Cathryn Halverson Books
Cathryn Halverson is an American literary scholar specializing in African American and women’s literature. She has written extensively on U.
Known for: The Model Black
Books by Cathryn Halverson
The Model Black
The Model Black: How Black Women Writers Reimagined U.S. Citizenship explores how African American women authors of the early twentieth century used literature to challenge racial and gender stereotypes and to redefine the concept of American citizenship. Through close readings of works by writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, Halverson examines how these authors constructed new models of Black womanhood and civic identity in the face of systemic exclusion.
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Theoretical Framework: Citizenship and Intersectionality
At the heart of *The Model Black* is an engagement with theories of citizenship that move beyond legal definitions toward cultural and affective ones. In the early twentieth century, American citizenship was bound to narratives of racial purity, national progress, and gendered respectability. To be ...
From The Model Black
Historical Context: Post-Reconstruction to Harlem Renaissance
The historical backdrop to the authors I examine is crucial. After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves systematically excluded from the promises of emancipation. Jim Crow legislation, disenfranchisement, and patriarchal norms defined civic life. Yet it was precisely within this restri...
From The Model Black
About Cathryn Halverson
Cathryn Halverson is an American literary scholar specializing in African American and women’s literature. She has written extensively on U.S. regionalism, race, and gender in twentieth-century fiction and teaches American literature at the University of Copenhagen.
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Cathryn Halverson is an American literary scholar specializing in African American and women’s literature. She has written extensively on U.
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