"The Mask Is the Face": Personae in Teaching Multi-Ethnic American Literature

Trickster novels, especially those by Gerald Vizenor and Maxine Hong Kingston, can be used to destabilize and undermine ethnic stereotypes. As many studies show, the trickster him/herself cannot be stable and thus resists the limitations of definition as the embodiment of ambiguity. Both insider and outsider, s/he plays with the whole concept of “sides” so as to erase the distinction between them. The trickster plays the game, including the game of language, in order to break and exploit its rules and thus destabilizes linguistic markers. Kingston and Vizenor use their novels to subvert the rules of the linguistic game and free perception from stereotypic rigidity. Perceptions of race and ethnicity are frequently codified in the form of stereotypes with which we are all familiar. Once established, they, of course, prove remarkably difficult to dismantle however false or misleading they might be with regard to the race or ethnicity in question; and thus they continue to exacerbate the social tensions with which we are equally familiar. Ethnic American literature has frequently addressed this issue; in this essay I intend to look at one narrative strategy which is specifically designed to question, challenge, exploit, and even manipulate perception.

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Teaching Jewish American Literature as Global Ethnic American Literature

MELUS ◽

10.1353/mel.2012.0036 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 183-184

Author(s):

Dean J. Franco

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Jewish American ◽

Jewish American Literature ◽

Ethnic American Literature

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The Uncommons (Danez Smith)

Minnesota Review ◽

10.1215/00265667-7737325 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (93) ◽

pp. 102-110

Author(s):

Christian P. Haines

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Collective Identity ◽

African American Literature ◽

Political Practice ◽

Social Death ◽

The Face ◽

Black Life ◽

Literature Culture

This article examines the poetry of Danez Smith as a practice of commoning. It introduces the concept of the uncommons as a way of thinking about how African American literature, culture, and political practice develop egalitarian forms of life in the face of white supremacism. It considers the ways in which the violences of white supremacism uncommon black life—that is, bar blackness from belonging—as well as the ways in which poetry and politics become avenues through which black life invents alternative socialities. From this perspective, the lyric qualities of Smith’s verse are social not because they prescribe a proper collective identity but because they invent modes of relation that transform social death into the possibility of another way of living. This is the uncommons: a reckoning with the racialized political economy of death that constructs commonality through dissonance, disruption, passion, and power.

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Trails

Literary Indians ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646947.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 116-145

Author(s):

Angela Calcaterra

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

American Literature ◽

Great Plains ◽

Indigenous Movements ◽

Critical Approach ◽

The West ◽

Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽

The Face

Chapter 4 argues that Indigenous story traditions are a crucial, overlooked context for understanding nineteenth-century American literature about “the West.” This chapter analyzes Pawnee and Osage narratives alongside Washington Irving’s Tour on the Prairies (1835) to demonstrate white authorial disorientation in the face of Indigenous storied space. Pawnee and Osage representations of journeys, crossings, and encounters along the network of trails that crossed the great plains guided these communities throughout the trying periods of US invasion and removal during the nineteenth century. The bodily discomfort and aesthetic disorientation depicted in Irving’s Tour on the Prairies is a result of his inability to connect with long-standing Indigenous movements and temporalities in this space. Similarly, scholarly misreading and neglect of this text is a product of a limited critical approach restricted to a singular authorial aesthetic. James Fenimore Cooper’s and Edwin James’s accounts of unsettling proximity to Native aesthetics close this chapter to suggest broader patterns of authorial disorientation.

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