Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • Black and Jewish: Language and Multiple Strategies for Self-Presentation American Jewish History Volume 100, Number 1, January 2016 pages 51-71 DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2016.0001 Sarah Bunin Benor, Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, California In January 2014, hip-hop star Drake hosted “Saturday Night Live” (SNL), opening with a skit…

  • Quicksand and Passing – Nella Larsen The Writes of Woman: Reviews of books by female writers 2015-11-24 Naomi Frisby Quicksand and Passing are two novellas packaged together and reissued by Serpent’s Tale in the UK. They both share the key theme of being a woman of colour in America early in the twentieth century but…

  • Adrian Piper, the uncompromising Berlin-based American artist and philosopher whose work applies the rigorous strictures of conceptual art to questions of race and identity, was awarded a Golden Lion award at the 56th Venice Biennale earlier this month. Piper received the honor for her participation in “All the World’s Futures,” where she showed The Probable…

  • The artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s direct and subtly intellectual approach to unpacking the tangled issues of race, gender, identity, and belonging has inspired a generation of socially-conscious artists across all media, although her impact is just now being fully recognized: she was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best artist at this year’s…

  • Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to…

  • Hairy Paws and Bald Heads: Anxiety and Authority in W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty American Literary Realism Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016 pages 95-111 James Weaver, Assistant Professor of English Denison University, Granville, Ohio Intensely concerned with the cultural and personal implications of miscegenation and its resultant social upheaval, W. D. Howells’ An…

  • Racial Fictions and the Cultural Work of Genre in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars American Literary Realism Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016 pages 128-146 Melissa Asher Rauterkus, Assistant Professor of English University of Alabama, Birmingham I intend to record my impressions of men and things, and such incidents or conversations which…

  • Passing for what you are not—whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women–can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing’s radical playfulness, the…

  • Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race New York University Press April 2014 273 pages 12 halftones Cloth ISBN: 9781479812981 Paper ISBN: 9781479859498 Ellen Samuels, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English University of Wisconsin, Madison In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white,…

  • From Necessity to Possibility: Postmodern and Heideggerian Aspects of Passing and Identity in Early African American Novels From 1853 to 1912 Sage Open October-December 2015 pages 1-15 DOI: 10.1177/2158244015618234 Charles Cullum Department of English Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts This article applies theories of fragmented postmodern identity and Heidegger’s modes of existence and concept of…