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The African has been separated from his Black American brothers and sisters since the dawn of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Millions of Africans were forcibly ejected from their native soil, separated from their loved ones-their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and torn from the lives they once knew, and transplanted into a new world. Essentially, the black American has become a new person in a new world with a unique experience. After hundreds of years in the new world,coupled with their unique experience; how do they view, or see, or relate or perceive or better yet interact with their African kith and kin they left on the African continent, who are now 'voluntarily' joining them in America in exodus proportions fleeing the life of grinding poverty, deprivation, hunger, dictatorships, helplessness, and all kinds of diseases? The authors spent more than twenty five years trying to find out answers to these questions.
This collection by death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars provides literary perspectives on the subject of the death penalty.
Re-inventing/Re-presenting Identities in a Global World is a collection of twelve selected essays which address the concepts of cultural identity formation and enactment, immigration, diaspora and repatriation, and gender politics within a globalized context. With the peripheral having now become the center of contemporary culture, this volume examines cultural and literary diversities that have emerged from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between cultures, politics, aesthetics and disciplines, with an emphasis on cultural identity as a site of crisis and fragmentation. Written in an accessible way, this volume addresses several audiences, from postgraduate researchers and sch...
Amitai Etzioni is one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our day, a man synonymous with the ideas of communitarianism. In this book, Etzioni challenges those who argue that diversity or multiculturalism is about to become the governing American creed. On the surface, America may seem like a fractured mosaic, but the country is in reality far more socially monochromatic and united than most observers have claimed. In the first chapter, Etzioni presents a great deal of evidence that Americans, whites and African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans, new immigrants and decedents of the Pilgrims, continue to share the same core of basic American values and aspirations. ...
White Lies considers African-American bodies as the site of cultural debates over a contested "white religion" in the United States. Rooting his analysis in the work of W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, Christopher Driscoll traces the shifting definitions of "white religion" from the nineteenth century up to the death of Michael Brown and other racial controversies of the present day. He engages both modern philosophers and popular imagery to isolate the instabilities central to a "white religion," including the inadequacy of this framing concept as a way of describing and processing death. The book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in African-American Religion, philosophy and race, and Whiteness Studies.
Finally breaking through heterosexual clichés of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels," Cotton’s Queer Relations exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South’s most iconic institution. Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class,...
These essays, written over more than thirty years of Vincent L. Wimbush’s career as a scholar, provide a response to the nearly universal, persistent, and sedimented modern-world hyper-signification of Black flesh, always needing to be framed, humiliated, policed, and dirtied. Because Wimbush is a scholar of religion as culture—having to do with social practices and their psycho-politics as regimes of knowledge, discourse, formation, and power relations—his ex-centric transdisciplinary interest in scriptures has been viewed, in some circles, as controversial. Yet it is Wimbush’s linkage of the modern hyper-signification of Black flesh—leading to racialization and racism, especially anti-Black racism—to the scriptural as shorthand for discourse and relations of power that makes this work compelling.
This collection argues that the romanticized conflation of “childhood” and “innocence” in American culture has been on a steady decline at least since the 1960s--largely due to postmodern critiques of overarching narratives involving both “the child” and the “innocence” of childhood. Additionally, this collection highlights and analyzes examples of children’s literature and culture throughout the 20th century (and into the 21st) which pointedly defy traditional, idealized notions of “childhood”. Such an analysis serves to reiterate the idea that the romanticized notion of “childhood” which has pervaded American culture for over two centuries is little more than a cultural construction that bears little to no resemblance to the actual, lived experience of American children.
Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, ...
A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.