Synopses & Reviews
A classic of cultural criticism, "Race," Writing, and Difference provides a broad introduction to the idea of "race" as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory. This collection demonstrates the variety of critical approaches through which one may discuss the complexities of racial "otherness" in various modes of discourse. Now, fifteen years after their first publication, these essays have managed to escape the cliches associated with the race-class-gender trinity of '80s criticism, and remain a provocative overview of the complex interplay between race, writing, and difference.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Writing "Race" and the Difference It Makes
Anthony Appiah - The Uncomplicated Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race
Edward W. Said - An Ideology of Difference
Jane Tompkins - "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History
Abdul R. JanMohamed - The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature
Bernard Lewis - The Crows of the Arabs
Israel Burshatin - The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and Silence
Mary Louise Pratt - Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen
Homi K. Bhabha - Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817
Patrick Brantlinger - Victorians and Africans: The Geneaology of the Myth of the Dark Continent
Sander L. Gilman - Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
Christopher L. Miller - Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology
Hazel V. Carby - "On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory
Barbara Johnson - Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston
Jacques Derrida - Racism's Last Word
Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon - No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's "Le Dernier Mot du Racisme"
Jacques Derrida - But, beyond . . . (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)
Tzvetan Todorov - "Race," Writing, and Culture
Houston A. Baker, Jr. - Caliban's Triple Play
Harold Fromm - The Hegemonic Form of Othering; or, The Academic's Burden
Mary Louise Pratt - A Reply to Harold Fromm
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Talkin' That Talk
Index