Research Catalog

Title

Race in American literature and culture / edited by John Ernest.

Publication

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Ernest, John

Description

xiv, 452 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

• "Race is central to American history. It is, or should be, impossible to understand the United States without attending carefully to how race has been defined and deployed at every stage of the nation's history. From the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited naturalization to "free white persons," to the Trump presidency, race has been at the center of American cultural life - both shaping and shaped by economic practices and priorities; influencing where people live and what opportunities they are likely to encounter; serving as a key variable in local, state, and national elections; serving as the ominous subtext of the legal system and policing methods; and guiding government policies and social practices. Although our educational system has almost miraculously managed to isolate and contain much of U.S. racial history into discrete and settled textbook chapters, it is difficult to imagine American history without accounting for the effects of the system of slavery, Indian removal, the Dred Scott decision, the Indian Appropriations Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese incarceration, or other racist projects in American history that shaped how the system works - who has control over space, governance, and power. Every aspect of American culture, from the Electoral College to the history of sports and entertainment, has been almost immeasurably influenced by the determination of the white population to define and guard the borders of whiteness and to subordinate and control all those beyond those borders"--
• Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so central to American literature as a whole.

Series Statement

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture

Subject

• American literature > History and criticism
• Racism in literature
• Race in literature
• American literature
• Racism
• Race relations
• United States > Race relations > History
• United States

Genre/Form

• Literary criticism.
• Essays.
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Part I: Fractured foundations. American empire / Edward Larkin -- Synchronic and diachronic : race in early American literatures / Katy Chiles -- Protean oceans : racial uncertainty in Arthur Gordon Pym and Emmanual Appadocca / Gesa Mackenthun -- Part II: Racial citizenship. "Faithful reflection" and the work of African American literary history / Derrick Spires -- Beyond protest / Koritha Mitchell -- Affiliated races / Edlie L. Wong -- Part III: Contending forces. Reconstructing race / Sarah E. Gardner -- Out of the silent South : white Southerners writing race during the long Reconstruction / John Grammer -- Neighborliness, race, and nineteenth-century regional fiction / Stephanie Foote -- Part IV: Reconfigurations. Passing / M. Giulia Fabi -- Beyond assimilation / John Alba Cutler -- Native reconfigurations / Kiara M. Vigil -- Dispossessions and repositionings : Sarah Winnemucca's school as anti-colonialist lesson / Cari Carpenter -- "White by law," white by literature : naturalization and the constructedness of race in the literature of American naturalism / Mita Banjeree -- Part V: Envisioning race. Picturing race : African Americans in US visual culture before the Civil War / Martha J. Cutter -- "The man that was a thing" : Uncle Tom's Cabin, photographic vision, and the portrayal of race in the nineteenth century / Maurice Wallace -- Locating race / Melanie B. Taylor -- De-forming and re-making : Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, woman, other and the multifocal decolonial novel / Paula M. L. Moya and Luz M. Jiménez Ruvalcaba -- Part VI: Case studies. Collective biographies and African American history : Men of mark (1887) and Progress of a race (1897) / Claire Parfait -- Aztlan for the middle class : Chicano literary activism / José Antonio Arellano -- The racial underground / Kinohi Nishikawa -- Literature in Hawaiian Pidgin and the critique of Asian settler colonialism / Jeehyun Lim -- Celeste Ng's Little fires everywhere and the burning house of American literature / Anna Brickhouse -- Part VII: Reflections and prospects. What is missing? Black history, Black loss, and Black resurrectionary poetics / P. Gabrielle Foreman -- Traditions, communities, literature / Siobhan Senier -- Children of the future / Min Hyoung Song -- Presidential race / Stephanie Li.

Call Number

Sc E 23-906

ISBN

• 9781108487399
• 1108487394
• 9781108720144
• 1108720145
• 9781108766654 (canceled/invalid)
• 9781108807791 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2021060642

OCLC

1263866587

Title

Race in American literature and culture / edited by John Ernest.

Publisher

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Added Author

Ernest, John, editor.

Research Call Number

Sc E 23-906