Hard-Boiled Reinvestigations of African American History in Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994)

Abstract Barbara Neely’s first two hard-boiled novels manifest features of contemporary narratives of slavery. The paper investigates the hybrid and seemingly ambiguous co-presence of two generic traditions in Neely: the hard-boiled crime novel’s lonely detective hero and scepticism are contrasted to the neo-slave narrative’s trickster protagonist and hopeful stance. The paper demonstrates that the hybrid presence of the two generic traditions withstands a binary logic of social scepticism versus hope. Neely’s novels trace a personal strategy of social resistance performed by Blanche White, Neely’s black female detective, who fights institutional racism via individual acts of speaking out and producing alternative knowledge. (ÁZSK)