The process of naming is a transformative act that inherently imparts meaning, whether it be through the conscious use of a familiar historical or allegorical appellation or through the creation of a new word. Critics have often noted the importance of names and naming in African-American literature, but Debra Walker King's Deep Talk is the first methodological discussion of the process. In this original study, the author seeks out the discourses existing beneath the primary narratives of these literary texts by interpreting the significance of certain character names.

King explores...

The process of naming is a transformative act that inherently imparts meaning, whether it be through the conscious use of a familiar historical or allegorical appellation or through the creation of a new word. Critics have often noted the importance of names and naming in African-American literature, but Debra Walker King's Deep Talk is the first methodological discussion of the process. In this original study, the author seeks out the discourses existing beneath the primary narratives of these literary texts by interpreting the significance of certain character names.

King explores...

In this compelling new study, Debra Walker King considers fragments of experience recorded in oral histories and newspapers as well as those produced in twentieth-century novels, films, and television that reveal how the black body in pain functions as a rhetorical device and as political strategy. King's primary hypothesis is that, in the United States, black experience of the body in pain is as much a construction of social, ethical, and economic politics as it is a physiological phenomenon.

As an essential element defining black experience in America, pain plays many roles. It is used...