Non-white Characters Research Articles

“A room of experience into which I cannot enter”: John Steinbeck on Race

Abstract In her seminal study on intellectuals and the civil rights struggle, Carol Polsgrove castigated “white intellectuals, in the North and South” for their reticence. After Brown v. Board of Education “opened the door to change,” she argues, America's leading intellectuals simply “milled about outside the door, debating amongst themselves how fast America ought to go through it.” Yet what of John Steinbeck? How did the compassionate advocate of social justice in the thirties respond to the racial upheaval of the fifties and sixties, a time when his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature made him once more a highly visible public intellectual? This paper applies a historical perspective in examining Steinbeck's contributions (or lack thereof) to America's race issue, with a particular emphasis on his nonfiction and personal correspondence. It is argued that Steinbeck was typically uncomfortable airing his support for the civil rights movement and deliberately avoided presenting himself as a spokesman on the issue. While in his fiction he tended to indulge in stereotyping, he did so with no perceptible intent to denigrate his nonwhite characters. His preoccupation, even when addressing the race issue directly, was always with the danger of moral decline in American society at large. Steinbeck's African American was presented as a dignified and courageous foil to the materialistic white American, who was “trapped and entangled” in avaricious individualism.

‘Don’t Call Me White’: Fashioning Sami Zayn’s Arabic and transnational identities

Abstract Though mainstream professional wrestling depends on and benefits from anglo-normative, Western hegemony, contemporary wrestling also subverts and parodies it. One character who can be read as white, Sami Zayn, undermines this hegemony through subtly asserting his Arabic and transnational identities. In wrestling, a character’s apparel functions as a metonym for the character, and with his tights Zayn counters mainstream Islamophobic discourse about Arabs post 9/11. Zayn’s tights are decorated with many national flags, Arabic characters and Roman letters to show he possesses a complex identity influenced by not only his ethnic heritage (Syrian) and country of birth (Canada), but every country he has visited and the cultures within them. His popularity and success allow a space within World Wrestling Entertainment for non-white characters to perform identities not limited to caricatures of their ethnic and racial backgrounds.

From the Advent of Multiculturalism to the Elision of Race: The Representation of Race Relations in Disney Animated Features (1995-2009)

As one of the most powerful purveyors of entertainment in the world, the Disney company has produced blockbuster films, including animated features that have enjoyed enduring popularity. Reflecting and shaping to some extent American popular culture and ideology, they have left vivid images in our memory. Arguably, one of Disney’s most ubiquitous symbol is the beautiful white princess. The representation of race relations in Disney films has always been problematic, sometimes sparking heated debates: non-white characters were either absent or stereotypically portrayed. Nonetheless, in parallel with the advent of multiculturalism in the 1990s, a series of films have foregrounded a new approach on these portrayals, the most notable being Pocahontas (1995), Atlantis (2001), and The Princess and the Frog (2009). In this article, I will examine the evolution of the representation of race, focusing on the film texts and their historical and cultural context, production history, and critical reception. I will argue that the apparent messages of tolerance and promotion of multiculturalism were accompanied and slowly replaced by a colour-blind erasure of race.

Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants by Lydia Kokkola (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants by Lydia Kokkola Laura Robinson Kokkola, Lydia. Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2013. 236pp. ISBN 9789027201553. A welcome exploration of the representation of adolescent sexuality in young adult fiction, Lydia Kokkola’s Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants fills a gap in contemporary scholarship [End Page 88] with its specific focus. Reading a corpus of close to 200 young adult novels and short fiction written in English since the Second World War, this book provides an analysis of the ideology of adolescence and its intersection with the representation of carnality. Kokkola presents three basic premises: first, that adolescence is constructed as a time of angst in order to exalt adulthood and preserve the notion of the innocent child; second, that Anglophone culture is much more fearful of teenaged sexuality than its European counterparts; and third, that sexuality is the rigorously-policed boundary between adulthood and adolescence. Through her chapters on sexual empowerment, pregnancy, queerness, bestiality (metamorphosis into animals primarily), and sexual abuse, Kokkola finds that adolescent carnality is variously punished, policed, or problematized. The strength of Kokkola’s investigation rests in her identification of the power of the reader to read queerly, to “read back and produce counter narratives,” as she does in her study (214). While adult writers construct these stories where teens are anguished over sexuality, and then punished for it, Kokkola suggests that the reader potentially offers an intervention in that representation. This book breaks new ground by offering a full-length, sustained exploration of the contentious topic of literature for young people and sexuality. Kokkola’s writing style and sense of humour makes this work infinitely readable as well. She inserts parenthetical asides where she admits to her actual, non-academic response to something, for example, and she writes with a personality that is delightful. When she discusses the representation of crisis focused on adolescence, she writes: “Well, excuse me Chicken Licken, but I’m having a hard time working up a sense of anxiety about this particular crisis” (209). As I read this book, I found myself growing increasingly disturbed that Kokkola did not engage with issues of race, and indeed, race only came up when the texts presented non-white characters. Kokkola does confront race, if it is late in the book. She writes, “So far, my enquiry has treated race as though it were a neutral category, although it clearly is not” (174). She points out here that her corpus contains mostly white characters and that, when racial or ethnic minorities appear, they are problematically connected to victimhood. I would be remiss, as well, if I did not mention the numerous typos that pepper the pages of this edition. I’m not certain on whose shoulders the responsibility for the missing words, misspellings and sentence structure problems should rest; however, it seems to me that John Benjamins might consider employing a more attentive copy editor and proofreader. That said, this book is a delightful read and an important contribution to the study of sexuality and of young adult fiction. I highly recommend it. [End Page 89] Laura Robinson Royal Miltary College of Canada Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc

MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s ed. by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing (review)

Reviewed by: MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s ed. by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing Rebecca Hill MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s. Edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013. The most recent collection generated from a conference at the University of Illinois Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Mad Men, Mad World covers mostly the first four seasons of the television show, which is now in its seventh and final season. The unit’s weblog, Kritik (http://unitcrit.blogspot.com) currently recapping Season 7, now includes a header explaining that it is “in collaboration with the publication” of the book. The decision to publish before the series conclusion means that critics’ judgments about the ultimate meaning of the show may be defied by Mad Men’s as-yet unseen narrative resolution. However, set in media res, Mad Men, Mad World can be read as the academic version of a tie-in, a companion to the show’s final seasons and a guidebook to the Mad-blogosphere—but it may require a second edition. Editors Goodlad, Kaganovsky and Rushing argue that Mad Men is a “groundbreaking approach to period drama” that has “altered the vision of the 1960s and of pastness itself” (2) as well as a strategically anachronistic representation of advertising that enables audiences to “explore the moral quandaries of a corrupting world”(15). Taking issue with Mark Greif’s dismissal of the show as an exercise in “Now We Know Better,” Mad Men, Mad World’s essayists offer more complex arguments about what the 1960s mean in the present and how historical fiction works in general (Greif, “You’ll Love the Way it Makes You Feel,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008). The deliberateness of the show’s producers makes Mad Men an excellent focal point for analysis that includes images, fashion, and architecture. Its critical reception allows authors to discuss the values of elite taste in the present; its approach to advertising throws the importance of television as the ultimate medium of consumption into high relief. In addition to connecting the series to the history of advertising, Mad Men, Mad World addresses the relationship of Mad Men to films and novels from the 1950s and 1960s and to television history. More so than the blog-originated Mad Men Unbuttoned by Natasha Vargas Cooper (2010), it probes inter-textual references for their larger cultural significance regarding race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism, and connects these to contemporary scholarship on television and advertising. The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Mad Worlds,” includes essays about Mad Men’s representation of history qua history as well as of specific issues such as civil rights and abortion. The second section, “Mad Aesthetics,” concerns the meaning and uses of style and image for Mad Men and its marketers, fans, and advertisers, while essays in the third section “Made Men” meditate on what the show says about identity. Mad Men, Mad World would work for courses introducing more general topics: television criticism, cultural studies, and historical fiction. [End Page 104] While the authors generally find much to admire in Mad Men, several essays are highly critical. Kent Ono argues that despite being self-reflective about race, Mad Men “unnecessarily and objectionably produces the irrelevance” of non-white characters in a way that mirrors the racism it seeks to critique (306). Jeremy Varon and Clarence Lang note the absence of representations of characters engaged in Sixties social movements, with Lang arguing that the show “naturalizes a Black quietude that did not actually exist” in the North and Varon pointing out that marginal characters who are engaged in social protest or counter-culture are portrayed as cynical or shallow, so that the narrative remains “captive to the condition it diagnoses” (258). Mad Men is, the editors have convincingly shown, a vexed reckoning with how we got to where we are now. In contrast to “Now We Know Better,” these critics might find Mad Men’s perspective is more accurately described as “Plus ça change. . .” Rebecca Hill Kennesaw State University...

