Corina Crisu is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Bucharest. She has participated in numerous international conferences, training workshops and joint projects, and she has authored more than 30 articles in the field of American Studies and Comparative Literature. Her past awards include a Soros-Chevening Fellowship at Oxford University (2000-2001) and a Fulbright Fellowship at Oregon State University (2001-2002).
Wide-ranging in scope and highly theoretical in terms of analysis, Rewriting: Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel engages in an intertextual dialogue between black and white texts of the past and the present. By making use of African American studies, postcolonial theory, New Historicism, feminism and gender studies, the book examines a range of representative postmodern novels by Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines and Ntozake Shange. Corina Crisu cogently argues that the novels discussed bring their major contribution to redefining black identity by producing significant rewritings of both black and white canonical authors: Conrad, Douglass, Dumas, Ellison, Equiano, Fauset, Harper, Hurston, Jacobs, Melville, Stowe, Wright and others. Crisu’s original argument explores how this form of rewriting reconsiders prior notions of identity and initiates polytropic reconfigurations of the black character whose flexible trajectory towards self-awakening and assertion eludes physical and mental fixation. The story of the polytropic heroes is retraced in relation to their social and political context for the abiding goal of charting a map of the key events in African American history from the Middle Passage to the Civil Right Movement. Rewriting thus demonstrates that contemporary black authors do not simply reproduce the past, but they instill a change in the reader’s way of perceiving it and reveal that previous racial representations must be revisited through endless intertextual efforts.
