Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • “Passing” and the American dream Salon Magazine 2003-11-03 Baz Dreisinger These days we’re supposed to think race doesn’t matter. But as “The Human Stain” and a raft of recent writing makes clear, we’re just as fascinated by its slippery boundaries as ever. Every now and then, cultural and social critics fashion an axiom that’s flippant,…

  • ENGL 773 (or) ENGL 873: Topics in Minority Literature: (W)Rites of Passing: Narratives of Shifting African American Identities Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania Fall 2012 Veronica Watson, Associate Professor of English “Passing” is a term that has, until quite recently, been used to refer almost exclusively to a person classified by society as a…

  • Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 1990 DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1034 pages 523-529 Mark J. Madigan, Professor / Fulbright Program Advisor in English Nazareth College, Rochester, New York The 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen’s two novels,…

  • IRISH-GA 1085: Black Irish Writing Gluckman Ireland House New York University Spring 2010 This course examines the textual force-fields of similarity and difference in the writing of racial and ethnic identities in the Atlantic World.  It begins by considering works of Irish writers who engaged with Atlantic slavery and the sympathetic and testamentary discourses within…

  • White Yet Non-White: Miscegenation in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2007) American Studies Today Online Volume 19, (2012) 2012-05-30 ISSN: 2044-804X Sofia Politidou Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece This article examines the changes in the concept of miscegenation, from the slavery years to the 1960s and the 2000s, as recorded in Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize poetry collection…

  • The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist.

  • This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature Temple University Press November 2010 216 pages 5.5 x 8.5 1 halftone paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-217-2 cloth ISBN: 978-1-43990-216-5 eBook ISBN: 978-1-43990-218-9 Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies (founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).) San Francisco State…

  • Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature European Journal of American Studies 1, 2011, Varia Document 6 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.9232 Daniel Stein Georg-August-Universität Göttingen This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric…

  • Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl: Race and Region in the Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt African American Review Volume 34, Number 3 (Autumn, 2000) pages 461-473 Anne Fleischmann The Supreme Court’s decision in The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case is notorious for having sewn racial segregation into the fabric of American society. One of the…

  • Obama, Zombies, and Black Male Messiahs In Media Res 2009-10-01 Elizabeth McAlister, Associate Professor of Religion, African American Studies and American Studies Wesleyan University Insofar as they occupy the symbolic place of messiah in these zombie apocalypses, it interesting that from Ben in Night, to Peter in Dawn, and John in Day, to Robert Neville…