Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, Hybridity in American Texts (American Ethnic and Cultural Studies) (Hardcover)

by David S. Goldstein (Editor), Audrey B. Thacker (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review
“This volume approaches traumas, conundrums, and opportunities of American hybridity from fresh angles. The writing is clear and the scholarship is alert and serious about its mission: to honestly confront America's racist history and practices and to understand the evolving complexity of American life and letters as fully and carefully as possible.”-John Whalen-Bridge, author of Political Fiction and the American Self

“The essays in this volume achieve much that is original in the field: they raise provocative challenges to prevalent theoretical paradigms (e.g., whiteness theory, double-consciousness, models of immigration); they examine a broad range of canonical and obscure, high-literary and popular texts across historical periods; and they draw attention to the ways in which race and ethnicity are fluid, dynamic, contested, and historically malleable constructs.”-Madhu Dubey, author of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism

Product Description
This volume of collected essays is an important contribution to contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, offering truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors-from Toni Morrison and James Weldon Johnson to Bret Harte and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton-these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures. Through these inventive close readings, the authors also intervene in a more theoretical register, providing a “re-viewing” of the conceptual touchstones of ethnic studies. With topics ranging from whiteness theory and Du Boisian double-consciousness to hybridity and postcolonial national sovereignty, the essays reassess the possibilities and limitations of these concepts for understanding the ways in which identity is constructed and experienced. American Hybridity is itself representative of the kind of fluid boundaries of scholarship essential to understanding race and ethnicity in the United States. It will be of special value to readers interested in ethnic and American studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. Contributors include Jesse Alemán, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and José L. Torres-Padilla.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press (June 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295986816
• ISBN-13: 978-0295986814
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,127,835 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)