Mixed Race Studies

Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Collection of Critical Essays

Edwin Mellen Press
June 2012
308 pages
ISBN10:  0-7734-1601-3; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-1601-7

Edited by:

Michael A. Zeitler, Associate Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

Charlene T. Evans, Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

This book examines significant aspects of President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father both in relation to the African American literary tradition and to the context of the relevant historical and cultural productions that inform it. The authors view the book a work of literature and compare it to other works by black authors such as Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison among others. Some authors contest the idea that the book was written during a pre-political stage in President Obama’s life because it was released to coincide with his first political campaign in Chicago, Illinois in the mid-1990’s. For autobiographical reasons the book is important because it shows various aspects of President Obama’s upbringing, and put in his own words his experience of being black in America. There is also a discussion of why he chose the less Americanized Barack when he went into college, rather than the homogeneous, whitened name Barry, which was the name he preferred in grammar school (out of being teased by other children)—and how he chose this name precisely because it constructed his identity as antithetical to the dominant paradigms of whiteness that he had been confined to while growing up in Hawaii. One article even describes President Obama’s father being ostracized from Kenyan politics after a coup d’etat forced a leader out of power who he had publically supported, which lead the family to America. It also tells the story of a turgid paternal influence on the young Barack Obama, where caught in a vicious cycle of perpetually working for his father’s approval, he spiraled into low self-esteem, which may have fueled his political ambitions later in life (as overcompensation for a lack of fatherly approval).

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Molefi Kete Asantei
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction / Michael A. Zeitler
• A Knot to Bind Our Experiences Together: Storytelling in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Critical Race Theory / Erin Ponton Fiero
• No Apology for the Show: Performance and Oratorical Self-Creation in Obama, Douglass, and Ellison / Granville Ganter
• Slumming and Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / David Mastey
• In Search of My Father’s Garden: Kenya as the Focal Point for the Study of a New Kind of Narrative in African American Autobiography / Claire Joly
• An Image of Africa: Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Rewriting of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ / Michael Zeitler
• Obama, Ellison, and the Search for Identity / Rita Saylors
• Voices of His Mothers: Feminist Interventions and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Letizia Guglielmo
• Queer Coherence: Loss and Hybridity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Patricia Harris Gillies
• The Search for Race and Masculine Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Dolores Sisco
• Beyond Race: Racial Transcendence in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Charlene T. Evans
• Glorious Burdens: A Lacanian Reading of Racial Passing, Inheritance, and Paternal Desire in Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Nicholas Powers

Barack Obama’s Improbable Election and the Question of Race and Racism in Contemporary America

Journal of Black Studies
January 2010
Volume 40, No. 3

Guest Editor
Pamela D. Reed, Assistant Professor of English Composition and Africana Literature
Virginia State University

The Journal of Black Studies has now issued two special issues on President Barack Hussein Obama. “The Barack Obama Phenomenon” (Mazama, 2007) examines the historic candidacy of the then Illinois Senator. The present issue explores Obama’s nascent presidency and matters of race and racism, both in the run-up to and in the wake of his landmark victory.

Try as one might, it is not possible to minimize the centrality of race in all areas of American life, even now. Indeed, since the inception of the American republic, built on the backs of enslaved Africans, race and color have been the ultimate determinants of socioeconomic status. For over four centuries, dating from around the mid-15th century, millions of Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and scores of them were brought to the United States, where their forced labor provided the engine for the American capitalist machine…

…Whatever the case, W. E. B. Du Bois’s prescient statement (1903) regarding the problem of the color line in the 20th century is no less true today—even as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. Be that as it may, Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of these United States. As a result, scholars will undoubtedly dissect his election and his presidency for the foreseeable future. We begin that process herein.

Table of Conents

• Pamela D. Reed – Introduction: Barack Obama’s Improbable Election and the Question of Race and Racism in Contemporary America. pp. 373-379.
• Philip S. S. Howard – Turning Out the Center: Racial Politics and African Agency in the Obama Era. 380-394.
• Christopher J. Metzler – Barack Obama’s Faustian Bargain and the Fight for America’s Racial Soul. pp. 395-410.
• Martell Teasley and David Ikard – Barack Obama and the Politics of Race: The Myth of Postracism in America. pp. 411-425.
• Thomas Edge – Southern Strategy 2.0: Conservatives, White Voters, and the Election of Barack Obama. pp. 426-444.
• Felix Germain – “Presidents of Color,” Globalization, and Social Inequality. pp. 445-461.
• Pearl K. Ford, Tekla A. Johnson, and Angie Maxwell – “Yes We Can” or “Yes We Did”?: Prospective and Retrospective Change in the Obama Presidency. pp. 462-483.
• David Mastey – Slumming and/as Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. pp. 484-501.

 
Read the entire introduction here.