Biography

Virginia Commonwealth University - English

Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University
Shermaine
Jones
My dissertation, “Choking Down that Rage:” Rage, Rape, Riot and the Gender Politics of Black Resistance from The Protest Novel to Gangsta Rap, contends that rage is the affective register through which black writers negotiate gender, identity, and national belonging. My argument breaks with the more commonly accepted perspective that black rage is a marker of pathology and is the property of the black underclass and males most specifically. Rather, I posit that if racial violence serves to discipline the black subject into submission, then black rage—in its fierce insistence of the value of black life—represents a potentially transformative affective response and mode of political resistance. To pursue my research questions, I consider several literary and historical movements in which rage figures as a mode of resistance to racism: The Protest Era (1936-1946), The Civil Rights Movement & Black Power Movement (1954-1980), and lastly the L.A. Riots (1992). My dissertation begins with an interrogation of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Anne Petry’s The Street. In chapters focused on the autobiographies of Angela Davis and Malcolm X, Alice Walker’s less-often read novel Meridian, as well as a culminating chapter engaging visual media and gangsta rap’s engagement of the L.A. Riots, this project demonstrates that there is an “ethics of rage.” In using this terminology, I call attention to the various dimensions of rage as a moral imperative, a philosophical principle that governs behavior and conduct, as well as a political strategy. My objective is to recuperate black rage as a useful and potentially healing affective response to racial terror.

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• Shermaine Jones (60% Match)
  Assistant Professor
  Virginia Commonwealth University - Virginia Commonwealth University