Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts

This volume of collected essays is an important contribution to contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, offering truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors-from Toni Morrison and James Weldon Johnson to Bret Harte and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton-these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between "ethnic" and "nonethnic" literatures. Through these inventive close readings, the authors also intervene in a more theoretical register, providing a "re-viewing" of the conceptual touchstones of ethnic studies. With topics ranging from whiteness theory and Du Boisian double-consciousness to hybridity and postcolonial national sovereignty, the essays reassess the possibilities and limitations of these concepts for understanding the ways in which identity is constructed and experienced. American Hybridity is itself representative of the kind of fluid boundaries of scholarship essential to understanding race and ethnicity in the United States. It will be of special value to readers interested in ethnic and American studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

David S. Goldstein teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Audrey B. Thacker teaches at California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge. Other contributors include Jesse Aleman, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and Jose L. Torres-Padilla.