Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature

by Singh, Amritjit; Schmidt, Peter; Buell, Lawrence; Sander, Rhonda Cobham; Flores, Juan; Henderson, Mae G.

• ISBN13: 9781578062515
• ISBN10: 1578062519
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

Probing essays that examine critical issues surrounding the United States's ever-expanding international cultural identity in the postcolonial eraDownload Plain Text versionAt the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may be in a "transnational" moment, increasingly aware of the ways in which local and national narratives, in literature and elsewhere, cannot be conceived apart from a radically new sense of shared human histories and global interdependence. To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries.Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in U.S. culture have provided some of the most innova-tive and controversial contributions to recent scholarship.Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literaturerepresents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale.This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here.These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today.The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in U.S. ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.Amritjit Singh, a professor of English and African American studies at Rhode Island College, is coeditor ofConversations with Ralph EllisonandConversations with Ishmael Reed(both from University Press of Mississippi). Peter Schmidt, a professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the author ofThe Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction(University Press of Mississippi).

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	xi
I: Identities, Margins, and Borders
On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory 3
Amrjit Singh
Peter Schmidt
II: Identities, Margins, and Borders
Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature	73	(22)
Arnold Krupat
``Where, By the Way, Is This Train Going?'': A Case for Black (Cultural) Studies	95	(8)
Mae G. Henderson
Refiguring Aztlan	103	(19)
Rafael Perez-Torres
Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads	122	(29)
Sau-ling C. Wong
Historical Configurations
Indian Literacy, U.S. Colonialism, and Literary Criticism	151	(25)
Maureen Konkle
Capitalism, Black (Under) development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s	176	(20)
Carla L. Peterson
Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Literature	196	(24)
Lawrence Buell
Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s	220	(24)
Amy Kaplan
Neither Fish, Flesh, Nor Fowl: Race and Region in the Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt	244	(14)
Anne Fleischmann
Postcolonialism after W. E. B. Du Bois	258	(21)
Kenneth Mostern
Contemporary Contestations
How (!) Is an Indian? A Contest of Stories, Round 2	279	(21)
Jana Sequoya Magdaleno
Revisioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Caribbean Women's Texts	300	(20)
Rhonda Cobbam
Arab-Americans and the Meanings of Race	320	(18)
Lisa Subair Majaj
Broken English Memories: Languages of the Trans-Colony	338	(11)
Juan Flores
``Born-Again Filipino'': Filipino American Identity and Asian Panethnicity	349	(21)
Leny Mendoza Strobel
South Asian American Literature: ``Off the Turnpike'' of Asian America	370	(18)
Lavina Dhingra Shankar
Rajini Srikanth
Can You Go Home Again?: Transgression and Transformation in African-American Women's and Chicana Literary Practice	388	(24)
Ines Salazar
Hybridity in the Americas: Reading Conde, Mukherjee, and Hawthorne	412	(33)
Bruce Simon
Contributors	445	(6)
Name Index	451	(14)
Subject Index	465