Race in American Literature and Culture

The book shows how American racial history and culture have shaped, and been shaped in turn by, American literature.

John Ernest (Edited by)

9781108487399, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 June 2022

466 pages
23.4 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.8 kg

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.

Part I. Fractured Foundations: 1. American empire Edward Larkin
2. Synchronic and diachronic: Race in early American literatures Katy Chiles
3. Protean oceans: Racial uncertainty in Arthur Gordon Pym and Emmanuel Appadocca Gesa Mackenthun
Part II. Racial Citizenship: 4. 'Faithful Reflection' and the work of African American literary history Derrick Spires
5. Beyond protest Koritha Mitchell
6. Affiliated races Edlie L. Wong
Part III. Contending Forces: 7. Reconstructing race Sarah Gardner
8. Out of the silent South: White Southerners writing race during the long reconstruction John Grammer
9. Neighborliness, race, and nineteenth-century regional fiction Stephanie Foote
Part IV. Reconfigurations: 10. Passing M. Giulia Fabi
11. Beyond assimilation John Alba Cutler
12. Native reconfigurations Kiara M. Vigil
13. Dispossessions and repositionings: Sarah Winnemucca's school as anti-colonialist lesson Cari Carpenter
14. 'White by Law,' White by literature: Naturalization and the constructedness of race in the literature of American naturalism Mita Banerjee
Part V. Envisioning Race: 15. Picturing race: African Americans in US visual culture before the Civil War Martha J. Cutter
16. 'The Man That Was a Thing': Uncle Tom's Cabin, photographic vision, and the portrayal of race in the nineteenth century Maurice Wallace
17. Locating race Melanie B. Taylor
18. De-forming and re-making: Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and the multifocal decolonial novel Paula M. L. Moya and Luz M. Jiménez Ruvalcaba
Part VI. Case Studies: 19. Collective biographies and African American history: Men of Mark (1887) and Progress of a Race (1897) Claire Parfait
20. Aztlan for the middle class: Chicano literary activism José Antonio Arellano
21. The racial underground Kinohi Nishikawa
22. Literature in Hawaiian pidgin and the critique of Asian settler colonialism Jeehyun Lim
23. Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and the burning house of American literature Anna Brickhouse
Part VII. Reflections and Prospects: 24. What is missing? Black history, Black loss and Black resurrectionary poetics P. Gabrielle Foreman
24. Traditions, communities, literature Siobhan Senier
26. Children of the future Min Hyoung Song
27 Presidential race Stephanie Li.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]