Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy--African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites--the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture.

Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally prevailing metaphors: first, the...

In Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination, author Rachel Rubinstein examines interventions by Jewish writers into an ongoing American fascination with the "imaginary Indian." Rubinstein argues that Jewish writers represented and identified with the figure of the American Indian differently than their white counterparts, as they found in this figure a mirror for their own anxieties about tribal and national belonging. Through a series of literary readings, Rubinstein traces a shifting and unstable dynamic of imagined Indian-Jewish kinship that can easily give way to...

"Provides the sort of historically and culturally informed critical discussion and close readings which African American literature still sorely needs."--A. Yemisi Jimoh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"A comprehensive study of the centrality of lynching to Hughes's artistic development, aesthetics, and activism. Scholars and general readers alike will find it a fascinating and indispensable addition to their understanding of the work of this brilliant poet."--Anne Rice, CUNY-Lehman College

Langston Hughes never knew of an America where lynching was absent from the...

As rigid and unforgiving as the boarding schools established for the education of Native Americans could be, the intellectuals who engaged with these schools including Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, and Montauketts David and Jacob Fowler in the eighteenth century, and Cherokees Catharine and David Brown in the nineteenth became passionate advocates for Native community as a political and cultural force. From handwriting exercises to Cherokee Syllabary texts, Native students negotiated a variety of pedagogical practices and technologies, using their hard-won literacy skills for...

Over the last twenty years, Native American literary studies has taken a sharp political turn. In this book, Matthew Herman provides the historical framework for this shift and examines the key moments in the movement away from cultural analyses toward more politically inflected and motivated perspectives. He highlights such notable cases as the prevailing readings of the popular within Native American writing; the Silko-Erdrich controversy; the ongoing debate over the comparative value of nationalism versus cosmopolitanism within Native American literature and politics; and the status of...