Norman, Brian

• 
• Alumni Author: Norman, Brian
• Year: 2004
• Publisher / Date: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013

These dead women, at least the more literary ones, constitute a tradition in which writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead. When they talk, they speak not only to their own lives, but also to matters of justice, history, and dearly held national ideals—whether the community welcomes it or not. Thus, writers stage encounters with that which should be past but has not passed. For instance, an American narrator encounters atrophied lines of aristocratic privilege in Poe's 1839 tale "The Fall of the House of Usher." Or, in Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, a mother confronts slavery's legacy a generation after its demise. And in Kushner's Angels in America, Ethel Rosenberg sits at the deathbed of Roy Cohn in Reagan-era America, taunting the man who orchestrated her notorious McCarthy-era execution.
—From the Introduction

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives.

Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

"Insightful and powerfully affecting, Dead Women Talking deepens our understanding of how the dead remain a vital presence and social force in American life and literature."—Kristin Hutchins, Women's Studies

"Norman examines an original, intriguing phenomenon in American literature—stories with deceased female characters... The study is well researched and offers an array of critical approaches. This important contribution to the study of American fiction should endure for some time."—Choice

"Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions."—Dana Benge, Rocky Mountain Review

"This book succeeds splendidly in identifying a meaningful tradition in American letters and demonstrating its value to the understanding of national cultural (and multicultural) membership and memory, literary and otherwise."—Leonard Cassuto, author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories
Brian Norman is an associate professor of English and director of African and African American studies at Loyola University Maryland. He is author of Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post–Civil Rights American Literature and The American Protest Essay and National Belonging. 

• 
• Alumni Author: Norman, Brian
• Year: 2004
• Publisher / Date: SUNY Press, 2010

Examines racial segregation in literature and the cultural legacy of the Jim Crow era.

As a touchstone issue in American history, segregation has had an immeasurable impact on the lives of most ethnic groups in the United States. Primarily associated with the Jim Crow South and the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation comprises a diverse set of cultural practices, ethnic experiences, historical conditions, political ideologies, municipal planning schemes, and de facto social systems. Representing Segregation traces the effects of these practices on the literary imagination and proposes a distinct literary tradition of representing segregation. Contributors engage a cross section of writers, literary movements, segregation practices, and related experiences of racial division in order to demonstrate the richness and scope of responses to segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking up the cultural expression of the Jim Crow period and its legacies, this collection reorients literary analysis of an important body of African American literature in productive new directions.

“By defining key figures, practices, and comparative approaches … [Representing Segregation] clarif[ies] and validate[s] the work of scholarship on the literature of the Civil Rights Movement … the volume … is excellent.” — MELUS

“Norman and Williams have assembled a collection of fine essays addressing the topic of place and space with regard to segregation … Presenting not only an eye-opening lesson in African American history but also a study in environmental justice, the contributors to this volume explain how race is embedded in the body, street, city, region, and country … This book settles any question there may have been about whether segregation or Jim Crow narrative exists … Highly recommended.” — CHOICE

“This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation.” — Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University

Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey.

• 
• Alumni Author: Norman, Brian
• Year: 2004
• Publisher / Date: University of Georgia Press, 2010

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo–segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement.

From Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post–civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo–segregation narrative tradition—one that developed in tandem with neo–slave narratives—by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present.

Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner’s representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin’s notorious account of crossing the color line from white to black in his 1961 work Black Like Me.

• 
• Alumni Author: Norman, Brian
• Year: 2004
• Publisher / Date: SUNY Press, 2007

Explores the role of the literary protest essay in addressing social divisions in the United States.

The American Protest Essay and National Belonging uncovers a rich tradition of essays by writers who also serve as spokespersons for American social movements throughout the nation’s history. Brian Norman demonstrates that the American protest essay is a distinct form that draws from both the European-born personal essay and American political oratory anchored in social movements. He places celebrated twentieth-century writers like James Baldwin, Vine Deloria Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright among many others in a tradition dating back to the nation’s founding. Drawing on feminist and multicultural studies and movements, Norman explains how the protest essay brings particular experiences of exclusion into direct conversation with beliefs in universal equality to offer a story of national belonging that is able to address, rather than repress, division.

“…a useful addition to our discussions on literary theory, rhetorical analysis, and social movement studies.” — SIGNS
“In a welcome project that identifies and explores an important aesthetic and political tradition of American prose, Brian Norman examines an impressive variety of essays that grapple with what is perhaps the most fundamental contradiction of American history … Students and scholars of American Studies, literature, history, and politics will be well served by his attention to the rhetorical stance afforded by the essay form; one hopes that students and scholars will be inspired to return to both the original texts and the animating spirit of this tradition.” — Prose Studies

“With such an ambitious agenda, Norman’s book is, from the beginning, an exercise in prolepsis: its project is so rich that it must inevitably stand as a foundation for many books to come.” — Callaloo

“…the first book of its kind, heralding a new era in the field of protest studies … Norman’s analysis will change how we think about the relationship between art and protest … [and] change how we understand the essay form itself, how we define a national literary tradition, and how we approach writers who are not usually celebrated as practitioners of the essay.” — Journal for the Study of Radicalism

“The authors that Brian Norman studies in The American Protest Essay and National Belonging have the courage to denounce failed promises of social inclusion and the faith to work for their realization. The genre that is the basis of his inquiry is born of their conviction that a nation dedicated to the proposition of human equality is an ideal worth fighting—and writing—for. This book engagingly chronicles the hopes and achievements of protest writing as it documents the rise of the protest essay in the United States.” — Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

“Brian Norman convincingly demonstrates how the tradition of the American protest essay continues the legacy of American democracy by turning political advocacy into a fine art. The essayists and novelists he considers inhabit the space in between the nation’s universalizing promises and the lived experiences of figures to whom those promises were refused. Informed by the conviction that a democracy that refuses to make good on its radical promises is an empty democracy, Brian Norman’s timely book also reevaluates the literary and political significance of the protest tradition for our present.” — Donald E. Pease, editor of National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives

Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland.