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Highlights the interplay of race, literature, and nation-building in U.S. history
In this book, Shannon Rose Riley provides a critically rich investigation of representations of Cuba and Haiti in US culture in order to analyze their significance not only to the emergence of empire but especially to the reconfiguration of US racial structures along increasingly biracial lines. Based on impressive research and with extensive analysis of various textual and performance forms including a largely unique set of skits, plays, songs, cultural performances and other popular amusements, Riley shows that Cuba and Haiti were particularly meaningful to the ways that people in the US re-imagined themselves as black or white and that racial positions were renegotiated through what she calls acts of palimpsest: marking and unmarking, racing and erasing difference. Riley’s book demands a reassessment of the importance of the occupations of Cuba and Haiti to US culture, challenging conventional understandings of performance, empire, and race at the turn of the twentieth century.
In Writing for Justice, Elna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Sjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Sjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play's production - and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic -...
What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny's dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century's most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.
2020 Barnard Hewitt Award, honorable mention Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage was the first professional regional theatre in the nation’s capital to welcome a racially integrated audience; the first to perform behind the Iron Curtain; and the first to win the Tony Award for best regional theatre. This behind-the-scenes look at one of the leading theatres in the United States shows how key financial and artistic decisions were made, using a range of archival materials such as letters and photographs as well as interviews with artists and administrators. Close-ups of major productions from The Great White Hope to Oklahoma! illustrate how Arena Stage navigated cultural trends. More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far the theatre could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative “in the round” approach, the narrative simulates sitting in different parts of the arena space to see the theatre through different lenses—economics, racial dynamics, and American identity.
During the past fifty years, Western culture has experienced a significant shift in its overall stance regarding multiethnic marriage. As a result, more North Americans than ever marry spouses whose ethnicity (or culture) differs from theirs. This trend also is observable in Christian circles. Unfortunately, few resources exist to help multiethnic couples maneuver through the potential minefield of cultural collision. The purpose of this volume is to provide such a resource. Equally Yoked examines the subject of multiethnic marriage from a biblical perspective, before considering a history of the practice in North America over the last four centuries. Additionally, this book surveys the challenges that multiethnic Christian couples frequently encounter, and offers premarital counseling propositions that will prove valuable to both counselors and couples who originate from diverse backgrounds.
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Shades of Gray Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective struggles with multiracial identity. McKibbin weaves a rich sociohistorical tapestry around the critically acclaimed works of Danzy Senna, Caucasia (1998); Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001); Emily Raboteau, The Prof...
This is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the American short story that includes an historical overview of the topic as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories, from Benjamin Franklin’s “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” in 1747 to “The Joy Luck Club”. Includes a selection of writers chosen not only for their contributions of individual stories but for bodies of work that advanced the boundaries of short fiction, including Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tim O’Brien Addresses the ways in which American oral storytelling and other narrative traditions were integral to the formation and flourishing of the short story genre Written in accessible and engaging prose for students at all levels by a renowned literary scholar to illuminate an important genre that has received short shrift in scholarly literature of the last century Includes a glossary defining the most common terms used in literary history and in critical discussions of fiction, and a bibliography of works for further study
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive collection of essays contributed by Classical Studies scholars that explore questions relating to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Covers topics of ethnicity in civilizations ranging from ancient Egypt and Israel, to Greece and Rome, and into Late Antiquity Features cutting-edge research on ethnicity relating to Philistine, Etruscan, and Phoenician identities Reveals the explicit relationships between ancient and modern ethnicities Introduces an interpretation of ethnicity as an active component of social identity Represents a fundamental questioning of formally accepted and fixed categories in the field
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson’s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book’s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture. Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B. Stepto