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An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Melissa Poulsen, Tereza Šmilauerová
In Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example
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Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Zachary Manditch-Prottas
Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in
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A Time of Plague: Allegory, Seriality, and Historicity in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Keith Jones
Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying
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Vincent Toro’s Hurricane Formalism MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Sara Thomas
Vincent Toro’s poetry and essays critique the ways that US actions in the wake of natural disasters damage Puerto Rican ecologies and culture. The entwinement of colonialism and natural disaster is the subject of Toro’s two collections, Stereo. Island. Mosaic. (2016) and Tertulia (2020). These collections instruct readers to toggle between close reading of language and formal analysis of genre and
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“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Jenny Kirton
This article examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper
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Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Allison N Harris
This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s
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Catholicism as Environmental Protest in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Andrew M Spencer
The geographical region of the US Southwest now known as New Mexico has been colonized by successive waves of invaders. First, the Spanish arrived carrying with them a militant Catholicism that sought to uproot and replace Native spiritualities. Next, the newly independent Mexican government also used Catholicism as a tool of colonization to counter the threat of Native uprisings and Anglo-American
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“A Poem Is a Gesture toward Home”: Formal Plurality and Black/Queer Critical Hope in Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Kaitlin Hoelzer
Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown’s own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown’s use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the
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“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Edward Avila
This essay investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo
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“We Were Born from Beauty”: Dis/Inheriting Genealogies of Refugee and Queer Shame in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous MELUS Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Jennifer Cho
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Queering Ethnic Rites of Passage: Transparent and One Day at a Time MELUS Pub Date : 2022-04-09 Stephanie Pridgeon
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Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer MELUS Pub Date : 2022-04-04 Nicole Waller
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The Unhurried Hermeneutics of Anti-Black Violence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise MELUS Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Margarita M Castromán Soto
The opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) are undeniably some of her most famous: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out there… . there is time and the day has just begun” (3). While the novel eventually reveals the identity of those who constitute the “they” of the opening action, in a move that has received much critical attention
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The Black Utopia: Secret Societies and Time Travel in W. E. B. Du Bois and Sutton E. Griggs MELUS Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Harper A.
It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel. . . . Here, in this particular exhibit, you’ll find members of the Wondaland and their notorious leader Janelle Monáe, along with her dangerous accomplice Badoula Oblongata. Together, they launched Project Q.U.E.E.N., a musical weapons program in the twenty-first century. Researchers are still deciphering the nature of this program and hunting the various
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“Doomed by the Confusion in Their Design”: Racialized Urban Space, Redlining, and Monolithic Whiteness in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Beckett B.
When Paule Marshall died, aged ninety, on 12 August 2019, her death was overshadowed by that of fellow writer Toni Morrison, who had died the previous week. Compared to the outpouring of obituaries and posthumous praise for Morrison’s work and social impact, the public mourning for the loss of Marshall arrived with some delay and struck an overall quieter chord. Yet Marshall’s passing is doubly painful
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The Diseased Body Politic of Early America in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-26 Basu S.
Comorbidities, previously rare in common parlance, became a ubiquitous word in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Denoting the coexistence of multiple ailments in a patient, the term was used by medical professionals and media commentators alike to account for the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on African Americans. Written forty years before the COVID pandemic, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
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Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature. Jenna Grace Sciuto MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-26 Wilson L.
Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature. Grace SciutoJenna. U of Mississippi P, 2021. xi + 240 pages. $99.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.
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Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism. Edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Weber D.
Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism. CappellEdited by EzraLangJessica. State U of New York P, 2020. xviii + 433 pages. $99.00 cloth; $33.95 paper.
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The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters. Joe Kraus MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Martin S.
The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters. KrausJoe. Cornell UP, 2019. viii + 225 pages. $26.95 cloth.
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Violence, Ritual, and Vogue: Black Queer Feminist Praxis in Motion MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-19 Forsgren L.
