...Caroline Chung Simpson Caroline Chung Simpson is associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She is author of An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960 (2001). University of Washington 2007 America's Asia: Racial Form...

...-racial encounters with an Islamic diaspora. By restoring West Africa as a contact zone within overlapping nineteenth-century Black Atlantic and Islamic diasporic histories, this essay traces a complex, ambivalent “islamicism” (or specific Islamic orientalism) within early pan-African or “back-to-Africa...

... historical and literary moments when gender norms, alongside racial and ethnic identities, underwent abrupt and vexed change. In these stories, scenes of domestic drama are transformed into modernist narratives of social and cultural transformation. The article contends that a pragmatic linguistic approach...

.... Drawn along a part of the globe that the West regarded as distant, exotic, and racially and culturally inferior, the date line is conveniently ignored in the works of these authors, who transplant what might otherwise be universal anxieties of modernity onto an exotic locale outside the regular view...

... of aesthetic autonomy to declare their freedom from colonial bondage, from systems of racial discrimination, and even from the new postcolonial state. In the geopolitical context of the Cold War, modernist ideals of aesthetic detachment also gave these writers a language of ideological neutrality. The literary...

...Michael Skansgaard Abstract Previous historical studies of The Weary Blues have focused on the racial symbolism of Langston Hughes’s technique, which (as the consensus goes) authenticates the voice of the persona through its deliberate simplicity. This orthodox view is wrongheaded from the outset...

... Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” ( 1983 ), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism...

... in which the play premiered. Applying theories of memory and melodrama, the article explains how many factors in the play—the actors, their voices, the stage space, the soundscape, and the mixing of the Catalan and Spanish languages—transmit memory across racial, temporal, and spatial boundaries...

... how the scripts of premodern racial formation travel over time and space, adapting themselves to the necessities and contingencies of their particular moments and geographies while also establishing a common racial lexicon. Scripts of Blackness is an invitation to study and theorize premodern racial...

... race are unstable. And this instability makes them par- ticularly telling for understanding ourselves as a nation built on racial contradiction. In Jefferson’s case, Staples writes, “it is quite possible that he viewed the mulatto Sally Hemings not as black, but as part of some middle category...

... and racism in early modern and Renaissance-era England are often told that their work is anachronistic. Although the field has been more willing to interrogate such claims in recent years, many scholars hold fast to a notion of England’s innocence in the early development of racial ideologies. The disavowal...

... to African American lit- erature, any black woman who would writc in this vein, she opined, was hardly a principled author. My friend’s exasperation revealed her belief that sentimental conventions, including tropes of domestic bliss and (inter)racial harmony, proved not merely frivolous when late...

... between his “criticism of cultural identity” and his “history of its nativist origins” (142), Our Amm‘ca chronicles a relentless effort to locate the moment at which a culture, as Michaels says of Anzia Yezierska and Pauline Hopkins, rewrote “the critique of racial identity as the commitment...

... Lauren . 1997 . “ The Face of America and the State of Emergency .” In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship , 175 – 220 . Durham, NC : Duke University Press . Bernstein Robin . 2011 . Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery...

... question has preoccupied its critics more than any other: Does Ellison’s aesthetic individualism -his commitment to formally accomplished art that champions the ethical primacy of the individ- ual-override his novel’s racial and political concerns? The postwar humanists who first took up...

... the bravado of DuBois’s book that is apt to take us aback, less its clear-sighted demoli- tion of Victorian racial propriety, than the sheer idiosyncrasy of its dis- cursive construction—or perhaps we should say, of the methodology that construction embodies. We might be particularly startled...

...-called natural identities but finds that Tarzan ultimately affirms racial and gender hierarchies2 The answer to Tarzan’s possibly liberating question ‘What does a man do?”is the ominous “[Men] con- trol and subordinate others” (68). For Torgovnick, Tarzan’s touching Cheyfitz...

... themselves that we think the racial makeup of the students in our schools should be reflected in the racial makeup of the authors whose books we assign to them. And even if we vary the argument and insist that our students should learn also (or instead) about the his- tory of others, we remain...

... the racial masquerade of modernism into a displacement of the dichotomies themselves” ( 195). But, North reminds us, fully appreciating such work requires a shift from the usual attention to the subject matter in African American writing to the cultural work done by experiments in tech- nique...

... to get our minds on our work, go back to our jobs, quit this talking.”6 Thus if the politics of most white civil rights novels are, in one sense, radical—implying the most thoroughgoing critique of the southern racial order by white southerners since George Washington Cable’s— they also remain...