Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism

Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism PDF Author: Leif Sorensen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137570199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism in which ethnic literary modernists of the 1930s play a crucial role. Focusing on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers of the 1930s (Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes) Sorensen presents a new view of the history of multicultural literature in the U.S. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors' works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of the new modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book.

Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism

Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism PDF Author: Leif Sorensen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137570199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism in which ethnic literary modernists of the 1930s play a crucial role. Focusing on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers of the 1930s (Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes) Sorensen presents a new view of the history of multicultural literature in the U.S. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors' works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of the new modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book.

Ethnic Modernism

Ethnic Modernism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.

The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms

The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms PDF Author: Kirby Brown
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000638324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms provides a powerful suite of innovative contributions by both leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field. Incorporating an international scope of essays, this volume reaches beyond traditional national or euroamerican boundaries to locate North American Indigenous modernities and modernisms in a hemispheric context. Covering key theoretical approaches and topics, this volume includes: Diverse explorations of Indigenous cultural and intellectual production in treatments of dance, poetry, vaudeville, autobiography, radio, cinema, and more Investigation of how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and cultural productions in North America from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Surveys of critical geographies of Indigenous literary and cultural studies, including refocused and reframed exploration of the diverse cultures, knowledges, traditions, geographies, experiences, and formal innovations that inform Indigenous literary, intellectual, and cultural productions The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms presents fresh insight to modernist studies, acknowledging and reconciling the occluded histories of Indigenous erasure, and inviting both students and scholars to expand their understanding of the field.

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930–1965: Volume 2

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930–1965: Volume 2 PDF Author: Victor Bascara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
This volume is devoted to Asian American Literature between 1930 to 1965, a period of immense social, historical, and cultural transformations that continue to shape the conditions of our world. From the Great Depression to the Second World War to the Civil Rights Movement to landmark immigrations reforms, Asian American literature provides unique and insightful perspectives on these historical developments, all while creatively engaging with globally-dispersed decolonization movements. Each chapter, written a by leading figures in their fields, demonstrates how Asian American writing affectingly reveals our complex world and its contested pasts. Case studies of major authors of this era show this as a time when the figure of the Asian American author became newly significant. This volume provides historical grounding, theoretical interventions, and nuanced textual analysis of Asian American literature in this period.

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996: Volume 3

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996: Volume 3 PDF Author: Asha Nadkarni
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108922317
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
Asian American Literature in Transition Volume Three: 1965–1996 offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the political and aesthetic stakes of what is now recognizable as an Asian American literary canon. It takes as its central focus the connections among literature, history, and migration, exploring how the formation of Asian American literary studies is necessarily inflected by demographic changes, student activism, the institutionalization of Asian American studies within the U.S. academy, U.S foreign policy (specifically the Cold War and conflicts in Southeast Asia), and the emergence of 'diaspora' and 'transnationalism' as important critical frames. Moving through sections that consider migration and identity, aesthetics and politics, canon formation, and transnationalism and diaspora, this volume tracks predominant themes within Asian American literature to interrogate an ever-evolving field. It features nineteen original essays by leading scholars, and is accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researchers alike.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde PDF Author: Steven S. Lee
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540116
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism

The Cambridge History of American Modernism PDF Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108808026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 948

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

Collecting Lives

Collecting Lives PDF Author: Elizabeth Rodrigues
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data’s revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.

Experimental

Experimental PDF Author: Natalia Cecire
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421433788
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.

Our America

Our America PDF Author: Walter Benn Michaels
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822320647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.