more Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels t. In order to emphasize its importance, he starts by clarifying the term and its special use in the context of official and unofficial discourses as to the ongoing plight of the 'near-white' population of the United States (but not necessarily restricted to this territory).While Sollors does acknowledge the initial - rather general and neutral - meaning of the term ( 'may refer to the crossing of any line that divides social groups'), he refers the reader to an entire line of seminal works on the AfricanAmerican experience, which employ the term in a nar.

Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, among other equally fascinating topics - like the Curse of Ham, the calculus of color, the 'tragic mulatto' -, Wemer Sollors dedicates an entire chapter to the study of passing as a social phenomenon, which greatly influenced the literary production of a particular American epoch and milieu. IntroductionIn his 1997 Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elem.ġ. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment.

Cabana memoriei by Tony Judt