Denying its formative dialogues with minorities, the white race, Stephen P. Knadler contends, has been a fugitive race. While the "white question," like the "Negro question," and the "woman question" a century earlier, has garnered considerable critical attention among scholars looking to find new anti-race strategies, these investigations need to highlight not just the exclusion of people of color, but also examine minority writers' resistance to and disruption of this privileged racial category. "Highly original, wonderfully detailed, and thought provoking," says Professor Candace Waid of Knadler's intellectually challenging book. Although excluded, people of color looked back in anger, laughter, and wisdom to challenge the unexamined lie of a self-evident whiteness. Looking at fictional and nonfictional texts written between 1850 and 1984, The Fugitive Race traces a long cultural and literary history of the ways African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Chicanos, gays, and lesbians have challenged the shape and meaning of so-called white identities. From the antebellum period to the 1980s, the belief in a white racial superiority, or simply a white difference, has denied that people of color might and do have an influence on the supposedly pure or protected character of whiteness. In contrast, this book attempts to define a new way of analyzing minority literature that questions this segregated color line. In addition to creating a new racial awareness, many writers of color tried to interfere in the historical formulation of whiteness. They created unsettling moments when white readers had to see themselves for the first time from the outside-in, or from the critical perspective of non-white writers. These writers--including William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Abraham Cahan, Young-hill Kang, Zora Neale Hurston, and Arturo Islas--did not simply resist assimilation. They sought to dismantle the white identities that lay as the foundation of the master's house. Stephen P. Knadler, an assistant professor of English at Spelman College, has been published in American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, and Modern Fiction Studies.

In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. Best also argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, Best helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, The Fugitive's Properties sets new agendas for scholars of American literature and legal culture.

Rediscovering the writings of early Asian America.

"Provides rich, nuanced readings." - Victor Bascara, University of California, Los Angeles

What is African American about African American literature? Why identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too often scholars have relied on nave concepts of race, superficial conceptions of African American history, and the marginalization of important strains of black scholarship. With this book, he creates a new and just r...

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned—and renounced—as one of the United States' most prominent abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism. What were Emerson's politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson—Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams—as well as many of today's leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the "pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism" by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, this volume reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.

¿Extradition¿ is the formal surrender of a person by a State to another State for prosecution or punishment. The U.S. has extradition treaties with over a hundred nations, although there are many countries with which it has no extradition treaty. International terrorism and drug trafficking have made extradition an increasingly important law enforcement tool. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.; (2) Bars to Extradition; (3) Constitutionality; (4) Procedure for Extradition from the U.S.: Arrest and Bail; Hearing; Review; Surrender; (5) Extradition for Trial or Punishment in the U.S.; (6) Alternatives to Extradition; Waiver. Append.: Countries with Which the U.S. Has a Bilateral Extradition Treaty, and those with Which the U.S. Has No Bilateral Extradition Treaty.

In Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intensedebate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.