Women Writing Race, Nation, and History

Women Writing Race, Nation, and History
Author: Sonita Sarker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192666975

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This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the "N/native" as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Šá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The "N/native" moves between "born in" and "first in" in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as de-colonizing nations, "Native" is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the "native" inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors' identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen, are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the "N/native" to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women's/feminist production were, and are in today's versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms

Disarming the Nation

Disarming the Nation
Author: Elizabeth Young
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1999-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226960876

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In a study that will radically shift our understanding of Civil War literature, Elizabeth Young shows that American women writers have been profoundly influenced by the Civil War and that, in turn, their works have contributed powerfully to conceptions of the war and its aftermath. Offering fascinating reassessments of works by white writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mitchell and African-American writers including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Harper, and Margaret Walker, Young also highlights crucial but lesser-known texts such as the memoirs of women who masqueraded as soldiers. In each case she explores the interdependence of gender with issues of race, sexuality, region, and nation. Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation argues that the Civil War functioned in women's writings to connect female bodies with the body politic. Women writers used the idea of "civil war" as a metaphor to represent struggles between and within women—including struggles against the cultural prescriptions of "civility." At the same time, these writers also reimagined the nation itself, foregrounding women in their visions of America at war and in peace. In a substantial afterword, Young shows how contemporary black and white women—including those who crossdress in Civil War reenactments—continue to reshape the meanings of the war in ways startlingly similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts. Learned, witty, and accessible, Disarming the Nation provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the Civil War, women's writing, and the many unresolved "civil wars" within American culture today.

The Promise of Patriarchy

The Promise of Patriarchy
Author: Ula Yvette Taylor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469633949

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The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.

Insurgent Cuba

Insurgent Cuba
Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807875740

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In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

Teach the Nation

Teach the Nation
Author: Anne-Elizabeth Murdy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317849493

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Is knowledge power? In Teach the Nation , Anne-Elizabeth Murdy explores the history and contradictions in the notion that education and literacy are vital means for improving social and political status in the US. By closely examining the rapidly shifting social context of education, and the emerging literature by and for African-American women during the 1890s, Murdy proves that the histories of education and literature are deeply connected and argues that their current lives must be regarded as mutually dependent. Teach the Nation offers a new understanding of literacy and pedagogical study and identifies how literary history enhances current feminist and anti-racist teachings. By excavating notions about education in the 1890s-as turbulent a time for American public education as today-Murdy asks readers to step back from this historical moment to better understand the contexts and institutions within which we theorize learning and teaching. In doing so, she compels readers to reimagine the potential for gaining social power through education and literature.

Nation, Empire, Colony

Nation, Empire, Colony
Author: Ruth Roach Pierson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1998-11-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780253113863

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"... a lively and interesting book... " -- American Historical Review These writers reveal the power relations of gender, class, race, and sexuality at the heart of the imperialisms, colonialisms, and nationalisms that have shaped our modern world. Topics include the (mis)representations of Native women by European colonizers, the violent displacement of women through imperialisms and nationalisms, and the relations between and among feminism, nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

Race, Nation, Class

Race, Nation, Class
Author: Étienne Balibar
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1991
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780860913276

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'Race, Nation, Class' is a key dialogue on identity and nationalism by major critics of capitalism.

Mulata Nation

Mulata Nation
Author: Alison Fraunhar
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496814460

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Repeatedly and powerfully throughout Cuban history, the mulata, a woman of mixed racial identity, features prominently in Cuban visual and performative culture. Tracing the figure, Alison Fraunhar looks at the representation and performance in both elite and popular culture. She also tracks how characteristics associated with these women have accrued across the Atlantic world. Widely understood to embody the bridge between European subject and African other, the mulata contains the sensuality attributed to Africans in a body more closely resembling the European ideal of beauty. This symbol bears far-reaching implications, with shifting, contradictory cultural meanings in Cuba. Fraunhar explores these complex paradigms, how, why, and for whom the image was useful, and how it was both subverted and asserted from the colonial period to the present. From the early seventeenth century through Cuban independence in 1899 up to the late revolutionary era, Fraunhar illustrates the ambiguous figure's role in nationhood, citizenship, and commercialism. She analyzes images including key examples of nineteenth-century graphic arts, avant-garde painting and magazine covers of the Republican era, cabaret and film performance, and contemporary iterations of gender. Fraunhar's study stands out for attending to the phenomenon of mulataje not only in elite production such as painting, but also in popular forms: popular theater, print culture, later films, and other media where stereotypes take hold. Indeed, in contemporary Cuba, mulataje remains a popular theme with Cubans as well as foreigners in drag shows, reflecting queerness in visual culture.

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872
Author: Lyde Cullen Sizer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2003-06-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807860980

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This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor. Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a "rhetoric of unity," giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.

U.S. Orientalisms

U.S. Orientalisms
Author: Malini Johar Schueller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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Malini Johar Schueller persuasively argues that current notions about the East can be better understood as latter-day manifestations of the earlier U.S. visions of the Orient refracted variously through millennial fervor, racial-cultural difference, and ideas of westerly empire. This book will be of interest to readers in American history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and literary theory.