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"American Studies : American Culture"
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Post-Soul Satire : Black Identity After Civil Rights
\"From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called \"post-black,\" \"post-soul,\" and examples of a \"New Black Aesthetic.\" Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Challenging the Black Atlantic
The historical novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves map black journeys from Africa to the Americas in a way that challenges the Black Atlantic paradigm that has become synonymous with cosmopolitan African diaspora studies. Unlike Paul Gilroy, who coined the term and based it on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness, Zapata, in Changó el gran putas (1983), creates an empowering mythology that reframes black resistance in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. In Um defeito de cor (2006), Gonçalves imagines the survival strategies of a legendary woman said to be the mother of black abolitionist poet Luís Gama and a conspirator in an African Muslim–led revolt in Brazil’s “Black Rome.” These novels show differing visions of revolution, black community, femininity, sexuality, and captivity. They skillfully reveal how events preceding the UNESCO Decade of Afro-Descent (2015–2024) alter our understanding of Afro-Latin America as it gains increased visibility.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
eBook
Growing up Asian American in young adult fiction
\"Contributions by Hena Ahmad, Linda Pierce Allen, Mary J. Henderson Couzelis, Sarah Park Dahlen, Lan Dong, Tomo Hattori, Jennifer Ho, Ymitri Mathison, Leah Milne, Joy Takako Taylor, and Traise Yamamoto. Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers' identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
American Cinema of the 2010s
The 2010s were perhaps the most tumultuous decade since the 1960s. The effects of the Great Recession continued to be felt. The administration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, encouraged many to think that America was now 'post-racial', an illusion broken by the election of Donald Trump. Polarisation reigned, communicated on social media. Netflix and Amazon jumped into production. By 2019, Netflix produced more feature films than the traditional studios combined. Cinema's move from film to digital, in production and in exhibition, was complete by mid-decade. `MeToo and `Oscarssowhite signaled a reckoning with gross gender and racial inequalities in the media, matched by that in the wider culture. The essays of this book explore the blockbusters, low-budget sleepers, and films in between.
eBook
Latinos and American popular culture
\"This book offers a complete overview of the contributions of U.S. Latinos to American popular culture and examines the emergence of the U.S. Latino identity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fighting Invisibility
In Fighting Invisibility , Monica Mong Trieu argues that we
must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully
understand the nuances of Asian American racialization. By doing
this, we face questions such as, historically, who has represented
Asian America? Who gets to represent Asian America? This book
shifts the primary focus to Midwest Asian America to disrupt-and
expand beyond-the existing privileged narratives in United States
and Asian American history. Drawing from in-depth interviews,
census data, and cultural productions from Asian Americans in Ohio,
Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and
Michigan, this interdisciplinary research examines how post-1950s
Midwest Asian Americans navigate identity and belonging, racism,
educational settings, resources within co-ethnic communities, and
pan-ethnic cultural community. Their experiences and life
narratives are heavily framed by three pervasive themes of
spatially defined isolation, invisibility, and racialized
visibility. Fighting Invisibility makes an important
contribution to racialization literature, while also highlighting
the necessity to further expand the scope of Asian American
history-telling and knowledge production.
eBook
Hoo-doo cowboys and bronze buckaroos : conceptions of the African American West
\"Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or underrepresented in studies focused only on traditional literary material. The book engages heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local Montana newspapers rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy and Taylor Gordon), who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the \"golden age of western television\" that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a \"postracial\" or \"postsoul\" frontier; Percival Everett's fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; and movies as recent as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos advances our discovery of how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, portrayed, and performed\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fifties ethnicities : the ethnic novel and mass culture at midcentury
Fifties Ethnicities brings together a variety of texts to explore what it meant to be American in the middle of \"America's Century.\" In a series of comparative readings that draws on novels, television programs, movie magazines, and films, Tracy Floreani crosses generic boundaries to show how literature and mass media worked to mold concepts of ethnicity in the 1950s. Revisiting well-known novels of the period, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as well as less-studied works, such as William Saroyan's Rock Wagram and C. Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song (the original source of the more famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), Floreani investigates how the writing of ethnic identity called into question the ways in which signifiers of Americanness also inherently privileged whiteness. By putting these novels into conversation with popular media narratives such as I Love Lucy, the author offers an in-depth examination of the boundaries and possibilities for participating in American culture in an era that greatly influenced national ideas about identity. While midcentury mass media presented an undeniably engaging vision of American success, national belonging, and guidelines for cultural citizenship, Floreani argues that minority writers and artists were, at the same time, engaging that vision and implicitly participating in its construction.
eBook
Cuban women and salsa : to the beat of their own drum
\"Although Salsa has garnered interest from various disciplines in the last fifteen years, the contributions of female performers has been largely ignored. This book adds to the field by tracing the participation of Cuban and Cuban-American women as either solo artists or lead vocals in the development and popularization of Salsa, highlighting their staging of gender, race and nation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Sufism and American Literary Masters
This book reveals the rich, but generally unknown, influence of Sufism on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. The translation of Persian poets such as Hafiz and Sa'di into English and the ongoing popularity of Omar Khayyam offered intriguing new spiritual perspectives to some of the major American literary figures. As editor Mehdi Aminrazavi notes, these Sufi influences have often been subsumed into a notion of \"Eastern,\" chiefly Indian, thought and not acknowledged as having Islamic roots. This work pays considerable attention to two giants of American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who found much inspiration from the Sufi ideas they encountered. Other canonical figures are also discussed, including Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with literary contemporaries who are lesser known today, such as Paschal Beverly Randolph, Thomas Lake Harris, and Lawrence Oliphant.
eBook