Poverty is violence. Lack of autonomy over reproductive decisions is violence. Stripping away access to cultural practices and traditions that allow us to live with our human dignity is violence. Allowing rape to happen generation after generation is violence. —Charlene A. Carruthers (33)
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Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity. Simón Ventura Trujillo MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Duran F.
Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity.TrujilloSimón Ventura. U of Arizona P, 2020. xviii +253 pages. $55.00 cloth; $55.00 e-book.
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Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. Juliana Hu Pegues MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Charlton R.
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. PeguesJuliana Hu. U of North Carolina P, 2021. xvii + 212 Pages. $95.00 hardcover; $32.95 paper.
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Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance. Jeffrey B. Ferguson. Afterword by George B. Hutchinson. Edited and with a Foreword by Werner Sollors MELUS Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Keyser C.
Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance. FergusonJeffrey B.. Afterword by HutchinsonGeorge B.. Edited and with a foreword by SollorsWerner. Rutgers UP, 2021. xiii +144 pages. $65.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
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When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Cutter M.
One of the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is the ongoing precarity of African American people living in what Christina Sharpe refers to as “the wake” of slavery. Due to disparities in medical care, African Americans are nearly three times more likely than whites to contract the virus and twice as likely to die from it (Bloomberg et al.). Yet the COVID-19 crisis merely brings to the fore
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Drowning out Karen in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-23 Ellis A.
A villainous figure emerges in the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued extrajudicial lethal violence leveled against Black life in the United States: the Karen. The Karen figure is so recognizable that it has exploded as a viral cultural trope.11 The Karen compounds the layers of sedimented grief and violence that characterize ongoing racialized oppression, communal loss, and collective
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Submission Information MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-21
MELUS welcomes essays and interviews of interest to those concerned with the multi-ethnic scope of literature in the United States. As the publication of a society of writers, researchers, and teachers, the journal is open to all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches. MELUS seeks, above all, to publish essays that advance ongoing critical conversations about the theoretical, historical, literary
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Journal Information MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-21
SCOPE: First published in 1974, MELUS is a quarterly journal featuring articles, interviews, and reviews encompassing the multi-ethnic scope of American literature, past and present. Most issues are thematically organized for greater understanding of topics. For more information on submissions, see the Submission Information on the final page of this issue.
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Contributors MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-21
José A. de la Garza Valenzuela (delagv@illinois.edu) is assistant professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and faculty affiliate in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of English. His work focuses on Chicanx literature with attention to how the state negotiates the possibility of
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Getting to the Root of US Healthcare Injustices through Morrison’s Root Workers MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-20 Anatol G.
Numerous scholars have explored the figure of the African diaspora ancestor/folk-healer—she who practices “roots” and provides cultural roots/routes to Africa in her community. I illuminate a few of these characters in Toni Morrison’s novels, considering how greater attention to them in the present moment generates significant insights into the two crises that currently plague our nation and much of
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Reclaiming the Street in Toni Morrison’s Jazz MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-19 Smith A.
In the summer of 2017, St. Louis police officers arrested and removed demonstrators protesting the Department of Justice’s decision to not prosecute the now former police officer Jason Stockley on a federal civil rights violation for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith. As Tucker Boulevard was cleared, officers started chanting in unison: “Whose streets? Our streets!” The chant reverberated through the
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“It’s Not My Freedom or Free”: The Big Box and Toni Morrison’s Meditations on Violence, Justice, and Power MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-19 Brown L.
