American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and ...consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. Robert S. Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, Levine argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period.Levine emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in his analysis of four illuminating "episodes" of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. He examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. Levine offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.
At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural ...labor or of the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe , Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature. Posmentier argues that environmental experiences of growth and rupture define the literature of black freedom, an archive that ranges from sonnets, mini-epics, documentary poems, periodicals, and novels to blues songs, dancehall productions, and ethnographic writing. In turn, this literature generates important and surprising models for ecological thought. Claude McKay, for example, connects rows of potatoes to the poetic line; Zora Neale Hurston composes rhythmic communal lyrics in the Florida muck following a deadly hurricane; and Derek Walcott critiques property-based ecological relations through the archipelagic shape of his mid-career poetry. Posmentier examines how these writers, along with Gwendolyn Brooks, Bessie Smith, Sterling Brown, Lloyd Lovindeer, Kamau Brathwaite, and others give voice to racialized experiences of alienation from the land while simultaneously envisioning a modern poetics of survival, repair, and generation. Going against the grain of scholarship that has situated modern black diasporic agency largely in metropolitan sites, Posmentier traces a black literary history of environmental and social disaster while exploring the possibilities and limits of poetry as an archive for black modern culture in its many forms. This pathbreaking book offers stunning new insight into modern black literature, environmental humanities, and poetry and poetics.
Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to ...family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.
Often treated like night itself-both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized-Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the US. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations ...of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the US, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside of the US. She takes as her subject novels, short stories, poetry, essays, non-fiction, photo-fictions, photography, and film, and examines these texts through the lenses of nationhood, sexuality, human rights, exoticism, among others.
This book offers insight into the approaches of a new generation of Jewish-American writers. Whether they reimagine their ancestors' "shtetl life" or invent their own kind of Jewishness, they have a ...common curiosity in what makes them Jewish. Is it because most of them are third-generation Americans who don't worry about assimilation as their parents' generation did? If so, how does the writing of recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union fit into the picture? Unlike Irving Howe predicted in 1977, Jewish-American literature did not fade after immigration. It always finds new paths, drawing from the vast scope of Jewish life in America.
Whilst scholarship about postmodernist American literature has tended to focus on the entanglements of power, language, identity, and history, few have noted the important role played by children and ...child culture. Reading Rikki Ducornet’s The Stain and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School through the lens of literary child studies can usefully demonstrate the ways in which postmodernist literature relies on depictions of childhood to interrogate language and culture acquisition, analogised in terms of parental, pedagogical and institutional control. Ducornet and Acker’s novels, in particular, use a young girl’s voice—to borrow a phrase from Acker, a kind of ‘child-drag’—to explore themes of control and female sexuality, and to demonstrate the broader difficulty of achieving some “authentic” identity, when “identity” is so often viewed as violence submitted from without. In conjunction with poststructuralist and feminist theories of identity-making, this essay will explore how both Ducornet and Acker use the form of the bildungsroman to explore how a self-effacing girlhood beset by naïve bad faith can try to transform itself—through a characteristically postmodernist disassembly of language—into a new and more authentic language of the self.
The primary aim of the article is to examine Paul Auster’s metafictional novel – Man in the Dark – in reference to the represented reality and imaginary spaces which play a crucial role in the ...development of the action. I will be focusing on the diverse levels of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the novel – the primary story and the embedded one – and their mutual relations and interactions. While discussing Man in the Dark, I shall explore the ways in which particular chronotopes affect individuals immersed in them. I will also prove that the text’s dominant story, recounted by the protagonist, August Brill, transgresses the spatial and temporal borders of the main character’s world, and, consequently, becomes completely separated from what is quotidian, known, and experienceable for him.The created worlds shall be analysed in reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.
Smart women, sophisticated ladies, savvy writers. . . Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Lois Long, Jessie Fauset, Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, and others imagined New York as a ...place where they could claim professional status, define urban independence, and shrug off confining feminine roles. It might be said that during the 1920s and 1930s these literary artists painted the town red on the pages of magazines likeVanity Fairand theNew Yorker.Playing Smart, Catherine Keyser's homage to their literary genius, is a captivating celebration of their causes and careers.Through humor writing, this "smart set" expressed both sides of the story-promoting their urbanity and wit while using irony and caricature to challenge feminine stereotypes. Their fiction raised questions about what it meant to be a woman in the public eye, how gender roles would change because men and women were working together, and how the growth of the magazine industry would affect women's relationships to their bodies and minds. Keyser provides a refreshing and informative chronicle, saluting the value of being "smart" as incisive and innovative humor showed off the wit and talent of women writers and satirized the fantasy world created by magazines.
Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This ...vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's nationalist internationalism, which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Black internationalist feminism critiques racist, heteronormative, and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. Cheryl Higashida shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, Higashida illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women to light against their marginalization and silencing. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, Black Internationalist Feminism contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.
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