Cinderella Story: A Scholarly Sketchbook about Race, Identity, Barack Obama, the Human Spirit, and Other Stuff that Matters

Cinderella Story: A Scholarly Sketchbook about Race, Identity, Barack Obama, the Human Spirit, and Other Stuff that Matter

AltaMira Press
February 2010
228 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-7591-1176-6 / 978-0-7591-1176-9  

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., Associate Professor of Art Education
Syracuse University

Cinderella Story is an experimental autoethnography that explores critical racial issues in America through the media of language and images. Rolling asks, How do words and images-involving stories and paradigms, past and future, perceptions of beauty and ugliness-become flesh? How are they done and undone? In this supple and complex narrative, the author peers deeply into his own life and attitudes, and into the racial images and ideas made explicit by American history as a whole, to sort out fact from fiction in new and ingenious ways.

Table of Contents

Prologue: An Old Story
Episode One: Borderlines
Episode Two: Homelessness
Episode Three: Origins
Episode Four: Breech Births and Cinderella Endings
Episode Five: Monsters Deconstructed
Episode Six: Figuring Myself Out
Episode Seven: Messing around with Identity Constructs
Episode Eight: Disruptions
Episode Nine: Secular Blasphemy
Episode Ten: Propaganda
Episode Eleven: Invisibility and In/di/visuality
Episode Twelve: The Meeting
Episode Thirteen: Self-Portrait, with Stern Resistance
Episode Fourteen: (Re)Appearances
Episode Fifteen: Self Portrait, with Backlighting
Episode Sixteen: The One-Drop Rule
Episode Seventeen: Self-Portrait, with Possibilities
Episode Eighteen: Epilogue, with New Story Values

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