Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2015-01-23 01:45Z by Steven

Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics

University Press of Mississippi
March 2005
240 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-57806-720-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61703-222-6

Gene H. Bell-Villada, Professor of Romance Languages
Williams College, Williamstown, Pennsylvania

Born in 1941 of a Hawaiian mother and a white father, Gene H. Bell-Villada, grew up an overseas American citizen. An outsider wherever he landed, he never had a ready answer to the innocuous question “Where are you from?”

By the time Bell-Villada was a teenager, he had lived in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Cuba. Though English was his first language, his claim on U.S. citizenship was a hollow one. All he knew of his purported “homeland” was gleaned from imported comic books and movies. He spoke Spanish fluently, but he never fully fit into the culture of the Latin American countries where he grew up.

In childhood, he attended an American Catholic school for Puerto Ricans in San Juan, longing all the while to convert from Episcopalianism so that he could better fit in. Later at a Cuban military school during the height of the Batista dictatorship, he witnessed fervent political debates among the cadets about Fidel Castro’s nascent revolution and U.S. foreign policy. His times at the American School in Caracas, Venezuela, are tinged with reminiscences of oil booms and fights between U.S. and Venezuelan teen gangs.

When Bell-Villada finally comes to the United States to stay, he finds himself just as rootless as before, moving from New Mexico to Arizona to California to Massachusetts in quick succession. His accounts of life on the campuses of Berkeley and Harvard during the tumultuous 1960s reveal much about the country’s climate during the Cold War era.

Eventually the “Gringo” comes home, finding the stability in his marriage and career that allows him to work through and proudly claim his identity as a “global nomad.”

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Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union

Posted in Anthologies, Barack Obama, Books, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2014-07-25 04:22Z by Steven

Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union

University Press of Mississippi
2014-07-17
432 pages
6 X 9 inches
3 B&W photographs
Hardcover ISBN: 9781628460216

Edited by:

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer of African American History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Essays that explore how the first black president connects to the past and reimagines national racial and political horizons

The concept of a more perfect union remains a constant theme in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama. From his now historic race speech to his second victory speech delivered on November 7, 2012, that striving is evident. “Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward,” stated the forty-fourth president of the United States upon securing a second term in office after a hard fought political contest. Obama borrows this rhetoric from the founding documents of the United States set forth in the U.S. Constitution and in Abraham Lincoln’sGettysburg Address.”

How naive or realistic is Obama’s vision of a more perfect American union that brings together people across racial, class, and political lines? How can this vision of a more inclusive America be realized in a society that remains racist at its core? These essays seek answers to these complicated questions by examining the 2008 and 2012 elections as well as the events of President Obama’s first term. Written by preeminent race scholars from multiple disciplines, the volume brings together competing perspectives on race, gender, and the historic significance of Obama’s election and reelection. The president heralded in his November, 2012, acceptance speech, “The idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like . . . . whether you’re black or white, Hispanic or Asian or Native American.” These essayists argue the truth of that statement and assess whether America has made any progress toward that vision.

Contributions by Lisa Anderson-Levy, Heidi Ardizzone, Karanja Keita Carroll, Greg Carter, Frank Rudy Cooper, Marhsa J. Tyson Darling, Tessa Ditonto, David Frank, Amy L. Heyse, David A. Hollinger, George Lipsitz, Mark McPhail, Tavia Nyong’o, David Roediger, Paul Spickard, Janet Mendoza Stickman, Paul Street, Ebony Utley, Ronald Waters

Contents

  • Preface / Hettie V. Williams and G. Reginald Daniel
  • Foreword: Race Will Survive the Obama Phenomenon / David Roediger
  • Introduction: Understanding Obama and Ourselves / George Lipsitz
  • Part I: Race, Obama, and Multiraciality
    • 1. Race and Multiraciality: From Barack Obama to Trayvon Martin / G. Reginald Daniel
    • 2. By Casta, Color Wheel, and Computer Graphics: Visual Representations of Racially Mixed People / Greg Carter
    • 3. Barack Obama: Embracing Multiplicity—Being a Catalyst for Change / Janet Mendoza Stickmon
    • 4. In Pursuit of Self: The Identity of an American President and Cosmopolitanism / Hettie V. Williams
  • Part II: Obama, Blackness, and the “Post-Racial Idea”
    • 5. Barack Hussein Obama, or, the Name of the Father / Tavia Nyong’o
    • 6. The End(s) of Difference? Towards an Understanding of the “Post” in Post-Racial / Lisa Anderson-Levy
    • 7. On the Impossibilities of a Post-Racist America in the Obama Era / Karanja Keita Carroll
    • 8. Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future / David A. Hollinger
  • Part III: Race, Gender, and the Obama Phenomenon
    • 9. From Chattel to First Lady: Black Women Moving from the Margins / Marsha J. Tyson Darling
    • 10. The “Outsider” and the Presidency: Mediated Representations of Race and Gender in the 2008 Presidential Primaries / Tessa Ditonto
    • 11. Obama’s “Unisex” Campaign: Critical Race Theory Meets Masculinities Studies / Frank Rudy Cooper
    • 12. “Everything His Father Was Not”: Fatherhood and Father Figures in Barack Obama’s First Term / Heidi Ardizzone
  • Part IV: Race, Politics, and the Obama Phenomenon
    • 13. Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience and the (Im)Possibility of Racial Reconciliation / David Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail
    • 14. Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness / Ronald W. Walters
    • 15. Barack Obama’s White Appeal and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era / Paul Street
    • 16. Barack Obama’s (Im)Perfect Union: An Analysis of the Strategic Successes and Failures in His Speech on Race / Ebony Utley and Amy L. Heyse
  • Epilogue: Obama, Race, and the 2012 Presidential Election / Paul Spickard
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Conversations with Natasha Trethewey

