Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction - Softcover

Paulin, Diana Rebekkah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816670994 ISBN 13: 9780816670994

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012

Synopsis

Imperfect Unions examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century dramatic and literary enactments played in the constitution and consolidation of race in the United States. Diana Rebekkah Paulin investigates how these representations produced, and were produced by, the black-white binary that informed them in a wide variety of texts written across the period between the Civil War and World War I-by Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Dixon, J. Rosamond Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, William Dean Howells, and many others. Paulin\u2019s \u201cmiscegenated reading practices\u201d reframe the critical cultural roles that drama and fiction played during this significant half century. She demonstrates the challenges of crossing intellectual boundaries, echoing the crossings-of race, gender, nation, class, and hemisphere-that complicated the black-white divide at the turn of the twentieth century and continue to do so today.Imperfect Unions reveals how our ongoing discussions about race are also dialogues about nation formation. As the United States attempted to legitimize its own global ascendancy, the goal of eliminating evidence of inferiority became paramount. At the same time, however, the foundation of the United States was linked to slavery that served as reminders of its \u201cmongrel\u201d origins.

About this title

About the Author:

Diana Rebekkah Paulin is associate professor of American studies and English at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0816670994
• ISBN 13: 9780816670994
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336