Download or read book A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism written by Christopher Douglas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an anthropology student studying with Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston recorded African American folklore in rural central Florida, studied hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talked with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage, and collected music from Jamaica. Her ethnographic work would serve as the basis for her novels and other writings in which she shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through an antiracist concept of culture championed by Boas: culture as plural, relative, and long-lived. Meanwhile, a very different antiracist model of culture learned from Robert Park's sociology allowed Richard Wright to imagine African American culture in terms of severed traditions, marginal consciousness, and generation gaps. In A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, Christopher Douglas uncovers the largely unacknowledged role played by ideas from sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers from diverse backgrounds. Douglas divides the history of multicultural writing in the United States into three periods. The first, which spans the 1920s and 1930s, features minority writers such as Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, who were indebted to the work of Boas and his attempts to detach culture from race. The second period, from 1940 to the mid-1960s, was a time of assimilation and integration, as seen in the work of authors such as Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, and Ralph Ellison, who were influenced by currents in sociological thought. The third period focuses on the writers we associate with contemporary literary multiculturalism, including Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Douglas shows that these more recent writers advocated a literary nationalism that was based on a modified Boasian anthropology and that laid the pluralist grounds for our current conception of literary multiculturalism. Ultimately, Douglas's "unified field theory" of multicultural literature brings together divergent African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literary traditions into one story: of how we moved from thinking about groups as races to thinking about groups as cultures—and then back again.
Download or read book If God Meant to Interfere written by Christopher Douglas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
Download or read book Text written by John Mowitt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of textuality in recent decades has come to designate a fundamentally contested terrain within a number of academic disciplines. How it came to occupy this position is the subject of John Mowitt's book, a critical genealogy of the social and intellectual conditions that contributed to the emergence of the textual object. Beginning with theTel Quelgroup in France in the sixties and seventies, Mowitt's study details how a certain interdisciplinary crisis prompted academics to rethink the conditions of cultural interpretation. Concentrating on three disciplinary projects—literary analysis, film studies, and musicology—Mowitt shows how textuality's emergence called into question not merely the relations among these disciplines, but also the cultural logic of disciplinary reason as such. At once an effort to define "the text" and to explore and extend the theory of textuality, this book illustrates why the notion of interdisciplinary research has recently acquired such urgency. At the same time, by emphasizing the genealogical dimension of the textual object, Mowitt raises the issues of its "antidisciplinary" character, and by extension its immediate pertinence for the current debates over multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Innovative, historically astute and theoretically informed, this important book will be indispensable reading for all scholars in literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism written by Leif Sorensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism in which ethnic literary modernists of the 1930s play a crucial role. Focusing on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers of the 1930s (Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes) Sorensen presents a new view of the history of multicultural literature in the U.S. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors' works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of the new modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book.
Download or read book The Romance of Race written by Jolie A. Sheffer and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism. The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation. By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.
Download or read book Impostors written by Christopher L. Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Miller takes us on an exciting tour of postcolonial and world literature, guiding us through the literary maze of the real and the pretenders to the real.” —Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the “intercultural hoax.” In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy’s Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller’s contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm. “In this fascinating study of intercultural literary hoaxes, Christopher L. Miller provides a useful, brief history of American literary impostures as a backdrop for his investigation of France’s literary history of ‘ethnic usurpation.’” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times–bestselling author
Download or read book Race Rights and Recognition written by Dean Franco and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Race, Rights, and Recognition, Dean J. Franco explores the work of recent Jewish American writers, many of whom have taken unpopular stances on social issues, distancing themselves from the politics and public practice of multiculturalism. While these writers explore the same themes of group-based rights and recognition that preoccupy Latino, African American, and Native American writers, they are generally suspicious of group identities and are more likely to adopt postmodern distancing techniques than to presume to speak for "their people." Ranging from Philip Roth’s scandalous 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint to Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan in 2006, the literature Franco examines in this book is at once critical of and deeply invested in the problems of race and the rise of multicultural philosophies and policies in America. Franco argues that from the formative years of multiculturalism (1965–1975), Jewish writers probed the ethics and not just the politics of civil rights and cultural recognition; this perspective arose from a stance of keen awareness of the limits and possibilities of consensus-based civil and human rights. Contemporary Jewish writers are now responding to global problems of cultural conflict and pluralism and thinking through the challenges and responsibilities of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, if the United States is now correctly—if cautiously—identifying itself as a post-ethnic nation, it may be said that Jewish writing has been well ahead of the curve in imagining what a post-ethnic future might look like and in critiquing the social conventions of race and ethnicity.
