English Language and Literature Commons^™

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

Angela Johnson: Award-Winning Novels And The Search For Self, Kaavonia M. Hinton-Johnson, Angela Johnson

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

It was over a decade ago when Rudine Sims Bishop (1992) prophetically dubbed Angela Johnson as possibly one of "the most prominent AfricanAmerican literary artists of the next generation" (616). At the time she had four picture books to her credit, but the following year she would publish her debut young adult novel, Toning the Sweep. From there, a number of other award-winners would follow and the total of young adult books would increase to eleven and counting. To date, Johnson has three Coretta Scott King Awards, a Michael L. Printz award, and the "Genius Grant" on her list of …

Indefinite Ethnicity In Fact And Fiction: "Invisible Color" Or "Honkified Meanderings"?, Anita Louise Hughes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Passing, both standard and reverse, is the process of changing ethnicity. The methodology of reverse passing varies, but claiming "no color" is ineffective in fact and fiction as can be seen in James McBride's The Color of Water, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and Rosellen Brown's Half a Heart. The characters in these texts attempt indefinite ethnicity by denying color and are prone to restlessness and failure until they accept racial duality.

Creole Carnival: Unwrapping The Pleasures And Paradoxes Of The Gift Of Creolization, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank goes against the current in questioning the social and intellectual embrace of the poetics of creolization, in terms of its the efficacy in subverting biases that underpinned colonial subordination and exploitation.

Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay concerns the Caribbean writer’s crucial confrontation with colonial literary models. In it, Kevin Frank argues that the central protagonist of David Dabydeen’s The Intended, the unnamed narrator, resembles the author in that he is torn between cultures (English, East Indian, and West Indian), and torn between two kinds of utility: one base, mechanical, and calculating, and the other, romantic. The latter predicament, Frank demonstrates, is a natural consequence of the convergence of romantic and utilitarian ideology underpinning British colonialism. Moreover, Dabydeen’s ambivalence about his allegiances and literary heritage is similar to that of one of his literary …

History Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Language Use And The Oral Tradition In Aaya (African American Young Adult) Literature, Kaavonia Hinton-Johnson

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In elementary school my favorite teachers taught me that the language used in my home was incorrect, incoherent, and inappropriate. My second grade teacher Ms. Hull, a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman, stands out among the others. I can still see her hovering over us. “Was!” Ms. Hull shouted, “not wuz. Your tongue is lazy.” “You be what?” she’d ask in disgust with one hand on her hip. When this happened, I was sure to get yelled at and lectured. To avoid such humiliation, I quickly learned to, as we said in my neighborhood, “talk proper.” Shame nagged at …

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends Of Nella Larsen’S Passing, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Review Of Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Noted poet, novelist, linguist, and educator, Velma Pollard was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, during the fall semester of 2001 when I conducted the following interview. John Martin, my graduate assistant at the time, assisted me in videotaping and transcribing our conversation, which took place in her cottage at the University on December 3, 2001.

In Search Of The British Indian In British India: White Orphans, Kipling’S Kim, And Class In Colonial India, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, …

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Selected Definitions For Work In Communication And Media Studies & Selected Bibliography Of Publications In Comparative Media Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Motherlands Of The Mind: A Study Of The Women Characters Of Attia Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column And Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Umme Sadat Nazmun Nahar Al-Wazedi

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine the portrayal of women characters by two post-colonial Indian writers, Attia Hosain and Salman Rushdie, respectively in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Midnight's Children (1980). I show how Hosain's and Rushdie's ideas of identity, nation and nationality influence their depiction of these women characters.

In the section analyzing Sunlight on a Broken Column, I argue that there is a spatial veil separating the feudal world of "Ashiana" from the outside world with its political disturbances, the life of a woman as an individual from the life of a woman as a part …

Toward A Framework Of Audience Studies In Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Central And East European Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Constructivism And Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Selected Journals Of Media And Communication Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Hybridity In Postcolonial Discourse: A Study Of Selected Plays By Wole Soyinka, Wai Wah Tham

Student Works (2000-2009)

Postcolonial discourse has argued that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is not a mere binary opposition of two separate entities. Rather, the contention is that what lies between the metropolitan center and its subordinated periphery is a dynamic site called the "liminal space", where the differences between the colonizer and the colonized are engaged in a dialogic interaction. Postcolonial study argues that this process affects the power dynamics between the two. For the marginalized, this process is potentially empowering for it presents a possible avenue for the postcolonial subject to modify the positions of dominance and subjectivity …

"And There I Found Myself More Truly And More Strange" : Narratives Of Return In Contemporary Malaysian And Singaporean Literature, Briana Lenore Shay

Student Works (2000-2009)

As our world is growing more mobile and fluid, the figure of the returnee is an increasingly common subject, especially in postcolonial societies. Indeed, returnees form a large. and growing, percentage of the Malaysian and Singaporean populations. This thesis examines six contemporary Malaysian and Singaporean narratives that explore the experience of characters that return to their homes after travelling or living overseas. The texts discussed include one novel, The Return, by K.S. Maniam; four short stories. "Welcome" and "Wedding Night", both by Gopal Baratham, "Return to Malaya" by Lee Kok Liang and "A Dream of China" by Ovidia Yu; and …

Raising Cultural Awareness In The Elementary Classroom Through African-American Children's Literature, Kirsten Seebeck

Graduate Research Papers

This research project topic was selected because of the need for raised cultural awareness in elementary classrooms, as indicated in current research findings. I chose African-American literature because in this region of the United States, Iowa in particular, the classrooms tend to be largely homogenous. Children who are from African-American descent find themselves to be in the minority in their classroom settings.

These children are not seeing many other children like themselves in their school community. It is therefore important that they see themselves in the literature shared within this community, in order to help them to relate to their …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

[Introduction To] From My People: 400 Years Of African American Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

A magnificent celebration of―and an essential introduction to―African American life and culture. Folklore displays the heart and soul of a people. African American folklore not only hands down traditions and wisdom through the generations but also tells the history of a people banned from writing and reading during slavery. In this anthology, Daryl Cumber Dance collects a wealth of tales that have survived and been adapted over the years, many featuring characters (like Brer' Rabbit) from African culture. She leaves no genre of folklore out, including everything from proverbs and recipes to folk songs and rumor. There is a section …

Unsettling Identities In Two Novels By Leslie Marmon Silko, Olivia Smith

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Throughout Native American Literature the state of identity in connection to one’s tribal culture, nature, and spirituality is vital to understanding both the struggles that Native Americans have endured during contact with Europeans and then Americans and the current ongoing cultural negotiations of contemporary tribal peoples. Native American writers use literature as a venue to reclaim and reconstruct identity, particularly in relation to a rapidly changing and commercial world.

Grounded in identity theory and Native American literary criticism, this thesis explores how Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko “unsettles” identities in her two novels Almanac of the Dead and Gardens …

"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 …

Style Guide Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Copyright Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture ©Purdue University, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.