Complicating Constructions

The essays in this volume achieve much that is original in the field: they raise provocative challenges to prevalent theoretical paradigms (e.g., whiteness theory, double-consciousness, models of immigration); they examine a broad range of canonical and obscure, high-literary and popular texts across historical periods; and they draw attention to the ways in which race and ethnicity are fluid, dynamic, contested, and historically malleable constructs. -- Madhu Dubey, author of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism This volume approaches traumas, conundrums, and opportunities of American hybridity from fresh angles. The writing is clear and the scholarship is alert and serious about its mission: to honestly confront America's racist history and practices and to understand the evolving complexity of American life and letters as fully and carefully as possible. -- John Whalen-Bridge, author of Political Fiction and the American Self

This volume of collected essays offers truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors - from Toni Morrison to Bret Harte - these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures.