Literature And Racial Ambiguity

Two Huron U. College English professors introduce 14 essays reading literary explorations of how the "hybridity" (per black- white Scottish writer Jackie Kay) of mixed race permutations subvert established racial categories and racist assumptions. Readings include: Nella Larsen's Passing, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Mourning Dove's Cogewea: The Half-Blood, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Adib Kalim's Seasonal Adjustments. Lacks an index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What happens to a country that was built on race when the boundaries of black and white have started to fade? Not only is the literal face of America changing where white will no longer be the majority, but the belief in the firmness of these categories and the boundaries that have been drawn is also disintegrating. In a nuanced reading of culture in a post Obama America, this book asks what will become of the racial categories of black and white in an increasingly multi-ethnic, racially ambiguous, and culturally fluid country. Through readings of sites of cultural friction such as the media frenzy around ‘transracial’ Rachel Dolezal, the new popularity of racially ambiguous dolls, and the confusion over Obama’s race, Fading Out Black and White explores the contemporary construction of race. This insightful, provocative glimpse at identity formation in the US reviews the new frontier of race and looks back at the archaism of the one-drop rule that is unique to America.

The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications. Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.

By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic? The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies.

An original contribution to political theory and cultural studies this work argues for a reinterpretation of how race is described in US society. By developing a new way to critically study how race persists in dominating society, the book provides readers with an understanding of how race is socially constructed today, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of political theory, American politics and race & ethnic politics

DIVA study on being Black and Jewish in the United States. Author discusses bi-racialism and how and why African-Americans of Jewish descent identify themselves with other groups who have had a history of legal, political and racial discrimination, such as/div

Grounded in ethnography, this monograph explores the ambiguity of English as a lingua franca by focusing on identity politics of language and race in contemporary South Africa. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach which highlights how ways of speaking English constructs identities in a multilingual context. Focusing primarily on isiZulu and Afrikaans speakers, it raises critical questions around power and ideology. The study draws from literature on English as a lingua franca, raciolinguistics, and the cultural politics of English and dialogues between these fields. It challenges long-held concepts underpinning existing research from the global North by highlighting how they do not transfer and apply to identity politics of language in South Africa. It sketches out how these struggles for belonging are reflected in marginalisation and empowerment and a vast range of local, global and glocal identity trajectories. Ultimately, it offers a first lens through which global scholarship on English as a lingua franca can be decolonised in terms of disciplinary limitations, geopolitical orientations and a focus on the politics of race that characterize the use of English as a lingua franca all over the world. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, World Englishes, ELF and African studies.