Posted in Anthologies, Biography, Books, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2013-12-05 20:32Z by Steven

Conversations with Natasha Trethewey

University Press of Mississippi
2013-08-28
256 pages
6 x 9 inches, introduction, chronology, index
Hardback ISBN: 9781617038792
Paperback ISBN: 9781617039515

Edited by:

Joan Wylie Hall, Lecturer in English
University of Mississippi

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother informs each book, Trethewey’s range of forms and subjects is wide. In compact sonnets, elegant villanelles, ballad stanzas, and free verse, she creates monuments to mixed-race children of colonial Mexico, African American soldiers from the Civil War, a beautiful prostitute in 1910 New Orleans, and domestic workers from the twentieth-century North and South.

Because her white father and her black mother could not marry legally in Mississippi, Trethewey says she was “given” her subject matter as “the daughter of miscegenation.” A sense of psychological exile is evident from her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), to the recent Thrall (2012). Biracial people of the Americas are a major focus of her poetry and her prose book Beyond Katrina, a meditation on family, community, and the natural environment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney. She emotionally acknowledges Rita Dove’s large impact, and she boldly positions herself in the southern literary tradition of Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Commenting on “Pastoral,” “South,” and other poems, Trethewey guides readers to deeper perception and empathy.

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Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study

Posted in Biography, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-12-05 20:01Z by Steven

Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study

University Press of Mississippi
2013-10-17
256 pages
6 x 9 inches, bibliography, index
Hardback ISBN: 9781617039102

Catharine Savage Brosman, Professor Emerita of French
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana Creole Literature is a broad-ranging critical reading of belles lettres—in both French and English—connected to and generally produced by the distinctive Louisiana Creole peoples, chiefly in the southeastern part of the state. The book covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flourishing period during which the term Creole had broad and contested cultural reference in Louisiana.

The study consists in part of literary history and biography. When available and appropriate, each discussion–arranged chronologically–provides pertinent personal information on authors, as well as publishing facts. Readers will find also summaries and evaluation of key texts, some virtually unknown, others of difficult access. Brosman illuminates the biographies and works of Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Adolphe Duhart, among others. In addition, she challenges views that appear to be skewed regarding canon formation. The book places emphasis on poetry and fiction, reaching from early nineteenth-century writing through the twentieth century to selected works by poets still writing in the early twenty-first century. A few plays are treated also, especially by Victor Séjour. Louisiana Creole Literature examines at length the writings of important Francophone figures, and certain Anglophone novelists likewise receive extended treatment. Since much of nineteenth-century Louisiana literature was transnational, the book considers Creole-based works which appeared in Paris as well as those published locally.

Catharine Savage Brosman, Houston, Texas, is professor emerita of French at Tulane University. She is the author of numerous books of French literary history and criticism, two volumes of nonfiction prose, and nine collections of poetry.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Chapter One. Louisiana and Its Population: The Historical Background
  • Chapter Two. Features of Early Louisiana Literature and the Cultural Milieu
  • Chapter Three. Pere Rouquette and Other Early Francophone Poets
  • Chapter Four. Mercier and Other Novelists Born in the Early Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter Five. Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrant Francophone Authors
  • Chapter Six. Fiction and Drama by Mid-Nineteenth-Century Free People of Color
  • Chapter Seven. Poetry by Mid-Nineteenth-Century Free People of Color
  • Chapter Eight. Cable and Hearn
  • Chapter Nine. Late Francophone Figures: de la Houssaye, du Quesnay, Dessommes
  • Chapter Ten. Kate Chopin
  • Chapter Eleven. King, Stuart, and Others
  • Chapter Twelve. Some Twentieth-Century Louisiana Prose Writers
  • Chapter Thirteen. Louisiana Creole Poets of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
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Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954

Posted in Books, History, Law, Monographs, United States on 2013-09-28 01:14Z by Steven

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954

University Press of Mississippi
2005
224 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 9781578067053
Paper ISBN: 9781604732474

Alex Lubin, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of New Mexico

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. How was interracial romance treated in popular culture by civil rights leaders, African American soldiers, and white segregationists?

Previous studies focus on the period beginning in 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned the last state antimiscegenation law (Loving v. Virginia). Lubin’s study, however, suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about “hybridity,” or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain.

