The fugitive race : minority writers resisting whiteness / Stephen P. Knadler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Knadler, Stephen P., 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Minority authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Minority authors.

Human skin color--Psychological aspects.

Human skin color.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Group identity in literature.

Ethnic groups in literature.

Minorities in literature.

Ethnicity in literature.

White people in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

xxviii, 249 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2002]

Summary:

Stephen P. Knadler adds to the discussion of the "white question" by contending that the white race has been a fugitive one that ignores the need for dialogue with minorities. The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness investigates the creation and perpetration of whiteness, highlighting both the race's exclusion of people of color and minority writers' resistance to this privileged racial category. Although excluded, people of color looked back in anger, laughter, and wisdom to challenge the unexamined lie of a self-evident whiteness. Looking at fictional and non-fictional texts written between 1850 and 1984, The Fugitive Race traces a long cultural and literary history of the ways African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Chicanos, gays, and lesbians have challenged the shape and meaning of socalled white identities. From the antebellum period to the 1980s, the belief in a white racial superiority, or simply a white difference, has denied that people of color might and do have an influence on the supposedly pure or protected character of whiteness. In contrast, this book attempts to define a new way of analyzing minority literature that questions this segregated color line. In addition to creating a new racial awareness, many writers of color tried to interfere in the historical formulation of whiteness. They created unsettling moments when white readers had to see themselves for the first time from the outside-in, or from the critical perspective of non-white writers. These writers -- including William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Abraham Cahan, Younghill Kang, Zora Neale Hurston, and Arturo Islas -- did not simply resist assimilation. They sought to dismantle the white identities that lay as the foundation of the master's house.

Contents:

Introduction: "Fugitive Race" Culture vii

1. Narrative Interruptions of Panic: Reverse Acculturation in the Early African American Fiction of William Wells Brown and Harriet Wilson 3

2. Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing War," and "Female Racism" 31

3. "Corporeal Suspicion" The Missing Crimes of Neoabolitionist Rape Culture in Pauline Hopkins's Detective Histories 59

4. Unacquiring Negrophobia: Younghill Kang and the Cosmopolitan Resistance to the White Logic of Naturalization 85

5. Dis-integrating Third Spaces: The Unrepresented in Abraham Cahan's and Mary Antin's Narratives of Americanization 112

6. White Dissolution: Homosexualization and Racial Masculinity in White Life Novels 144

7. Queer Aztlan, Mestizing "White" Queer Theory: Arturo Islas's The Rain God 176

Coda: Anti-Racist Apartheid 203.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-238) and index.

ISBN:

1578065062

OCLC:

49225401