Reads and interprets eight works of literature by people of color, foregrounding the philosophical debate about modernity vs. postmodernity rather than solely issues of race.

The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.

Modern North American Criticism and Theory presents the reader with a comprehensive and critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Focusing on the growth and expansion of critical trends and methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts, the book offers a narrative of change, transformation, and the continuous quest for and affirmation of multiple cultural voices and identities. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of whiteness studies and the cultural study of masculinity, this book provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of questioning, debate, and exploration.

This book offers both a philosophical and sociological model for understanding the constitution of identity in general, and black social identity in particular, without reverting to either a social or racial deterministic view of identity construction. Using a variant of structuration theory (phenomenological structuralism) this work, against contemporary postmodern and post-structural theories, seeks to offer a dialectical understanding of the constitution of black American and British life within the class division and social relations of production of the global capitalist world-system, while accounting for black social agency.

Contemporary Social Theory helps students explore, describe, and discuss how social theory relates to their own experiences, popular culture, and the world in which they live. It advances the view that new theory can be effectively used to assess social and cultural phenomena. The text identifies the important intellectual movements, categories, and paradigms that have occurred in the study of social theory. It also looks at issues closely related to contemporary social theory, such as: the postmodern condition, globalization, postcolonialism, inequality, gender, race, and human sexuality.

This anthology demonstrates the longstanding, multifarious, and major role that race has played in the formation of knowledge. The authors demonstrate how race theory intersects with other bodies of knowledge by examining discursive records such as travelogues, literature, and historiography; theoretical structures such as common sense, pseudoscientific racism, and Eurocentrism; social structures of class, advancement, and identity; and politico-economic structures of capitalism, colonialism, and law.

Looking to the way that race has been conceived through the tradition of Latin American political thought, The Color of Citizenship examines the centrality of race in the making of modern citizenship. It posits race as synthetic, dynamic, and fluid - a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.

Postmodern Vernaculars examines the work of Chicana authors such as Gaspar de Alba, Anzaldúa, Cantú, Castillo, Cisneros, Mora, Pérez, and Viramontes in relation to theories of postmodernism. Working with a fluid concept of postmodernism, one that traces the term's evolution from the 1960s to the present, this book argues that Chicana literature is one vernacular, a regional variation of postmodernism. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarship that postmodernism itself has enabled - specifically recent developments in the fields of geography, ethnography, photography, history, and linguistics - Postmodern Vernaculars shows that Chicana literature participates in the ongoing reconstruction of postmodernism.

Table of contents

His impulse, instead, is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so attempt to clear a "new" postmodern space."--BOOK JACKET.