Part VII: Reflections and prospects. Presidential race / Stephanie Li. 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.
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"-- Provided by publisher.
Series:
Cambridge themes in American literature and culture
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.