Racial Blasphemies ― Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature

Racial Blasphemies, using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words - that furiously communicates not theology or spirituality as much as it signals the sheer difficulty of representing race in a non-racist manner on the literary page.

Michael L. Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays on race, sexuality, and literature have appeared in Callaloo, GLQ, and the University of Toronto Quarterly.