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Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction
Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-29
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 100032818X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"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.
Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Author: Tyrone R. Simpson II
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2012-01-30
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 113701489X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book explores how six American writers have artistically responded to the racialization of U.S. frostbelt cities in the twentieth century. Using the critical tools of spatial theory, critical race theory, urban history and sociology, Simpson explains how these writers imagine the subjective response to the race-making power of space.
Crossing the Line
Author: Gayle Wald
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2000-07-24
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9780822325154
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →DIVExamines constructions of racial identity through the exploration of passing narratives including Black Like Me and forties jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir Really the Blues./div
Black American Men who Betray Their Race
Author: Gregory Dorian Coleman (Jr.)
Publisher:
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing on literary works by five African-American male authors--Sutton Griggs, Ralph Ellison, Charles Gordone, John Edgar Wideman, and Paul Beatty--my archive provides a diachronic examination of the race traitor to show how his numerous permutations and appearances across periods and genres speak to the ever-shifting politics of black identity. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) brings into focus the intersections between anti-African emigration sentiment and black identity. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) calls attention to the double agency of black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and the subversiveness of their black tokenism. Gordone’s No Place to be Somebody (1969) stages the trauma of being called a race traitor, reminding us that the discourse of Black Power identity, while affirming, is also fraught with psychological danger. Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984) introduces the notion of compartmentalization as the internal process which enables the race traitor to mask his feelings of guilt over his flight from the black community, showing us not only how compartmentalization actually feels, but also how it is undone—how it can actually be healed. And lastly, Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) explores, against a backdrop of the rising black public intellectualism at the close of the 20th century, what it looks like for the race traitor to return home and reassume responsibility for and to black community. Ultimately, Black Men Who Betray Their Race invites us to reconsider Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness from a fresh perspective, enabling us to reflect on the tension between individuality and collectivity as lived, represented, and performed across the 20th century"--Abstract.
Trauma and Race
Author: Sheldon George
Publisher:
Published: 2016-02
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9781602587359
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →African American identity is racialized. And this racialized identity has animated and shaped political resistance to racism. Hidden, though, are the psychological implications of rooting identity in race, especially because American history is inseparable from the trauma of slavery. In Trauma and Race author Sheldon George begins with the fact that African American racial identity is shaped by factors both historical and psychical. Employing the work of Jacques Lacan, George demonstrates how slavery is a psychic event repeated through the agencies of racism and inscribed in racial identity itself. The trauma of this past confronts the psychic lack that African American racial identity both conceals and traumatically unveils for the African American subject. Trauma and Race investigates the vexed, ambivalent attachment of African Americans to their racial identity, exploring the ways in which such attachment is driven by traumatic, psychical urgencies that often compound or even exceed the political exigencies called forth by racism.
"Not Even Past"
Author: Dorothy Stringer
Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is "not even past," narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S. modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster.
Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Author: Christine Grogan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-10-03
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 1611479681
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.
The Racial Shadow in 20th Century American Literature
Author: Julie Schrader Villegas
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 498
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Author: Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2010-12
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780807138175
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of "home" -- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection. While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.
