Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”
Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.
Table of Content
List of Abbreviations | ix
Introduction : Two Minds | 1
1 “Whiteness Visible”: Critical Whiteness Studies and O’Connor’s Fiction | 13
2 Race, Politics, and the Double Mind: Flannery’s Correspondence versus O’Connor’s Fiction | 36
3 Theology, Religion, and Race: Constant Conversion and the Beginning of Vision | 70
4 “Africanist Presence” and the Role of Black Bodies | 97
5 The Failure and Promise of Communion | 125
Acknowledgments | 145
Works Cited | 149
Index | 155
About the author
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a professor, writer, and poet at Fordham University and the Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Among her recent books are Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (Liturgical, 2015) and Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor (Paraclete, 2020).
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