Writing on the bicentennial anniversary of American independence, Toni Morrison reflects on whether—and when—the nation’s promises of freedom and justice will fully extend to its Black population. Morrison acknowledges that “there is repetition of the grotesque in our history. And there is the miraculous walk of trees,” but for her, the heart of the inquiry is “whether our walk is progress or merely
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The Law’s Business: Peculiar Profits in Edward Jones’s The Known World MELUS Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Elizabeth Yukins
This essay examines Edward Jones’s radical historiography in The Known World (2003), specifically how he represents law as a mercurial, illogical, and generative force in the workings of American slavery. Centrally, Jones highlights the viability and profitability of the American nineteenth-century legal system’s absurdities. The essay extends current scholarship to reckon with a central tension in
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Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite. Rodrigo Lazo MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Daniella Cádiz Bedini
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From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. Koritha Mitchell MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Kerstin Rudolph
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“Nothing Made Them Change Their Minds about the Medical Industry”: Medical Abuse, Incarceration, and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Home MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Patrick S Allen
Abstract Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) takes up issues of (anti-)Blackness, eugenics, and the healing powers of communities of Black women. In the novel, Cee, the protagonist’s sister, is hired as a “helper” (explicitly not a “nurse”) for a white eugenicist. Cee is essentially incarcerated at the doctor’s home office, where she is reduced to a sort of living cadaver upon whom the doctor experiments,
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Guest Editors’ Introduction—Visionary Praxis: Paule Marshall’s, Ntozake Shange’s, and Toni Morrison’s Foresight concerning Sick Violence and Violent Sickness MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Robin Brooks,Meina Yates-Richard
Abstract This introduction provides an overview of the special issue that focuses on the interconnections of Black women’s literary studies with the crises of COVID-19 and ongoing anti-Black violence. More specifically, it considers how the work of three renowned writers, Paule Marshall, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison—which collectively spans over fifty years—offers models for how to reimagine our
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Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920. Lucas A. Dietrich MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Allison Fagan
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On Opacity: Toni Morrison’s and Paule Marshall’s Narrative Vision Therapy MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Nicole Morris Johnson
Abstract Acknowledging an ongoing atmosphere of Black death, assault, and pain, and its relationship to a kind of ocular and imaginative distress, this article highlights the urgency of revisiting the lessons embedded in the writing of Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye [1970]), Beloved [1987]) and Paule Marshall (“Reena” [1962], and Praisesong for the Widow [1983]). I join robust conversations in Black
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The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature. Drew Lopenzina MELUS Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Isabel Quintana Wulf
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Loving Mean: Racialized Medicine and the Rise of Postwar Eugenics in Toni Morrison’s Home MELUS Pub Date : 2021-11-18 James Fitz Gerald
This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) against the backdrop of the United States’ well-documented patterns of unconstrained experimentation on racial-minority patients. The essay focuses specifically on contexts of mid-century eugenics, which exposed black Americans, often women, to nonconsensual and nontherapeutic surgical procedures. I argue that Home is not only informed by these traumatic
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Teaching Jewish American Literature. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein MELUS Pub Date : 2021-10-26 Lang J.
Teaching Jewish American Literature. RosenbergRobertaRubinstein Rachel, editors. The Modern Language Association of America, 2020. viii + 347 pages. $75.00 hardcover; $34.00 paperback.
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Techniques of Justice: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race MELUS Pub Date : 2021-10-22 Katherine Fusco, Lynda C. Olman
This essay responds to recent calls for a closer examination of visualizations of race in multi-ethnic literature by revisiting the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in this area: particularly, the infographics he created for the 1900 Paris Exposition and the covers he commissioned for The Crisis during his editorship of that journal. Utilizing an approach derived from Foucault’s theories of panopticism, we
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Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Response to 9/11 MELUS Pub Date : 2021-10-22 Caitlin Simmons
“Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa’s response to 9/11” examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s experimental dissertation—a collection of essays, poetry, and art—that she intermittently edited until her untimely passing in 2004. Published and edited in 2015 with annotations by multicultural scholar, AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa’s final text has not received its fair share of scholarly attention
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Black Insecurity at the End of the World MELUS Pub Date : 2021-10-02 Justin L Mann
“Black Insecurity at the End of the World” examines the sensibility I term black insecurity by reading Colson Whitehead’s 2010 novel Zone One against a backdrop of bioinsecurity and police murder of black people. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, from the same year, when situated in dialogue with Whitehead’s text, show that black insecurity reframes the spatio-temporal
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“But You’re Not at All like Bertha”: Contemporary (Black) Trans* Studies and Richard Wright’s “Man of All Work” MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Guy Mark Foster
This essay mines the intersections among contemporary trans* studies, black feminism, and black studies to reexamine Richard Wright’s short story, ‘Man of All Work’ (1961), depicting a black heterosexual man’s efforts to save his home from foreclosure by dressing in his wife’s clothes to find work. Rather than engage these critical traditions in rigid identitarian terms, this essay uses such scholarship
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“We Are Here”: Race, Gender, and Spaces of “Common Ground” in the Works of John Edgar Wideman, bell hooks, and Jesmyn Ward MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Joel Wendland-Liu
Black-authored self-writing serves as a tool of cultural self-determination and anticipates the concept of “placemaking.” Scholars regard “placemaking” as a process by which people of color struggle to transform space into place, to alter racially segregated spaces into sites of joy, freedom, and political mobilization. This essay evaluates these claims through an exploration of spatial themes in three
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Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, and Alana Yu-Lan Price MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Trosper Z.