Download or read book Redlining Culture written by Richard Jean So and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.
Download or read book The Ethnic Avant Garde written by Steven S. Lee and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity written by Veronica Benet-Martinez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multiculturalism is a prevalent worldwide societal phenomenon. Aspects of our modern life, such as migration, economic globalization, multicultural policies, and cross-border travel and communication have made intercultural contacts inevitable. High numbers of multicultural individuals (23-43% of the population by some estimates) can be found in many nations where migration has been strong (e.g., Australia, U.S., Western Europe, Singapore) or where there is a history of colonization (e.g., Hong Kong). Many multicultural individuals are also ethnic and cultural minorities who are descendants of immigrants, majority individuals with extensive multicultural experiences, or people with culturally mixed families; all people for whom identification and/or involvement with multiple cultures is the norm. Despite the prevalence of multicultural identity and experiences, until the publication of this volume, there has not yet been a comprehensive review of scholarly research on the psychological underpinning of multiculturalism. The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity fills this void. It reviews cutting-edge empirical and theoretical work on the psychology of multicultural identities and experiences. As a whole, the volume addresses some important basic issues, such as measurement of multicultural identity, links between multilingualism and multiculturalism, the social psychology of multiculturalism and globalization, as well as applied issues such as multiculturalism in counseling, education, policy, marketing and organizational science, to mention a few. This handbook will be useful for students, researchers, and teachers in cultural, social, personality, developmental, acculturation, and ethnic psychology. It can also be used as a source book in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on identity and multiculturalism, and a reference for applied psychologists and researchers in the domains of education, management, and marketing.
Download or read book The Impossible Jew written by Benjamin Schreier and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the works of key Jewish American authors to explore how the concept of identity is put to work by identity-based literary study.
Download or read book Multiculturalism written by and published by Syed Ali Raza. This book was released on 2011 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has multiculturalism failed? Is it time to move on? What is the alternative? Ali Rattansi explores the issues, from national identity and social cohesion to cultural fragmentation and 'political correctness'. Providing a balanced assessment of the truth and falsity of the charges against multiculturalism, he explores new ideas for the future. Multiculturalism appears to be in terminal crisis. It has been blamed for undermining national identity, diluting social cohesion, creating ethnic ghettos and cultural fragmentation, providing fertile ground for Islamic radicalism, encouraging perverse 'political correctness', and restricting liberal freedoms of expression, amongst other things. The public debate over multiculturalism has polarised opinion amongst the general public, policy makers, and politicians. But how much real evidence, beyond tabloid headlines and anecdotes, exists for these claims? In this Very Short Introduction, Ali Rattansi considers the actual evidence from social science research to provide a balanced assessment of the truth and falsity of the charges against multiculturalism. Dispelling many myths in the process, he also warns about the dangers that lurk in an uncritical endorsement of multiculturalism, and concludes by arguing that it is time to move on to a form of 'interculturalism'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1970 1980 written by Kirk Curnutt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled, from 1960s' nostalgia to feminism and the redefinition of masculinity to sexual liberation and rock 'n' roll. Other essays address New Journalism, the rise of blockbuster culture, memoir and self-help, and crime fiction - all demonstrating that the Me Decade was nothing short of mesmerizing.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature written by Hana Wirth-Nesher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.
Download or read book A History of Colombian Literature written by Raymond Leslie Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as José Eustacio Rivera, Tomás Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
Download or read book Reproduction written by Ian Williams and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With subtlety and wit, [a] prizewinning debut” novel set in 1970s Toronto “explores a liaison across race and class divisions in Canada” (The Guardian, UK). Felicia and Edgar come from different worlds. She’s a nineteen-year-old student and Caribbean immigrant while he is the impetuous heir to his German family’s fortune. When their ailing mothers are assigned the same Toronto hospital room, their chance encounter leads to an unlikely relationship full miscommunications, misunderstandings, and very surprising results. Years later, Felicia’s son Armistice—“Army” for short—is a teenager fixated on get-rich-quick schemes, each one more absurd than the next. The. Edgar finally re-enters Felicia’s life, at yet another inopportune moment, putting this “witty, playful and disarmingly offbeat” saga on the path to its heartfelt conclusion (The Toronto Star, CA). Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Download or read book American Multiculturalism After 9 11 written by Derek Rubin and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and rich volume charts the post-9/11 debates and practice of multiculturalism, pinpointing their political and cultural implications in the United States and Europe.
