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Articles 31 - 45 of 45
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
English Ethnicity And Race In Early Modern Drama, By Mary Floyd-Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (Book Review), Imtiaz Habib
English Faculty Publications
The article reviews the book "English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama," by Mary Floyd-Wilson.
Interracial Love, Virginians' Lies, And Donald Mccaig's Jacob's Ladder, Suzanne W. Jones
Interracial Love, Virginians' Lies, And Donald Mccaig's Jacob's Ladder, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
The Old South's taboo against love between blacks and whites has cast a long shadow. No cross-racial relationship has been so pathologized by American society. Even in 1967, when the Supreme Court finally declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage, down from thirty states as recently as 1948. Not until 1998 and 2000 did ballot initiatives in South Carolina and Alabama finally eliminate the last of the antimiscegenation laws, although no one had tried to enforce them for years. Recent U.S. census figures show interracial unions increasing--up from 3 …
Writing The Lives Of Others: The Veterans Project, Sandra Young
Writing The Lives Of Others: The Veterans Project, Sandra Young
English Faculty Publications
This essay describes an advanced composition course in which the students studied the ethics, politics, history, and rhetorical strategies involved in writing the lives of others. The heart of the course was a service-learning project that introduced college juniors and seniors to veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The students interviewed, wrote brief biographies, and transcribed the wartime stories of a group of veterans from a local American Legion post and its women’s auxiliary. The stories were collected in a volume made available to local American Legion posts, veterans hospitals, and libraries in Connecticut.
Buying Time: Howards End And Commodified Nostalgia, Elizabeth Outka
Buying Time: Howards End And Commodified Nostalgia, Elizabeth Outka
English Faculty Publications
Midway through E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the newly married Margaret Schlegel Wilcox returns to the titular country house to find it the recipient of an unexpected makeover. Closed since the death of the first Mrs. Wilcox and for months used as a warehouse for the Schlegels’ possessions, the house has been unpacked and reconstituted by the housekeeper, Miss Avery, who creates a new interior built from moments of Margaret’s own history. As Margaret moves through the house in surprise, she takes a virtual tour of her past: her umbrella-stand greets her in the entrance way, the infamous sword …
Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones
Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.
Passing As Danzy Senna, Bertram D. Ashe, Danzy Senna
Passing As Danzy Senna, Bertram D. Ashe, Danzy Senna
English Faculty Publications
Caucasia, written by Danzy Senna, is part of a growing sub-genre of African-American novels, some of which announce their themes by their titles: White Boys, by Reginald McKnight; The White Boy Shuffle, by Paul Beatty; The Last Integrationist, by Jake Lamar; and Negrophobia, by Darius James, to name a few. Caucasia is a "Post-Soul" novel that explores the world of "mullatos" - both cultural and racial. But even though artists such as Kara Walker, photographer Lorna Simpson, and essayist Lisa Jones also explore the vicissitudes of post-Civil Rights Movement Black identity, in Black fiction its …
Book Review: The Mormon Question: Polygamy And Constitutional Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America, Terryl Givens
Book Review: The Mormon Question: Polygamy And Constitutional Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America, Terryl Givens
English Faculty Publications
Polygamy makes for fascinating social history and for best-selling potboilers as well. This study by Sarah Barringer Gordon, who teaches both law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first attempt to write a full-length legal history of “the Principle.” It turns out that even in this dry-as-dust genre, polygamy fuels a very dynamic story indeed, one that reveals the rich malleability of the Constitution, the endless resourcefulness of determined guardians of public morality, and the resilience of a peculiar people committed to the practice of plural marriage.
I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones
I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …
"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe
"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
This study consists of a cultural reading of the cover photograph of the June-July 1999 issue of Vibe magazine. It explores the relationship between Mase, an African-American male rap star, and the three anonymous African-American female models that surround him. The study interprets the cover through the long, straightened hair of the models, locating the models' hair in a historically-informed context of black hair theory and practice. The study argues that the models' presence on the cover, particularly their "bone straight and long" hair, "enhances" Mase in much the same way breast-augmented "trophy women" "enhance" their mates. Ultimately, the study …
"Under The Umbrella Of Black Civilization": A Conversation With Reginald Mcknight, Bertram D. Ashe
"Under The Umbrella Of Black Civilization": A Conversation With Reginald Mcknight, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent - or a deep Southern drawl. In an instant he can switch from a precise West African dialect to hip, urban street lingo, and then effortlessly segue back to his normal voice. McKnight says he "hit the ground running" as a mimic, and his talent was broadened as he lived all over the United States as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His time spent on the road …
Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones
Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Since the Civil War white male writers of the American South have created fond fictions about childhood friendships that crossed the color line. For example, much of the poignancy of Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) comes from Bayard Sartoris's description of the close relationship he had with a black servant boy Ringo in the Mississippi small town that will separate them as they grow older and that from the beginning marked them as different, based on race. After their boyhood games and real Civil War adventures together, Bayard and Ringo grow up to be, not close friends, but master and faithful …
On The Jazz Musician's Love/Hate Relationship With The Audience, Bertram D. Ashe
On The Jazz Musician's Love/Hate Relationship With The Audience, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
An assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Bertram D. Ashe discusses how the intersection of an African American cool style with a black vernacular tradition and multi-racial audiences complicates audience-performer relations. In the vernacular tradition, performers play not "to" but "with" an audience, drawing on the call-response patterns that characterize the black aesthetic. Ashe notes that the vernacular tradition is not racial but cultural, and class can be as important a marker as race in determining audience expectations. Differing cultural backgrounds create, in Ashe's words, "competing realities," distinct sets of expectations that can shape a …
Born And Made: Sisters, Brothers, And The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
Born And Made: Sisters, Brothers, And The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
English Faculty Publications
We are--almost all--born into families, born into relationship. Like Mary Ann Evans, I was born a little sister--but had I encountered her "Brother and Sister" sonnets at twelve, I might have thrown the book across the room. George Eliot's fantasy of a perfected brother-sister relationship in these sonnets rings hollow and yet resonates profoundly with me. As a little sister myself, I wonder what could make the relationship--so often fraught with competition, envy, and neglect, yet potentially so richly rewarding--seem so powerfully right, so important to and adult woman's self-identification? For the narrator of the sonnets is certainly an adult …
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
English Faculty Publications
Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …
"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …