Dislocating the Colour Line: Identity, Hybridity and Singularity in African-American Literature (Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisses): Identity, ... Narrative (Mestizo Spaces / Espaces Métissés) - Softcover

Kawash, Samira

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804727759 ISBN 13: 9780804727754

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

This book provides a historical context for racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the native writings of African-Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.

About this title

Review:

'There are many, I would even say too many, books on the race issue. Most of them repeat endlessly the same questions and offer the same answers. This book is an exception in the recent debate about race because Samira Kawash offers us a new, diachronic perspective based on a new methodological approach.' Bogumil Jewiewicki, Professor of History, Laval University

Synopsis:

Inquiries into the meaning and force of race in American culture have largely focused on questions of identity and difference What does it mean to have a racial identity? What constitutes racial difference? Such questions assume the basic principle of racial division, which todays seems to be becoming an increasingly bitter and seemingly irreparable chasm between black and white. This book confronts this contemporary problem by shifting the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division. It provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, passing novels, and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work?

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0804727759
• ISBN 13: 9780804727754
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284