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Complicating Constructions
Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts
Edited by David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker
NEW IN PAPERBACK
This volume of collected essays is an important contribution to contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, offering truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors-from Toni Morrison and James Weldon Johnson to Bret Harte and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton - these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between "ethnic" and "nonethnic" literatures.
Through these inventive close readings, the authors also intervene in a more theoretical register, providing a "re-viewing" of the conceptual touchstones of ethnic studies. With topics ranging from whiteness theory and Du Boisian double-consciousness to hybridity and postcolonial national sovereignty, the essays reassess the possibilities and limitations of these concepts for understanding the ways in which identity is constructed and experienced. Complicating Constructions is itself representative of the kind of fluid boundaries of scholarship essential to understanding race and ethnicity in the United States. It will be of special value to readers interested in ethnic and American studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.
David S. Goldstein teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Audrey B. Thacker teaches at California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge. Other contributors include Jesse Alemán, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and José L. Torres-Padilla.
Series: American Ethnic and Cultural Studies
Quotes:
"This volume approaches traumas, conundrums, and opportunities of American hybridity from fresh angles. The writing is clear and the scholarship is alert and serious about its mission: to honestly confront America's racist history and practices and to understand the evolving complexity of American life and letters as fully and carefully as possible." - John Whalen-Bridge, author of Political Fiction and the American Self
"The essays in this volume achieve much that is original in the field: they raise provocative challenges to prevalent theoretical paradigms (e.g., whiteness theory, double-consciousness, models of immigration); they examine a broad range of canonical and obscure, high-literary and popular texts across historical periods; and they draw attention to the ways in which race and ethnicity are fluid, dynamic, contested, and historically malleable constructs." - Madhu Dubey, author of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism
Reviews:
"Unlike other recent treatments. . . this one is broad, and therein lies its strength. . . . Recommended." -Choice
"This collection does seem to be unique in its mixture of essays written about 'ethnic' and 'non-ethnic' texts, and it may hearken the beginning of the end of the traditional binary method of categorizing American texts." -Multi-Cultural Reviews
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction / David S. Goldstein
I. Re-Constructing Race and Ethnicity: Identity Imposed or Adopted
1. Citizenship Rights and Colonial Whites: The Cultural Work of Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton's Novels / Jesse Aleman
2. Testifying Bodies: Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte's Gabriel Conroy
3. The Color of Money in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Ariel Balter
4. Passing as the "Tragic" Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison's Novels / Annemarie Christiansen
5. Re-Viewing the Literary Chinatown: Multicultural Hybridity in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land / Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
6. Reading The Turner Diaries: Jewish Blackness, Judaized Blacks, and Head-Body Race Paradigms / Joe Lockard
II. Re-Contextualizing Race and Ethnicity: Texts in Historical and Political Perspective
7. Smallpox, Opium, and Invasion: Chinese Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction / Edwin J. McAllister
8. Visualizing Race in American Immigrant Autobiography / Georgina Dodge
9. Maud Martha vs. I Love Lucy: Taking on the Postwar Consumer Fantasy / Tracy Floreani
III. Re-Considering Race and Ethnicity: Meta-Issues in Theory and Criticism
10. Some Do, Some Don't: Whiteness Theory and the Treatment of Race in African-American Drama / William Over
11. Traumatic Legacy in Darryl Pinckney's High Cotton / Alexandra W. Schultheis
12. Portnoy's Neglected Siblings: A Case for Postmodern Jewish American Literary Studies / Derek Parker Royal
13. Tension, Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for Shared Knowledge / Sheree Meyer, Chauncey A. Ridley, and Olivia Castellano
14. When Hybridity Doesn't Resist: Giannina Braschi's Yo-Yo Boing! / Jose L. Torres-Padilla
Contributors
Index
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Pub Date:
2008
ISBN:
PAPER:
0-295-98835-5
978-0-295-98835-1
CLOTH:
0-295-98681-6
978-0-295-98681-4
Price:
Paper: $25.00s
Cloth: $50.00x
Subject Listing:
Literary Studies, American Ethnic Studies
Bibliographic information:
Orig. pub. 2007. 352 pp., notes, bibliog., index, 6 x 9 in.
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