‘Your heart goes out to the Australian Tourist Board’: critical uncertainty and the management of censure in Chris Lilley's TV comedies

Chris Lilley's domestic reputation as a writer and creator of nationally award-winning material has largely not suffered, in contrast to other shows featuring provocative themes. What is distinctive about Lilley's work that allows him to forestall accusations of ‘racism’ that other shows would face? In order to address these questions, this article investigates key components of Lilley's comedies in three major contexts. First, I consider the work in the framework of post-2000 Australia. How might the depicted themes of aspiration and disenfranchisement dispose at least ‘middle’ Australian viewers to find favour with Lilley? Second, I look at the material in the context of ‘cringe’ comedy. A key theme that emerges throughout critical appraisals is the uncertainty about the ethical value of the humour. How do Lilley's shows create a sense of critical ambiguity that plays out in Lilley's favour? Finally, I examine the framing of Lilley's non-white characters, contrasting critical responses to them with the reception of another well-known performance of blackface on Hey Hey It's Saturday. How might the more contained criticism of performance and scripting flaws (that Lilley's work received) displace more serious charges?

Starry white trek: Science fiction and racial discourse

This article demonstrates that the science fiction’s visions of the future are not exempt from problems of rasism even when openly opposed it. Film and TV Star Trek production is commonly regarded as a significant example of courageous and effective intervention of mass culture on the widespread racial prejudices legitimized by the public policy. Subsequent interpretations, however, in its ‘emancipatory text’ finds smuggled recurrences of the same racial discourse against which it acted, whether it concerns other ‘races’ on Earth or space aliens. A fair interpretation would have to conclude that the white male norm requires effort of its ‘deconstruction’ that would be more extensive then involvement in the program the non-white characters - if we do not want to extend his exclusive and discriminatory rule, in mitigated or disguised form, to the galaxy.

Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York

Clem Spender's child--growing up on charity in a Negro hovel, or herded in one of the plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first--she felt it in every fibre of her body.--Edith Wharton, Old Maid (1924) I hate to be photographed because results are so trying to my vanity; but I would do anything to obliterate the Creole lady who has been masquerading in the papers under my name for the last year.--Edith Wharton, in a letter to William Crary Brownell (1902) The Children: lives with Tina lives with niggers! A Boy: Shame on you living with Niggers! Another Boy: Nigger! Tina: I'm not!--Edith Wharton, The Old Maid, stage adaptation by Zoe Akins (1935) Old Maid is a novella brimming with racial angst--about being racially misconstrued, revealed, contaminated, diseased, and obliterated. In this tale about illegitimacy, in which the author looks back on the Old New York of the 1850s, Edith Wharton finally explores the racial foundations of the world she had described in her earlier novels, moving from its surface to its anxious roots. What simmered in The House of or The Age of Innocence on the back burner boils on the front flame in Old Maid. Here Wharton not only confronts slavery, America's racial past, and its continuing racial anxieties, but she also secretly destabilizes her own racial identity as white. Perhaps because Wharton invisibly implicates herself in this text, its racial politics, despite being central and unrelenting, are also somewhat hidden and have escaped critical attention. (1) This is all the more surprising as Wharton scholars have become increasingly interested in Wharton's racial politics and the role plays in her writing. This essay will reveal the centrality of in the Old Maid and hopefully contribute to this ongoing critical conversation by destabilizing some of its most fundamental assumptions. In combining racial issues of 1850s New York with those of the 1920s, Wharton creates a sophisticated text that links her writing both to mid-nineteenth-century writing about slavery and to 1920s writing about race. Through this double nature of the text, Wharton is able to reflect upon the various functions of race in New York and in American culture in these eras. These reflections are by no means those of a distanced writer; by linking the novella's plot to her own autobiography, Wharton claims the nonwhite characters of her tale as her possible ancestors and thus invisibly destabilizes her own whiteness. In doing so, she suggests racial politics quite different from the conservative white stance most critics have attributed to her as she depicts the enforced homogeneity of Old New York as stifling and unsustainable. In tracing the slow demise of the ruling class, Wharton ends her plot with a love match--an exceedingly rare event in Wharton's fiction--that depicts racial hybridity as being more fulfilling than an engineered, monitored whiteness. At the same time, Wharton also clearly traces the racial anxieties of the New York of both eras, leaving no doubt about the considerable challenges her mixed couple will face. Edith Wharton as Race Writer Over the last fifteen years or so, Wharton critics have slowly begun to tackle Wharton's view on race, a task met with difficulty from its inception. On the one hand, there was Wharton's rather overt anti-Semitism, visible in her letters and her fiction, which many critics had avoided. (2) On the other, there seemed to be little mention in Wharton's fiction of African Americans and America's slaveholding past. These poles marked the difficult critical territory of determining Wharton's racial politics. Slowly, however, a body of work did emerge. (3) In 1994 Dale Bauer published Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, which examined the cultural politics of Wharton's later fiction, and particularly her interest in eugenics; in the same year, my article 'The Impossible Rosedale': Race and the Reading of The House of Mirth discussed both the historical context of Wharton's portrayal of Rosedale and the central, functional role anti-Semitism plays in her novel. …

