Full Description
Race and Transatlantic Identities provides a rich overview of the complex relationship between the construction of race and transatlantic identity as expressed in a variety of cultural forms, refracted through different disciplinary and critical perspectives, and manifested at different historical moments. Spanning a period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributions provide a panorama of the wealth and variety of contemporary approaches to grappling with notions of race in a transatlantic context, raising questions about the permanence and fixity of racial boundaries. The volume, which focuses on the cultural sites where individuals construct and express their racial identities in the context of those boundaries, also explores strategies through which those boundaries are defined and redefined. The collection conducts this inquiry by juxtaposing essays on literature, history, visual arts, material culture, music, and dance in ways that encourage the reader to engage with concepts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The articles in this book were originally published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies.
Contents
Introduction - Blurring boundaries: race and transatlantic identities in culture and society 1. The vitriolic blood of a Negro: the development of racial identity and Creole elitism in New Spain and Spanish Louisiana, 1763-1803 2. 'I am the only woman!': the racial dimensions of patriarchy and the containment of white women in James Hakewill's A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica . . . (1825) 3. Fictional space and taxonomies of race in the Bahamas: mapping American identity in the early Republic 4. Two heads of the same drum? Musical narratives within a transatlantic religion 5. 'A sound that is missing': writing Africa in the Anglophone Caribbean 6. Troubling the white supremacy-black inferiority paradigm: Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in Europe 7. 'Blind Tom' abroad: race, disability, and transatlantic representations of Thomas Wiggins 8. Discursive encounters: dance, inscription, and modern identities in interwar Paris 9. Black dagoes? Italian immigrants' racial status in the United States: an ecological view 10. Reading 'things' in Italian-America
