Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Encounters
People of Asian descent have lived for centuries in North and South America, where they have been actively involved in the creation of multicultural, multiethnic societies. This groundbreaking anthology explores their experiences among ethnic and cultural groups in a unique collection of works by and about Asian Americans. Utilizing a rich blend of analytical, autobiographical, biographical, and narrative essays, oral histories, fiction, photography, and artwork, the anthology focuses especially on the interactions of Asians with others outside the dominant culture. Contributors range from established scholars, writers and artists to little-known voices heard here for the first time. Scholar...
Something Akin to Freedom
2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why would someone choose bondage over individual freedom? What type of freedom can be found in choosing conditions of enslavement? In Something Akin to Freedom, winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Stephanie Li explores literary texts where African American women decide to remain in or enter into conditions of bondage, sacrificing individual autonomy to achieve other goals. In fresh readings of stories by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Gayl Jones, Louisa Picquet, and Toni Morrison, Li argues that amid shifting positions of power and through acts of creative agency, the women in these narratives make seemingly anti-intuitive choices that are simultaneously limiting and liberating. She explores how the appeal of the freedom of the North is constrained by the potential for isolation and destabilization for women rooted in strong social networks in the South. By introducing reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, Li expands our understanding of individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison: a biography looks at the remarkable life of an essential American novelist, whose critically acclaimed, bestselling books offer lively, powerful depictions of black America. Toni Morrison serves as a basic introduction to the literary influences that shaped Morrison's writing, from the early novels to the breakout success of Song of Solomon, from the overwhelming achievement of Beloved: a novel to her most recent book, A Mercy. The book also examines Morrison's other writing--criticism, essays, edited volumes, and children's books--as well as her academic career, her work as an editor at Random House, and her political activism, most notably in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Ugly White People
Whiteness revealed: an analysis of the destructive complacency of white self-consciousness White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take. Stephanie Li argues that much of...
Zora Neale Hurston
In this biography, chronological chapters follow Zora Neale Hurston's family, upbringing, education, influences, and major works, placing these experiences within the context of American history. This biography of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most influential African American writers of the 20th century and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, is primarily for students and will cover all of the major points of development in Hurston's life as well as her major publications. Hurston's impact extends beyond the literary world: she also left her mark as an anthropologist whose ethnographic work portrays the racial struggles during the early 20th century American South. This work includes a preface and narrative chapters that explore Hurston's literary influences and the personal relationships that were most formative to her life; the final chapter, "Why Zora Neale Hurston Matters," explores her cultural and historical significance, providing context to her writings and allowing readers a greater understanding of Hurston's life while critically examining her major writing.
Signifying without Specifying
On the campaign trail, Barack Obama faced a difficult task—rallying African American voters while resisting his opponents’ attempts to frame him as “too black” to govern the nation as a whole. Obama’s solution was to employ what Toni Morrison calls “race-specific, race-free language,” avoiding open discussions of racial issues while using terms and references that carried a specific cultural resonance for African American voters. Stephanie Li argues that American politicians and writers are using a new kind of language to speak about race. Challenging the notion that we have moved into a “post-racial” era, she suggests that we are in an uneasy moment where American public discourse demands that race be seen, but not heard. Analyzing contemporary political speech with nuanced readings of works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead, Li investigates how Americans of color have negotiated these tensions, inventing new ways to signal racial affiliations without violating taboos against open discussions of race.
Playing in the White
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels--that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the u...
Pan–African American Literature
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.
Singapore Childhood
The political, economic and social changes that have occurred over the past 60 years have shaped and transformed the childhood of children in Singapore. This book explores this transformation through anecdotes and memories through interviews with individuals hailing from different races and age groups, together with related archived materials from different sources. The components of childhood -- birth, home, play, school, health and welfare -- are revisited so as to provide useful insights about the past to young readers and at the same time serve as a nostalgic read for older readers.Written in a simple and accessible manner and filled with numerous photographs and specially commissioned cartoons, this book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in knowing about childhood as it was and is being experienced in Singapore.This book is also available in Chinese.
Reading Race Relationally
What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States' class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection. At the same time, Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.
