Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • Does racial hybridity offer a future beyond racial difference? At a time when the idea of a postracial society has entered public discourse, “The Amalgamation Waltz” investigates the practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  • The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction Oxford University Press October 2009 216 pages Hardback ISBN13: 9780195377361; ISBN10: 0195377362 Caroline Rody, Associate Professor of English University of Virginia In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures–in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications–a radical interaction has…

  • Feeling Ancestral: The Emotions of Mixed Race and Memory in Asian American Cultural Productions positions: east asia cultures critique Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2008 pages 457-482 Jeffrey Santa Ana, Assistant Professor English Department Stony Brook University The current era of war, militarism, and neocolonialism in the Pacific is a time in which capitalist expansion simultaneously…

  • The Tragic Mulatta Plays the Tragic Muse Victorian Literature and Culture Volume 37, Issue 2 (June 2009) pages 501-522 DOI: 10.1017/S1060150309090317 Kimberly Snyder Manganellia, Assistant Professor of 19th-Century British and American Literature Clemson University Marie Lavington, the runaway octoroon slave in Charles Kingsley‘s little-read novel Two Years Ago (1857), makes this declaration of independence in…

  • “Our Duty to Conserve”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context South Atlantic Quarterly Volume 108, Number 3 (2009) pages 519-540 DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2009-006 Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy Pennsylvania State University When restored to its historical context, W. E. B. Du Bois‘s “The Conservation of Races” emerges less as…

  • The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice Camera Obscura Volume 24, Number 1, 70 (2009) pages 37-65 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2008-014 Jennifer González, Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture Contemporary Art, Race and Representation Harvard University Contemporary digital artists have been exploring the function of the face and its relation…

  • White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism Volume 13, Number 2 (July 2009) pages 39-56 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2009-005 Patricia de Santana Pinho State Univiersity of New York, Albany This article analyzes anecdotes, jokes, standards of beauty, color categories, and media representations of “mixed-race” individuals to…