The most important books to focus on race relations in the past few years have all presented the United States through a long-standing white/black binary. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) explore how violence and invisibility shape contemporary black subjectivity. However, even as John Hope Franklin proclaimed in “One America in the 21st Century,” President Clinton’s 1997 race initiative, “This country cut its eye teeth on racism in the black/white sphere,” we must still bear in mind Korean American spokeswoman Angela Oh’s hope for a “new language” that will allow discussion “beyond the black-white paradigm.” As she further explained in the well-publicized dispute, “We need to go beyond that because the world is about much more than that, and this is sort of the next horizon” (quoted in Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America beyond...
East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights Era
Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship
Stephanie Li holds the Susan D. Gubar Chair in Literature at Indiana University. She is the author of four books, including Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2012) and Playing in the White: Black Subjects, White Writers (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015). She is currently coediting a special issue of American Literary History on twenty-first-century African American writing and guest editing a Close-Up for Black Camera on Beyoncé.
Stephanie Li; East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights Era
Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship. American Literature 1 March 2017; 89 (1): 188–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3788777
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