Description
Book SynopsisThe concept of a “postracial” America —the dream of a nation beyond race — has attracted much attention over the course of the presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that this idea is peculiar to the contemporary moment alone. Postracial America? An Interdisciplinary Study attempts to broaden the application of this idea by situating it in contexts that demonstrate how the idea of the postracial has been with America since its founding and will continue to be long after the Obama administration’s term ends. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of the postracial in the United States through a variety of critical lenses, including film studies; literature; aesthetics and conceptual thinking; politics; media representations; race in relation to gender, identity, and sexuality; and personal experiences. Through this diverse interdisciplinary exploration, this collection skeptically weighs the implications of holding up a postracial culture as an admirable goal for the United States.
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword by Carmen Gillespie Introduction: The Postracial—The General and the Particulars by Vincent Stephens and Anthony Stewart Part I. Whose Ideal? The History and the Fiction of Postraciality Chapter 1: Frederick Douglass Confronts the Post-Slavery Argument: Regarding Some Origins of the Postracial Idea by Éva Tettenborn Chapter 2: Black Is Red All Over Again: The Returns of Cold War Anticommunist Rhetoric by James Zeigler Chapter 3: College Students Counter the Postracial Narrative by Mary Jo McCloskey Chapter 4: The Death of Race: Living Posthumously in a Postracial Society by Whitney Shepard Chapter 5: Against “Lynch Law” in the Age of Extrajudicial Killing and War Crimes by Spring Ulmer Part II. Applying and Misapplying the Postracial Chapter 6: Are We the “Future Americans”? Charles Chesnutt Anticipates a Postracial American Society by Cherise A. Pollard Chapter 7: The Desire for the End of Race: Barthes, Everett, and the Belief in the Postracial by Anthony Stewart Chapter 8: Guns on the Border of Black and Queer: Firearms and Redemption Schemes in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction by Joshua Brewer Chapter 9: Postracism in Heidi W. Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky: Racial Identity and the New Universal Subject by Márcia C. Agustini Bibliography Index About the Contributors