The book focuses on the years immediately after the war, when ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality were being reformulated and solidified in both the academy and the public. Lubin shows that interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites, was a testing ground for both the general American public and the American government. The government wanted interracial relationships to be treated primarily as private affairs to keep attention off contradictions between its outward aura of cultural freedom and the realities of Jim Crow politics and antimiscegenation laws. Activists, however, wanted interracial intimacy treated as a public act, one that could be used symbolically to promote equal rights and expanded opportunities. These contradictory impulses helped shape our current perceptions about interracial romances and their broader significance in American culture.

Romance and Rights ends in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, before the civil rights movement became well organized. By closely examining postwar popular culture, African American literature, NAACP manuscripts, miscegenation laws, and segregationist protest letters, among other resources, the author analyzes postwar attitudes towards interracial romance, showing how complex and often contradictory those attitudes could be.

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Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-07-20 02:51Z by Steven

Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production

University Press of Mississippi
2013-05-13
240 pages (approx.)
6 x 9 inches, bibliography, index
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-61703-755-9

Crystal S. Anderson, Assistant Director of Teaching Excellence, Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning and Affiliate Faculty, Korean Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo, how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities

In this study, Crystal S. Anderson explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, Anderson examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999-2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferral, Anderson traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian cultural production interrogates conceptions of race, ethnic identity, politics, and transnational exchange.

Ultimately, this book reads contemporary black/Asian cultural fusions through the recurrent themes established by the films of Bruce Lee, which were among the first–and certainly most popular–works to use this exchange explicitly. As a result of such films as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971), Lee emerges as both a cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon who resonates with the experiences of African American, Asian American, and Asian youth in the 1970s. Lee’s films and iconic imagery prefigure themes that reflect cross-cultural negotiations with global culture in post-1990 Afro-Asian cultural production.

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Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Passing on 2013-05-11 22:18Z by Steven

Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

University Press of Mississippi
1998
184 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-57806-798-5

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Never before published, a 1920s novel disputes prevailing attitudes on racial character and identity

Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts, as well, against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand returns to his home in New Orleans and discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children.

Chesnutt resolves Marchand’s dilemma with a surprising plot reversal. Marchand, although white, chooses to pass as a black so that he can keep his wife and children. Thus by altering the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, Chesnutt shows Marchand’s awareness that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on “blood” but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable male character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions.

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A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

Posted in Arts, Books, Louisiana, Monographs, United States on 2013-03-15 21:18Z by Steven

A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

University Press of Mississippi
2012-09-20
450 pages
9 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches,
400+ color illustrations, foreword, introduction, bibliography, index of artists
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-61703-690-3
 
Edited By:

Michael Sartisky, President
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

J. Richard Gruber, Director Emeritus
Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Associate Editor:

John R. Kemp, Former Deputy Director
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

A lushly illustrated celebration of two centuries of creative work from Louisiana

A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana is a handsome, unprecedented, commemorative hardcover edition limited to approximately 3,000 copies. This large-format volume encompasses 450 color pages featuring approximately 275 artists and photographers. For art collectors and enthusiasts, for followers of Louisiana history, and for keepers of Louisiana pride, this dazzling book is testimony to the state’s vibrant artistic culture.

Coeditors are Michael Sartisky, PhD, president of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and J. Richard Gruber, PhD, director emeritus of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; John R. Kemp, former deputy director of the LEH, is serving as associate editor. Written by scholars from around the country, the entries include all genres (painting, sculpture, photography, folk art, decorative art, furniture) and periods, from colonial to contemporary. Private collections and major archives such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana State Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, among others, contribute a comprehensive library of images.

Every entry in the book will be linked to fully articulated entries on each artist and genre in KnowLA: The Digital Encyclopedia of Louisiana History and Culture,which also will have the capacity to include a much more extensive image gallery for each artist and genre.

View A Unique Slant of Light in digital format here.

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Me: A Book of Remembrance

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Novels, Women on 2013-02-17 21:41Z by Steven

Me: A Book of Remembrance

University Press of Mississippi
1997 (Originally published in 1915)
368 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0878059911 (9780878059911)
Paper ISBN: 087805992X (9780878059928)

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954)

Afterword by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

A Chinese-Eurasian’s autobiographical novel tracing a woman’s dual quest for a writing career and romance

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry.

In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora’s search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton’s reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry.

Despite the silence of the text, Me: A Book of Rembrance reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored,” she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America’s Anglo preference.

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To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

Posted in Biography, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2011-10-24 01:40Z by Steven

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

University Press of Mississippi
1999
202 pages
Cloth: 157806130X (9781578061303)
Paper: 1578061318 (9781578061310)

Jon Woodson, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Jean Toomer’s adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie—Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman—and, through them, the mystic’s influence on many of the notables in African American literature.

Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy in the United States.

Woodson’s is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of “objective literature.” He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • 1 Jean Toomer: Beside You Will Stand a Strange Man
  • 2 Wallace Thurman: Beyond Race and Color
  • 3 Rudolph Fisher: Minds of Another Order
  • 4 Nella Larsen: The Anatomy of “Sleep”
  • 5 George Schuyler: New Races and New Worlds
  • 6 Zora Neale Hurston: The Self and the Nation
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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