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.

Minorities--United States--Intellectual life.

Minorities.

Human skin color--Psychological aspects.

Human skin color.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Human skin color in literature.

Group identity in literature.

Ethnic groups in literature.

Minorities in literature.

Ethnicity in literature.

White people in literature.

White in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Denying its formative dialogues with minorities, the white race, Stephen P. Knadler contends, has been a fugitive race. While the "white question," like the "Negro question," and the "woman question" a century earlier, has garnered considerable critical attention among scholars looking to find new anti-race strategies, these investigations need to highlight not just the exclusion of people of color, but also examine minority writers' resistance to and disruption of this privileged racial category. "Highly original, wonderfully detailed, and thought provoking," says Professor Candace Waid of Knadler's intellectually challenging book. 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 nonfictional 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 so-called 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, Young-hill 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. Stephen P. Knadler, an assistant professor of English at Spelman College, has been published in American Literature , American Literary History , American Quarterly , Minnesota Review , and Modern Fiction Studies.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright page

Contents

Introduction: "Fugitive Race" Culture

The Fugitive Race

1. Narrative Interruptions of Panic

2. Miscegenated Whiteness

3. "Corporeal Suspicion"

4. Unacquiring Negrophobia

5. Dis-integrating Third Spaces

6. White Dissolution

7. Queer Aztlan, Mestizing "White" Queer Theory

Coda: Anti-Racist Apartheid

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Footnote

ch05fn1.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

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

ISBN:

1-283-21038-X

9786613210388

1-60473-040-4

1-4175-0698-9

OCLC:

614929068