The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature

A comprehensive study of how American racial history and culture have shaped, and have been shaped by, American literature.

John Ernest (Edited by)

9781108812993, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 June 2024

318 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

Race is central to American history. It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding how race has been defined and deployed at every stage of the nation's history. Offering a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history of race, The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature shows how this history has been represented in literature, and how those representations have influenced American culture. Written by leading scholars in in African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies, the essays in this volume address the centrality of race in American literature by foregrounding the conflicts across different traditions and different modes of interpretation. This volume explores the unsteady foundations of American literary history, examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and then considers various aspects of the multiple literary and complexly interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape.

Introduction John Ernest
Part I. Foundations: 1. Tracing Race Travis Foster
2. Racial Management and Technologies of Care Malini Johar Schueller
Part II. Backgrounds: 3. Still looking for the Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature Valerie Babb
4. From Plymouth Rock to Standing Rock: Hospitality, Settler Colonialism, and 400 Years of Indigenous Literary Resistance Drew Lopenzina
5. Racing Latinidad Renee Hudson
6. African American Literature's One Long Memory Chris Freeburg
7. Race and the Mythos of Model Minority in Asian American Literature Swati Rana
Part III. The Dynamics of Race and Literary Dynamics: 8. 'Dramatic Race': Democratic Lessons of Twenty-First Century African American Drama Frank Obenland
9. Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and Twenty-First Century Indigenous Literatures René Dietrich
10. Shades of Whiteness and the Enigma of Race: Racial In-Betweenness and American Literature Mita Banerjee
11. There is Here: Immigration Law and the Literature of Belonging Jeannie Pfaelzer
Part IV. Rethinking American Literature: 12. Race, Revision, and William Wells Brown's Miralda Brigitte Fielder
13. 'Here's to Chicanos in the Middle Class!': Culture, Class, and The Limits of Chicano Literary Activism José Antonio Arellano
14. Pulping the Racial Imagination Kinohi Nishikawa
15. Recognition, Urban NDN Style: The Social Poetics of Pre-1980s Intertribal Newspapers Siobhan Senier
Part V. Case Studies: 16. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Question of Race Claire Parfait
17. The Legacy of Toni Morrison: Black Writers, Invisibility and Intimacy Stephanie Li
Suggested Readings.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]