Cornell University Press
The Bounds of Race
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About this book
The concept of race is central to one of the most powerful ideological formations in history, Dominick LaCapra argues in his introduction to this volume, and understanding the effects of that ideology and its intricate relations with issues of class and gender is one of the most pressing challenges to contemporary modes of thought. The eleven essays comprising The Bounds of Race confront this challenge with insight, rigor, and imagination.
The authors take on questions of language, genre, and politics with reference to African-American, Anglo-American, African, South African, Francophone North African, British, and Afro-Hispanic texts. Individual chapters discuss writings from an array of genres including homily, autobiography, the novel, children's literature, and political and scientific discourse. Taken together, the essays argue persuasively that the existing canon must be expanded, that the protocols of interpretation must be transformed to make a prominent place for such issues as race, and that the problem of interpretation cannot be posed in the absence of theoretically informed modes of historical investigation.
The Bounds of Race provides a subtle analysis of the variable role of racial ideologies and traces the interplay between hegemonic constraints and the strategies of resistance to them.
Author / Editor information
Dominick LaCapra is Professor Emeritus of History and Comparative Literature. He is the author of many books, including History, Literature, Critical Theory; History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence; and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory.
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction
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1. The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the Afro-American Tradition
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2. Moving On Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon
39 -
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3. Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism
72 -
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4. The Color of Politics in the United States: White Supremacy as the Main Explanation for the Peculiarities of American Politics from Colonial Times to the Present
104 -
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5. Out of Africa: Topologies of Nativism
134 -
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6. Autoethnography: The An-archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road
164 -
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7. "The Very House of Difference": Race, Gender, and the Politics of South African Women's Narrative in Poppie Nongena
196 -
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8. Beyond the Limit: The Social Relations of Madness In Southern African Fiction
231 -
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9. The Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilingualism: Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature
255 -
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10. Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference
278 -
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11. Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule
311 -
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Notes on Contributors
344 -
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Index
347
