Synopses & Reviews
Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice, Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem and the ‘Yellow Question in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.
Review
“Original and compelling. . . . Simultaneously sophisticated and accessible, Race for Citizenship fills a critical lacuna in‘race relations studies.”
-Elaine Kim,University of California, Berkeley
Synopsis
There can be little doubt that the Holocaust was an event of major consequence for the twentieth century. While there have been innumerable volumes published on the implications of the Holocaust for history, philosophy, and ethics, there has been a surprising lack of attention paid to the theoretical and practical effects of the Shoah on biblical interpretation.
Strange Fire addresses the implications of the Holocaust for interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, bringing together a diverse and distinguished range of contributors, including Richard Rubenstein, Elie Wiesel, and Walter Brueggemann, to discuss theoretical and methodological considerations emerging from the Shoah and to demonstrate the importance of these considerations in the reading of specific biblical texts. The volume addresses such issues as Jewish and Christian biblical theology after the Holocaust, the ethics of Christian appropriation of Jewish scripture, and the rethinking of biblical models of suffering and sacrifice from a post-Holocaust perspective.
The first book of its kind, Strange Fire will establish a benchmark for all future work on the topic.
About the Author
TOD LINAFELT is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, Georgetown University. He is the author of Surviving Lamentations and a commentary on the book of Ruth.