Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • A Mestiza in the Borderlands: Margarita Cota-Cárdenas Puppet Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies Volume 34, Number 1 (June 2012) pages 47-62 Ana María Manzanas Calvo Department of American Literature and Culture Universidad de Salamanca, Spain The article explores the formal and conceptual complexities of a novella that has so far escaped…

  • Vincent van Gogh and Barack Obama in a poem by Derek Walcott Literature & Aesthetics Volume 20, Number 2 (December 2010) pages 181-192 Thijs Weststeijn Department of Art, Religion, and Cultural Sciences University of Amsterdam Remember Vincent, saint of all sunstroke…! The sun explodes into irises, the shadows are crossing like crows, they settle, clawing…

  • Making and Unmaking Whiteness in Early New South Fiction After the Civil War Smashwords 2012-06-06 77 pages (21,670 words) eBook ISBN: 9781476497068 Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania This essay—a work of literary criticism and critical race studies written to be accessible to non-specialists—examines how popular fiction…

  • English 49, “Whiteness” and Racial Difference Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Spring 1997 Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature A look at the conflicted ways in which “racial” identities and differences have been constructed in past and contemporary cultures, especially in the U.S. Topics given emphasis in the syllabus include why saying…

  • EN-255 Passing Narratives Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania Fall Semester Passing narratives investigate how the boundaries of identity can be reimagined. Most often depicting racial passing (when a person “passes for” someone of another race), these narratives also can be about performing another gender or sexual identity. In this course, we will examine a variety of…

  • Ming Wong’s Imitations Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World Volume 9, Number 2 (2014) Special Topic: Contemporary Remediations of Race and Ethnicity in German Visual Cultures 32 pages Barbara Mennel, Associate Professor of English University of Florida The article “Ming Wong’s Imitations” analyzes the installation Life of Imitation, created…

  • Here, There, and In Between: Travel as Metaphor in Mixed Race Narratives of the Harlem Renaissance University of Massachusetts, Amherst 2014-05-09 Colin Enriquez English Department Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than…

  • Transforming Three Sisters: A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Modern Classic Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature pages 130-146 Elizabeth Liang “All right, let’s agree that this town is backward and vulgar, and let’s suppose now that out of all its thousands of  inhabitants there are…

  • In 1963, James Baldwin wrote two essays that examined the role of race and racism in the history of America. Published in The New Yorker, Baldwin’s first essay, written in the form of a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation explained “the crux of [his] dispute with [his] country”…

  • Photography in Economies of Demonstration: The Idea of the Jews as a Mixed-Race People Jewish Social Studies Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2013 pages 150-183 DOI: 10.1353/jss.2013.0015 Amos Morris-Reich, Director of the Bucerius Institute Department of Jewish History University of Haifa, Israel Photographs played an important role in the development of the idea of the…