Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature PDF

Author: Silvia Schultermandl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-16

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1000390985

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Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures

Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures PDF

Author: Silvia Schultermandl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1000363120

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This edited collection applies kinship as an analytical concept to better understand the affective economies, discursive practices, and aesthetic dimensions through which cultural narratives of belonging establish a sense of intimacy and affiliation. In North American and European ethnic literatures, kinship has several social functions: negotiating diasporic belonging in and outside of the perimeters of bloodlines and genealogy; positioning queer-feminist interventions to counter ethno-nationalist narratives of belonging; challenging liberal sentimentalist narratives, such as those grafted onto the bodies of transnational adoptees; re-formulating cultural heterogeneity through interracial and interethnic kinship constellations outside either post-racial assumptions about colorblindness or celebrations of racial and ethnic pluralism. In all of these cases, kinship features as a common theme through which contemporary authors attend to challenges of conscribing individuals into inclusive, counter-hegemonic cultural narratives of belonging.

Beat Feminisms

Beat Feminisms PDF

Author: Polina Mackay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-20

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1000509885

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This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

Affective Worldmaking

Affective Worldmaking PDF

Author: Silvia Schultermandl

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 3839461413

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What makes up a public, what governs dominant discourses, and in which ways can counterpublics be created through narrative? This edited collection brings together essays on affect and narrative theory with a focus on the topics of gender and sexuality. It explores the power of narrative in literature, film, art, performance, and mass media, the construction of subjectivities of gender and sexuality, and the role of affect in times of crisis. By combining theoretical, literary, and analytical texts, the contributors offer methodological impulses and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of affect theory in cultural studies.

Spain, the United States, and Transatlantic Literary Culture throughout the Nineteenth Century

Spain, the United States, and Transatlantic Literary Culture throughout the Nineteenth Century PDF

Author: John C. Havard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1000461483

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The relationship between the United States and Spain evolved rapidly over the course of the nineteenth century, culminating in hostility during the Spanish–American War. However, scholarship on literary connections between the two nations has been limited aside from a few studies of the small coterie of Hispanists typically conceived as the canon in this area. This volume collects essays that push the study of transatlantic connections between U.S. and Spanish literatures in new directions. The contributors represent an interdisciplinary group including scholars of national literatures, national histories, and comparative literature. Their works explore previously understudied authors as well as understudied works by better-known authors. They use these new archives to present canonical works in new lights. Moreover, they explore organic entanglements between the literary traditions, and how those raditions interface with Latinx literary history.

Reading Together, Reading Apart

Reading Together, Reading Apart PDF

Author: Tamara Bhalla

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-10-17

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0252098927

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Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation--and serves as an expression of a sense of belonging--within the South Asian diaspora in the United States. Tamara Bhalla blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. Her fascinating investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace and social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout, Bhalla questions how her subjects' circumstances, shared race and class, and desires limit the values they ascribe to reading. She also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians' powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature PDF

Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1317818202

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This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Transnational Matrilineage

Transnational Matrilineage PDF

Author: Silvia Schultermandl

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 3825812626

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Transnational Matrilineage offers a novel approach to Asian American literature, including texts by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Mei Ng, Nora Okja Keller and Vineeta Vijayaragahavan, with particular attention to depictions of transnational solidarity (that is the sense of community between women of different cultures or cultural affiliations) between Asian-born mothers and their American-born daughters. While focusing on the mother-daughter conflicts these texts portray, this book also contributes to ongoing debates in transnational feminism by scrutinizing the representation of Asia in Asian American literature.

Contemporary Arab-American Literature

Contemporary Arab-American Literature PDF

Author: Carol Fadda-Conrey

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-05-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1479826677

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The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

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