Racism And Xenophobia In Early Twentieth Century American Fiction

Author : Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000328189

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Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Wisam Abughosh Chaleila Pdf

"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

Author : Lisa Woolfork
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : American literature
ISBN : WISC:89077532190

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Trauma and Racial Difference in Twentieth-century American Literature by Lisa Woolfork Pdf

Author : Shelly Brivic
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2015-10-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780807162286

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Tears of Rage by Shelly Brivic Pdf

In this provocative study, Shelly Brivic presents the history of the twentieth-century American novel as a continuous narrative dialogue between white and black voices. Exploring four of the most renowned and challenging works written between 1930 and 1990 -- William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Richard Wright's Native Son, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- Brivic traces how these works progress through the interaction of white and black perspectives toward confronting the calamity of slavery and its reverberating aftermath and continuing legacy. Brivic shows how one novel leads ineluctably to the next and how the four works in a sense form one continuous narrative: with Faulkner's attack on the racial system in Absalom, Absalom! in the 1930s, a literary space opened for Wright's devastating novel of protest. Through the character of Bigger Thomas, Wright's Native Son exposes a virtually incurable division in American ideologies, which leads to the multiplying perspectives of postmodernism in Pynchon's V. Arriving at the crest of the civil rights movement, V. questions Western systems of control, laying a foundation for a world outside the white one, and so providing a basis for the African view of reality presented in Morrison's Beloved. The emergence of African consciousness in American literature exemplified across these works has had, and continues to have, Brivic concludes, the potential not only to redress ongoing injustices but to bring about a new conception of the American universe and its laws of reality. Striking in both the selection of novels and the connections Brivic draws among them, Tears of Rage advances understanding of the destructive nature of racism and the possibilities for overcoming its effects through literature.

Author : Erika Lee
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2019-11-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781541672598

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America for Americans by Erika Lee Pdf

This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist). The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an epilogue reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.

Author : Gale Research Company
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Literature, Modern
ISBN : UOM:39015066115299

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Twentieth-century Literary Criticism by Gale Research Company Pdf

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.

Author : Francisco Bethencourt
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2015-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691169750

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Racisms by Francisco Bethencourt Pdf

A groundbreaking history of racism Racisms is the first comprehensive history of racism, from the Crusades to the twentieth century. Demonstrating that there is not one continuous tradition of racism, Francisco Bethencourt shows that racism preceded any theories of race and must be viewed within the prism and context of social hierarchies and local conditions. In this richly illustrated book, Bethencourt argues that in its various aspects, all racism has been triggered by political projects monopolizing specific economic and social resources. Racisms focuses on the Western world, but opens comparative views on ethnic discrimination and segregation in Asia and Africa. Bethencourt looks at different forms of racism, and explores instances of enslavement, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing, while analyzing how practices of discrimination and segregation were defended. This is a major interdisciplinary work that moves away from ideas of linear or innate racism and recasts our understanding of interethnic relations.

Author : Cathy Boeckmann
Publisher : American Literary Realism and
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 081735297X

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A Question of Character by Cathy Boeckmann Pdf

Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America. In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well. Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson--each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white--Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.

Author : Catherine Jurca
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2001-03-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691057354

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White Diaspora by Catherine Jurca Pdf

In novels as disparate as Tarzan (written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright's Native Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 620 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Academic libraries
ISBN : UCSC:32106017987774

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Choice by Anonim Pdf

Author : Cornell University
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 558 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : Universities and colleges
ISBN : CORNELL:31924058982749

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Cornell University Courses of Study by Cornell University Pdf

Author : Shawn Salvant
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2015-01-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780807157848

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Blood Work by Shawn Salvant Pdf

The invocation of blood-as both an image and a concept-has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans. Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner's Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots-real and literary-of racial identity.

Author : Pamela Susan Nadell,Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015050773830

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Women and American Judaism by Pamela Susan Nadell,Jonathan D. Sarna Pdf

New portrayals of the religious lives of American Jewish women from colonial times to the present.

Author : Lothrop Stoddard
Publisher : DigiCat
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2022-11-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : EAN:8596547387893

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The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard Pdf

Racial divide in America is hinged upon the precarious relations between the two communities—the dominant Whites American and the marginalised Black Americans. Behind every push-back against the Blacks, even after five decades of Civil Rights Movement, is an unshakeable belief in the idea White Supremacy. Read this book to understand why the Black Americans are indignant, angry and raring to dismantle the structures of epistemic racism. This book is adjusted for readability on all devices and follows the perceived threat of White Supremacists against the growing power of the "coloured people." In the current scenarios it has assumed a historic significance in understanding the White mentality and their long-held fears.

Author : Martin Japtok
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2005-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015060841411

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Growing Up Ethnic by Martin Japtok Pdf

Growing Up Ethnic examines the presence of literary similarities between African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories in the first half of the twentieth century; often these similarities exceed what could be explained by sociohistorical correspondences alone. Martin Japtok argues that these similarities result from the way both African American and Jewish American authors have conceptualized their "ethnic situation." The issue of "race" and its social repercussions certainly defy any easy comparisons. However, the fact that the ethnic situations are far from identical in the case of these two groups only highlights the striking thematic correspondences in how a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories construct ethnicity. Japtok studies three pairs of novels--James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Edna Ferber's Fanny Herself, and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Giver--and argues that the similarities can be explained with reference to mainly two factors, ultimately intertwined: cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman genre. Growing Up Ethnic shows that the parallel configurations in the novels, which often see ethnicity in terms of spirituality, as inherent artistic ability, and as communal responsibility, are rooted in nationalist ideology. However, due to the authors' generic choice--the Bildungsroman--the tendency to view ethnicity through the rhetorical lens of communalism and spiritual essence runs head-on into the individualist assumptions of the protagonist-centered Bildungsroman. The negotiations between these ideological counterpoints characterize the novels and reflect and refract the intellectual ferment of their time. This fresh look at ethnic American literatures in the context of cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary and race studies.

Author : Helen Young
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317532170

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Race and Popular Fantasy Literature by Helen Young Pdf

This book illuminates the racialized nature of twenty-first century Western popular culture by exploring how discourses of race circulate in the Fantasy genre. It examines not only major texts in the genre, but also the impact of franchises, industry, editorial and authorial practices, and fan engagements on race and representation. Approaching Fantasy as a significant element of popular culture, it visits the struggles over race, racism, and white privilege that are enacted within creative works across media and the communities which revolve around them. While scholars of Science Fiction have explored the genre’s racialized constructs of possible futures, this book is the first examination of Fantasy to take up the topic of race in depth. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, drawing on Literary, Cultural, Fan, and Whiteness Studies, offers a cultural history of the anxieties which haunt Western popular culture in a century eager to declare itself post-race. The beginnings of the Fantasy genre’s habits of whiteness in the twentieth century are examined, with an exploration of the continuing impact of older problematic works through franchising, adaptation, and imitation. Young also discusses the major twenty-first century sub-genres which both re-use and subvert Fantasy conventions. The final chapter explores debates and anti-racist praxis in authorial and fan communities. With its multi-pronged approach and innovative methodology, this book is an important and original contribution to studies of race, Fantasy, and twenty-first century popular culture.