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"Caucasian race in literature."
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Becoming yellow
In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become \"yellow\" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.
eBook
The Souls of White Folk
The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize
Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body
of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social
construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing
approach to these texts that says African American writers
retreated from issues of \"race\" when they wrote about whiteness,
Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an
African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names
\"the literature of white estrangement.\"
In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B.
Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity
(Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial
subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba
Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories
and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white
estrangement from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth
centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part
of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge
and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates
that these texts have an important place in the growing field of
critical whiteness studies.
eBook
At the Fault Line
Social identities within post-apartheid South Africa remain highly contested with issues of race and racism often dominating the national discourse. In order to find their place within the national narrative, white South Africans need to re-think their stories, re-define their positions in society and re-imagine their own narratives of identity and belonging. By exploring whiteness and white identity through the lens of literary journalism, this book reflects on ways in which writers use the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in this genre to reveal the complexities of white identity formation and negotiation within contemporary society. Authors such as Rian Malan (My Traitor's Heart), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull and Begging to Be Black), Jonny Steinberg (Midlands) and Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying) are writing at times of political and social flux. By working at the fault line of literature and journalism, these literary journalists not only mirror the volatility of their social setting but also endeavour to find new narrative forms, revealing the inherent anxiety and possibility of whiteness in contemporary South Africa.
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Faulkner and Whiteness
William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standards of the region, and complex portrayals of the interactions between blacks and whites. Throughout his work Faulkner contests white identity-its performance by whites and those passing for white, its role in shaping the South, and its assumption of normative identity in opposition to nonwhite \"Others.\" This is true even in novels without a strong visible African American presence, such as As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion.Faulkner and Whiteness explores the ways in which Faulkner's fiction addresses and de-stabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the essays argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate's consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner's oeuvre-and scholarly views of it-in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.
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Miedo negro, poder blanco en la Cuba colonial
Este libro destaca cómo, junto con el temor de que se produjera una rebelión de esclavos semejante a la de Haití, se originaron otras fobias en Cuba que incidieron en la manera en que los letrados se refirieron a la esclavitud, a la raza africana y a la cultura criolla en general, y cómo tales temores sirvieron como concepto básico para construir la nación. [Texto de la editorial].
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Explorers in Eden : Pueblo Indians and the promised land
Explorers in Eden uncovers an intriguing array of diaries, letters, memoirs, photographs, paintings, postcards, advertisements, anthropological field studies, and scholarly monographs. They reveal how Anglo-Americans disenchanted with modern urban industrial society developed a deep and rich fascination with pueblo culture through their biblical associations.
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Producing American races : Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison
In Producing American Races Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.
McKee provides close readings of six novels—James's The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and Morrison's Sula and Jazz—interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral—and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison's African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.
With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race—and especially whiteness—Producing American Races will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.
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White Scholars/African American Texts
What makes someone an authority? What makes one person's knowledge more credible than another's? In the ongoing debates over racial authenticity, some attest that we can know each other's experiences simply because we are all \"human,\" while others assume a more skeptical stance, insisting that racial differences create unbridgeable gaps in knowledge.
Bringing new perspectives to these perennial debates, the essays in this collection explore the many difficulties created by the fact that white scholars greatly outnumber black scholars in the study and teaching of African American literature. Contributors, including some of the most prominent theorists in the field as well as younger scholars, examine who is speaking, what is being spoken and what isnot, and why framing African American literature in terms of an exclusive black/white racial divide is problematic and limiting.
In highlighting the \"whiteness\" of some African Americanists, the collection does not imply that the teaching or understanding of black literature by white scholars is definitively impossible. Indeed such work is not only possible, but imperative. Instead, the essays aim to open a much needed public conversation about the real and pressing challenges that white scholars face in this type of work, as well as the implications of how these challenges are met.
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Autobiography of an Ex-White Man
An intensely personal meditation on the nature of America
by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and
found his understanding of the world transformed by the
experience. Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is
an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a
White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found
his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The
book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events
leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the
W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the
University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department
with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the
apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department
in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw
himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as
possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic
responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of
American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible
metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a
land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then
for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then
for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an
accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of
the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to
express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's
racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable
barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American
storyas a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory
project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at
the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous
books, including Introductory Philosophy and In
Defense of Anarchism .
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