{"id":58266,"date":"2019-06-03T17:58:34","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58266"},"modified":"2019-06-03T17:58:34","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:58:34","slug":"coloring-locals-racial-formation-in-kate-chopins-youths-companion-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58266","title":{"rendered":"Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s “Youth’s Companion” Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s “Youth’s Companion” Stories<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

University of Iowa Press<\/a>
\n2003
\n168 pages
\n7 drawings, references, index
\nCloth ISBN: 9780877458289
\neBook ISBN: 9781587294280<\/p>\n

Bonnie James Shaker<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of English
\nKent State University Geauga, Burton, Ohio<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Coloring Locals<\/em> examines how the late nineteenth-century politics of gender, class, race, and ethnicity influenced Kate Chopin’s<\/a> writing for the major family periodical of her time.<\/p>\n

Chopin’s canonical status as a feminist rebel and reformer conflicts with the fact that one of her most supportive publishers throughout her life was the Youth’s Companion<\/em><\/a>, a juvenile periodical whose thoroughly orthodox \u201cfamily values\u201d contributed to its success as the longest-running and, at one time, most widely circulating periodical in nineteenth-century America<\/a>. Not surprisingly, Chopin\u2019s Youth\u2019s Companion<\/em> stories differ from her canonical texts in that they embrace and advance ideals of orthodox white femininity and masculinity. Rather than viewing these two representations as being at odds with each other, Bonnie Shaker asserts that Chopin’s endorsement of conventional gender norms is done in the service of a second political agenda beyond her feminism, one that can help the reader appreciate nuances of identity construction previously misunderstood or overlooked in the body of her work.<\/p>\n

Shaker articulates this second agenda as \u201cthe discursive act of coloring locals,\u201d the narrative construction of racial difference for Louisiana<\/a> peoples of African American, Native American, and French American ancestry. For Chopin, \u201ccoloring locals\u201d meant transforming non-Louisianans\u2019 general understanding of the Creole and Cajun as mixed-race people into \u201cpurely\u201d white folks, this designation of whiteness being one that conferred not only social preferment but also political protections and enfranchisement in one of the most racially violent decades of U.S.<\/a> history. Thus, when Chopin is concerned with coloring her beloved Louisiana Creoles<\/a> and Cajuns<\/a> \u201cwhite,\u201d she strategically deploys conventional femininity for the benefits it affords as a sign of middle-class respectability and belonging.<\/p>\n

Making significant contributions both to the scholarship on Kate Chopin and on race and gender construction, this sophisticated study will be of great interest to scholars and students of nineteenth-century ethnic and cultural studies as well as Chopin scholars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Coloring Locals” examines how the late nineteenth-century politics of gender, class, race, and ethnicity influenced Kate Chopin’s writing for the major family periodical of her time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1196,369,17,20],"tags":[29898,29896,29899,483,2193,29897],"class_list":["post-58266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literary-criticism","category-louisiana","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-bonnie-j-shaker","tag-bonnie-james-shaker","tag-bonnie-shaker","tag-kate-chopin","tag-university-of-iowa-press","tag-youths-companion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58268,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58266\/revisions\/58268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}