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. SchenwarMaya, MacaréJoe, and Yu-lan PriceAlana, editors.Haymarket Books, 2016. 226 pages. $15.29 paperback; $10.79 e-book; $7.49 audiobook.
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Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Robin E. Field MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-22 Karmakar G.
Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction.FieldRobin E.. Clemson UP, 2020. vii + 264 pages. $120.00 hardcover.
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The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History. James H. Cox MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-22 Zink A.
The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History. CoxJames H.. U of Minnesota P, 2019. 274 pages. $108.00 cloth; $27.00 paperback.
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Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel. Mazen Naous MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-22 Sinno N.
Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel. NaousMazen. Ohio State UP, 2020. x+ 209 pages. $22.72 paperback.
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“Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)”: Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-09 José A de la Garza Valenzuela
The interpretation of documents holds together the center of Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines (2003). Presented as time-stamped vignettes detailing the life of laborers at a vineyard for an university assignment, the novel throws into question the distance between the experiences the characters have and those accessible to Leonardo, the ethnographer-in-training. In Crossing Vines, queer migrant
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Journal Information MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-02
MELUS welcomes essays and interviews of interest to those concerned with the multi-ethnic scope of literature in the United States. As the publication of a society of writers, researchers, and teachers, the journal is open to all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches. MELUS seeks, above all, to publish essays that advance ongoing critical conversations about the theoretical, historical, literary
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Journal Information MELUS Pub Date : 2021-09-02
SCOPE: First published in 1974, MELUS is a quarterly journal featuring articles, interviews, and reviews encompassing the multi-ethnic scope of American literature, past and present. Most issues are thematically organized for greater understanding of topics. For more information on submissions, see the Submission Information on the final page of this issue.
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Contributors MELUS Pub Date : 2021-08-24
Claudia Alonso-Recarte (claudia.alonso@uv.es) is associate professor in English at the Universitat de València, Spain. Her research mainly revolves around the field of (critical) Animal studies, with a particular interest in ethical representations of nonhuman otherness in literature and the performing arts. Her research has often intersected with ethnic studies and themes related to racial and national
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Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” MELUS Pub Date : 2021-08-30 Patrick F Walter
This article examines the intersection of drug-use, aesthetics, and Blackness at work in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). While much of the scholarship on Baldwin’s story has dwelt on the significance of music, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent and related theme of drug addiction and intoxication. Through an historical contextualization and analysis of the
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Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues MELUS Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Laura T Smith
This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (1999) mobilizes a conspiracy theory concept of anti-black violence in America. The highly discursive play depicts a pair of black brothers named Lincoln and Booth as they banter, argue, and compete with each other over games of three-card monte. In the final scene of the play, the brothers fulfil the destiny inscribed
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Place-Based Learning in Three Bildungsromane: To Kill a Mockingbird; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; and Under the Feet of Jesus MELUS Pub Date : 2021-07-16 Jennifer Horwitz
This article, which focuses on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976); and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), argues that the American bildungsroman is a genre that is uniquely situated to challenge and recast dominant assumptions about education in the United States. Although mainstream forms of education are often presented