Books in the American Literatures Initiative series

A historical overview of Chicano literature and history from the 19th - 21st centuries

Examines the issue of national affiliation in cases where two nations have become one or one nation has become two. It uses the US Civil War as a case study to demonstrate loyalty and allegiance can be used. It analyses literary works written during and after the conflict to reveal that post-war literature was profoundly shaped by loyalty.

Articulates a fresh understanding of how the Chicano movement contributed to the social and political currents of postwar America, and how the movement remains meaningful today.

Spanning the 1990s to the present, the author takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging.

Using the term "e;exodus politics"e; to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights. The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership. He draws on a variety of disciplines-including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology-in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics. Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.

Uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.

Highlights the long history of African American-Asian American relations

In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines. This book argues that the ideological work of colonial dominance figured into the emerging field of American literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual tasks of colonial management.

Provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth's migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage.

In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation-a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement-black writers also addressed the effects of "e;Jane Crow,"e; the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson.By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women's writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era.A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title