Performing Americanness : race, class, and gender in modern African-American and Jewish-American literature
"In Performing Americanness, Catherine Rottenberg raises important questions about what it means to be American through a wholly original analysis of modern African-American and Jewish-American literature. The book illustrates how the novels of Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan help us to understand the specific ways that gender, class, race, and ethnicity have regulated the identity formation of African and Jewish Americans, as well as the ways these categories have helped produce and sustain social stratification in the United States more generally. Through the author's comparative lens, new light is shed on fundamental internal and external conflicts--especially of identity--that took place as both groups sought to move from margin to center by carving out a niche for themselves in mainstream American society."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2008
Dartmouth College Press : Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, N.H., ©2008
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 180 pages ; 24 cm
9781584656821, 1584656824
170203948
Introduction : performing Americanness
Performativity in context
Passing : race, identification, and desire
American dream discourse and class performativity
Race and the making of ethnicity
Race and the new woman
A parrot of words and monkey of manners