Race Characters
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€91.99
1900 to 1960
A01=Swati Rana
African American
Afro-Caribbean
Ameen
American dream
American exceptionalism
Arab American
Asian American
assimilation
Author_Swati Rana
authorial character
Black
Category=DSB
Category=DSRC
Category=JBFH
Category=JBSL
character
Chicanao
Chicano
comparative
comparative ethnic literature
Dalip Singh
diaspora
early twentieth-century immigrant literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic literature
ethnicity
Filipinao
immigration
Jose Antonio
Jose Garcia
Marshall
model minority
Paule
race
racial form
Rihani
Saund
South Asian
Villa
Villarreal
Product details
- ISBN 9781469659466
- Weight: 557g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 16 Nov 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial for they promise to atone for racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. In this book, Swati Rana builds on studies of character and racial form and offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates, through literary analysis, a fuller social reading of race. Rana focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit an oppositional framing of ethnic literature. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, Jose Garcia Villa, and Jose Antonio Villarreal explore different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, Rana argues. Analyzing literary characterization as well as the interrelation of persona and personhood, Race Characters reveals how the protagonist of the American dream is socially constrained and structurally driven.
Swati Rana is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
