.

E. Lâle Demirtürk is professor emerita of American Literature in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.