Abstract
The co-editors introduce the contributions to the special issue ‘Blurring Boundaries: race and transatlantic identities in literature and culture’. The transatlantic world has been and continues to be transformed through migrations and immigrations, burgeoning tourism, and shifting trade patterns, which call forth the creation of new boundaries and the ‘blurring’ of previous ones. The essays in this issue examine the shifting boundaries of race and racial identities in the Atlantic world, focusing on the arts and other cultural sites where individuals construct and express their identities.
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Notes
Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness; Science & Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 223.
Nell Irvin Painter, ‘What is Whiteness’, New York Times, June 20, 2015. https://doi.org/www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html?smid=fb-share&_r=[1
Kirk Johnson, Richard Pérez-Peña, and John Eligon, ‘Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is Defiant: ‘I Identify as Black”, New York Times, June 16, 2015. https://doi.org/www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html?_r=0
Baz Dreisinger. ‘Blackish in America’, New York Times Book Review, June 7, 2015, 1. The book reviewed is
Mat Johnson Loving Day (New York: Speigal & Grau, 2015).
Dreisinger ‘Blackish’, 30.
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 10.
Cheryl Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Random House, 1998), 112.
Kate Flint, ‘Transatlantic Currents’, American Literary History 21, no. 2 (2009): 325.
J. R. Oldfield, ‘Transatlanticism, Slavery, and Race’, American Literary History 14, no. 1 (2002): 131.
Evelyn O’Callaghan. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804-1939: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’ (New York: Routledge, 2004), 176.
Ibid., 178.
Theodore Stanton, ‘Frederick Douglass in Paris’, Open Court, 1, no. 6 (1887): 151.
Geneva Southall, Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-Composer: Continually Enslaved (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), ix.
Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 43
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5.
Ellen Samuels, ‘Reading Race through Disability: Slavery and Agency in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and ‘Those Extraordinary Twins”, The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 60.
Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 43.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4.
James T. Farrell, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (New York: Library of America, 2004), 451.
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Elizabeth T. Kenney is Assistant Dean, Research and Graduate Studies and visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Salem State University, Massachusetts. Her recent work focuses on nineteenth-century New England culture in a transatlantic context. She is currently working on an annotated edition of Jeannette Hart’s complete writings.
Sirpa Salenius is a Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, and she is also affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland. Her publications focus on Transatlantic Studies, on examining the presence of American artists and writers in Italy and on exploring gender, sexuality, and race in the transatlantic context. Among her recent books is Rose Elizabeth Cleveland: First Lady and Literary Scholar (2014) and An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming, 2016).
Whitney Womack Smith earned an MA in English from University of Missouri and a PhD in English from Purdue University. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing at Miami University. She also holds affiliate status in the Black World Studies and Women’ s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s writing, transatlantic literary studies, travel writing, gender studies, and celebrity culture.
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Kenney, E.T., Salenius, S. & Smith, W.W. Blurring boundaries: race and transatlantic identities in culture and society. J Transatl Stud 14, 119–125 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1169867
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1169867