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"Human skin color in literature"
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Shades of Difference
Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national origins-including English-as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-centuryLondon Gazetteused the term \"black\" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as \"white.\" InShades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, \"race,\" embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts-historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's \"Hero and Leander\" and Shakespeare's \"Venus and Adonis.\" By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender,Shades of Differencefurthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
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I color myself different
An inspiring story of identity and self-esteem from celebrated athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick. When Colin Kaepernick was five years old, he was given a simple school assignment: draw a picture of yourself and your family. What young Colin does next with his brown crayon changes his whole world and worldview, providing a valuable lesson on embracing and celebrating his Black identity through the power of radical self-love and knowing your inherent worth. I Color Myself Different is a joyful ode to Black and Brown lives based on real events in young Colin's life that is perfect for every reader's bookshelf. It's a story of self-discovery, staying true to one's self, and advocating for change...even when you're very little!
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Strangers in Blood
Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.
Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.
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Mulattas and Mestizas
In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a \"new\" America. Bost challenges the popular media's notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the \"changing\" face of America extends throughout American history. Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the \"browning\" of America. Original and ambitious in scope, Mulattas and Mestizas measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.
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Fugitive Race
Denying its formative dialogues with minorities, the white race, Stephen P. Knadler contends, has been a fugitive race. While the \"white question,\" like the \"Negro question,\" and the \"woman question\" a century earlier, has garnered considerable critical attention among scholars looking to find new anti-race strategies, these investigations need to highlight not just the exclusion of people of color, but also examine minority writers' resistance to and disruption of this privileged racial category. \"Highly original, wonderfully detailed, and thought provoking,\" says Professor Candace Waid of Knadler's intellectually challenging book. Although excluded, people of color looked back in anger, laughter, and wisdom to challenge the unexamined lie of a self-evident whiteness. Looking at fictional and nonfictional texts written between 1850 and 1984, The Fugitive Race traces a long cultural and literary history of the ways African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Chicanos, gays, and lesbians have challenged the shape and meaning of so-called white identities. From the antebellum period to the 1980s, the belief in a white racial superiority, or simply a white difference, has denied that people of color might and do have an influence on the supposedly pure or protected character of whiteness. In contrast, this book attempts to define a new way of analyzing minority literature that questions this segregated color line. In addition to creating a new racial awareness, many writers of color tried to interfere in the historical formulation of whiteness. They created unsettling moments when white readers had to see themselves for the first time from the outside-in, or from the critical perspective of non-white writers. These writers--including William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Abraham Cahan, Young-hill Kang, Zora Neale Hurston, and Arturo
Islas--did not simply resist assimilation. They sought to dismantle the white identities that lay as the foundation of the master's house. Stephen P. Knadler, an assistant professor of English at Spelman College, has been published in American Literature , American Literary History , American Quarterly , Minnesota Review , and Modern Fiction Studies.
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Out of Touch
Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory, and cultural criticism.These discourses reveal the extent to which skin figures in the cultural effect of changes in visual technologies, a development argued by critics to be at the heart of the contest between surface and depth.
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Whitewashing America
Even before mass marketing, American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of \"the good things in life.\"
Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history,Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imaginationexplores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity.
From the Revolutionary War until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, coarse, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers knit around themselves refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially \"white.\"
Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and household servants.
This book explores what it meant to be \"white\" by delving into the whiteness of dishes, gravestone art, and architecture, as well as women's clothing and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion.
Early nineteenth-century authors participated in this material economy as well, building their literary landscapes in the same way their readers furnished their households and manipulating the understood meanings of things into political statements.
Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions.
Bridget T. Heneghan, a lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, has been published inNineteenth-Century Studies.
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To be suddenly white : literary realism and racial passing
To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference. The desire \"to be suddenly white\" serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both.
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