Confronting Visuality In Multi Ethnic Womens Writing

Considering new perspectives on writers such as Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, Confronting Visuality in Multi-ethnic Women's Writing traces a cross-cultural tradition in which contemporary female writers situate images of women within larger contexts of visuality.

Considering new perspectives on writers such as Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, Confronting Visuality in Multi-ethnic Women's Writing traces a cross-cultural tradition in which contemporary female writers situate images of women within larger contexts of visuality.

Redrawing the Historical Past examines how multiethnic graphic novels portray and revise U.S. history. This is the first collection to focus exclusively on the interplay of history and memory in multiethnic graphic novels. Such interplay enables a new understanding of the past. The twelve essays explore Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica, Scott McCloud’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, Art Spiegelman’s post-Maus work, and G. Neri and Randy DuBurke’s Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, among many others. The collection represents an original body of criticism about recently published works that have received scant scholarly attention. The chapters confront issues of history and memory in contemporary multiethnic graphic novels, employing diverse methodologies and approaches while adhering to three main guidelines. First, using a global lens, contributors reconsider the concept of history and how it is manifest in their chosen texts. Second, contributors consider the ways in which graphic novels, as a distinct genre, can formally renovate or intervene in notions of the historical past. Third, contributors take seriously the possibilities and limitations of these historical revisions with regard to envisioning new, different, or even more positive versions of both the present and future. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that graphic novelists use the open and flexible space of the graphic narrative page—in which readers can move not only forward but also backward, upward, downward, and in several other directions—to present history as an open realm of struggle that is continually being revised. Contributors: Frederick Luis Aldama, Julie Buckner Armstrong, Katharine Capshaw, Monica Chiu, Jennifer Glaser, Taylor Hagood, Caroline Kyungah Hong, Angela Lafien, Catherine H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Jorge Santos.

Journeys Exposed: Women's Writing, Photography, and Mobility examines contemporary literature written by women that are all in different ways related to Italy. It argues that photography provides women with a means to expose aspects of their nomadic self and of the others’ mobile lives within and beyond the writing process. By resorting to the visual, women individualistically respond to forms of hegemonic power, fragmentation, displacement, loss and marginality, and make these experiences key to their creative production.

Native American literature has always been uniquely embattled. It is marked by divergent opinions about what constitutes authenticity, sovereignty, and even literature. It announces a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel. Its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet external and internal expectations. This Cambridge History endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: “Traces & Removals” (pre-1870s); “Assimilation and Modernity” (1879-1967); “Native American Renaissance” (post-1960s); and “Visions & Revisions” (21st century). These rubrics highlight how Native literatures have evolved alongside major transitions in federal policy toward the Indian, and via contact with broader cultural phenomena such, as the American Civil Rights movement. There is a balance between a history of canonical authors and traditions, introducing less-studied works and themes, and foregrounding critical discussions, approaches, and controversies.

Teaching any subject in a digital venue must be more than simply an upload of the face-to-face classroom and requires more flexibility than the typical learning management system affords. Applied Pedagogies examines the pedagogical practices employed by successful writing instructors in digital classrooms at a variety of institutions and provides research-grounded approaches to online writing instruction. This is a practical text, providing ways to employ the best instructional strategies possible for today’s diverse and dynamic digital writing courses. Organized into three sections—Course Conceptualization and Support, Fostering Student Engagement, and MOOCs—chapters explore principles of rhetorically savvy writing crossed with examples of effective digital teaching contexts and genres of digital text. Contributors consider not only pedagogy but also the demographics of online students and the special constraints of the online environments for common writing assignments. The scope of online learning and its place within higher education is continually evolving. Applied Pedagogies offers tools for the online writing classrooms of today and anticipates the needs of students in digital contexts yet to come. This book is a valuable resource for established and emerging writing instructors as they continue to transition to the digital learning environment. Contributors: Kristine L. Blair, Jessie C. Borgman, Mary-Lynn Chambers, Katherine Ericsson, Chris Friend, Tamara Girardi, Heidi Skurat Harris, Kimberley M. Holloway, Angela Laflen, Leni Marshall, Sean Michael Morris, Danielle Nielsen, Dani Nier-Weber, Daniel Ruefman, Abigail G. Scheg, Jesse Stommel

Hybrid narrative forms are used frequently by authors exploring or living in multicultural societies as a method of reflecting multicultural lives. This timely book examines this rhetorical strategy, which permits an author to bridge cultures via literary technique. Strategies covered include multilingualism, magical realism, ironic humor, the use of mythological figures from the characters' heritage cultures, and the presentation of different perspectives on landscapes and other spaces as related to ethnicity. By investigating elements of ethnic literature comparatively, this book reaches beyond the boundaries of any one ethnic group, a vital quality in today's world.

Efforts at diversifying and pluralizing curricula in English departments have been under way long enough for many to realize that simply adding a few texts by writers historically omitted will not promote truly broadened learning. A course on "minority literature" (Native-American, Asian-American, African American, and Hispanic) for the Women's Studies Department at the University of Minnesota proved to be a pedagogical experiment as well as an opportunity to teach fiction by nonwhite women. The class was divided into four families, or small research teams, each responsible for reporting to the entire class on one aspect of culture for three of the units. The four areas of culture chosen for study were music, visual arts, mythology/religion/spirituality, and family and state structure/governance. One of the highlights of the reports was their diversity of format. Writing assignments were the other major component of the course. The assumption behind all writing assignments was that for white students to interact with literature written by "nonwhite" authors requires a new set of critical criteria and modes for analyzing and discussing texts. It was essential to break down defenses, especially well learned by honors students, thereby enabling them to make often painful connections between text and self. The assignments were centered around a series of open-ended responses to questionnaires and reflections and responses in student journals. The course was a major success, though future courses of this type would probably concentrate on two rather than three cultures because of the restraints of time. (Appendixes include a student questionnaire, journal guidelines, and writing assignments.) (TB)

"This collection brings together an international, multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in different media seeking to question and re-theorize the contested terms of our title: "woman," "writing," "women’s writing" and "across." "Culture" is translated into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. How might one write across national cultures; or across a national and a minority culture; or across disciplines, genres and media; or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power; or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses? The collection explores and develops recent feminist, queer and transgender theory and criticism, and also aesthetic practice. "Writing across" assumes a number of orientations: posthumanist; transtemporal; transnationalist; writing across discourses, disciplines, media, genres, genders; writing across pronouns – he, she, they; writing across literature, non-literary texts and life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki."--Provided by publisher.

Does literature serve a humanizing function? Can it achieve social transformation? What roles does literature play for defining self, creating community, and achieving global perspective? This is the first book to thoroughly explore the methods by which educators, creative writers, and policymakers have constructed workable models of teaching literature in multicultural classrooms. The authors provide an interdisciplinary dialogue on the setbacks, solutions, silences, and successes that often occur in classes of multicultural literature. They all take the stance that definitions of literacy and literature originate as much outside the classroom as within it. With the inclusion of essays by writers themselves--a feature provided by no other book on this subject--the authors offer a unique vocalization of the nationalistic, economic, empowering, and moral purposes that reading and writing serve. The book also includes a current guide to selected resources in multicultural literature, in hopes of encouraging and facilitating instructors in the transformation of their own literature courses into multicultural ones.