From shadow to presence : representations of ethnicity in contemporary American literature / Jelena Sesnic.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Šesnić, Jelena.

Series:

Critical approaches to ethnic American literature ; no. 1.

Critical approaches to ethnic American literature ; no. 1

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

Ethnicity in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

data file

Summary:

This volume departs from a more static concept of identity politics to engage the varied and entangled processes of ethnic/racial, national, and gender identifications in a range of contemporary US ethnic texts (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s). Recognizing the growing salience of variously named ethnic, multicultural, and minority literatures as they are produced and circulated in the USA and worldwide nowadays, this work charts four broadly defined models of approaching such texts: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and finally, the diasporic model. Drawing extensively on psychoanalytic theory, feminist/gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and its revision of ethnography, the book offers a fresh, engaged, theoretically, and analytically well-rehearsed overview of the distinctive and determining features of a rapidly expanding domain of contemporary US literary production, namely, ethnic literatures. Of potential interest to scholars of American/US literature, but also minority and postcolonial literatures, and to students of American literature, the book attempts an interethnic comparative approach to well- and lesser-known texts. Among the authors represented are Shawn Wong, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Roberto Fernández and Edwidge Danticat.

Contents:

Preliminary Material / Jelena Šesnić

Acknowledgments / Jelena Šesnić

US ethnic identities from cultural nationalism to trans-nationalism / Jelena Šesnić

Impassioned discourse and “passionate politics”: cultural nationalism and the ethnic revival / Jelena Šesnić

Summoning a new subject: “ethnic feminists” / Jelena Šesnić

Borderlands/contact zones: “reworlding” ethnicity / Jelena Šesnić

Diasporic identities: breaking and re-making ethnicity / Jelena Šesnić

Afterword: the wheel keeps on turning / Jelena Šesnić

Notes / Jelena Šesnić

Bibliography / Jelena Šesnić

Index / Jelena Šesnić.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-273) and index.

ISBN:

94-012-0450-0

1-4356-0076-2

OCLC:

714567348

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401204507 DOI