The Master's Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze in Ian McEwan's Saturday

ABSTRACT Racist, sexist, and cultural essentialisms deny people subjectivity, and some post-9/11 literature suggest methods for resistance. In Ian McEwan's best-selling novel Saturday, white protagonist Henry Perowne may initially seem more likely to uphold rather than resist class, gender, and racial stereotypes. However, Perowne's objectification of three of the novel's nonwhite characters demonstrates how essentialisms reinforce the “master narratives” of financial wealth, professional success, and family bliss, and, in an unexpected twist, indicates how such pervasive stereotypes might be undermined.

Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction Suzanne Del Gizzo Amy L. Strong . Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xiii + 174 pp. Over the past twenty-five years, Ernest Hemingway has been undergoing the scholarly equivalent of an "extreme makeover." In the early 1980s, criticism of the great, macho, celebrity writer of modern American literature, who inspired protective loyalty in some critics and outright antipathy in others, seemed to have reached a saturation point. One leading critic even announced that he believed "there was nothing more to be said about Hemingway's fiction" (qtd. in Strong vii). But the publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 changed everything. Since 1986, Hemingway scholarship has become a boom industry as critics have tackled issues of gender and sexual identity from nearly every conceivable angle and in relation to every piece of writing in Hemingway's oeuvre. As a result, long held beliefs about the author's misogyny and machismo have been challenged, and a newer, less easily pigeon-holed Hemingway has emerged. Amy L. Strong's Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction continues this makeover trend, just as the field appears to be reaching the point of exhaustion again, redirecting attention to Hemingway's interest in race and racial identity. Strong has been interested in Hemingway's relationship to race for quite some time (her first article on Hemingway and native Americans appeared about twelve years ago), but her decision to write what I believe is the first book-length study of Hemingway and race was prompted by the 2005 publication of Under Kilimanjaro, the scholarly edition of Hemingway's book based on his second African safari in 1953–54 (first published in 1999 as True At First Light). For Strong, the publication of Under Kilimanjaro, with its candid account [End Page 842] of Hemingway's desire to become a member of the Wakamba tribe, provides critics with the occasion to address what she rightly sees as the author's lifelong fascination with race as seriously and comprehensively as they have addressed gender issues in his work. She believes the time is ripe to challenge the perception that Hemingway is one of the "whitest writers in the American literary tradition" (11). Inspired by strategies pioneered by Toni Morrison in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark, Strong presents her project as "a revisionist reading of Hemingway's work" in which she examines "how Hemingway's fiction looks if we bring his nonwhite characters out of the background and asks how we must define Hemingway's conception of American identity differently when it is constructed on the basis of race" (12, 13). She acknowledges that there is already a sizeable body of scholarship on Hemingway and race, but she claims that these past efforts defanged Hemingway's racial obsessions by translating them into more familiar (and less controversial) motifs in Hemingway scholarship such as father-son relationships, primitivism, lost wilderness, and male initiation rites. The effect, she explains, is that "The critical response to issues of race in Hemingway's works . . . reveals patterns of marginalization, disavowal, and outright dismissal" (4). Her project seeks to remedy this situation by emphasizing Hemingway's awareness of and engagement with the realities of race in the construction of his nonwhite characters and his portrayals of racial interaction. It is an ambitious and worthwhile project, but the results are uneven in part because Strong cannot consistently anchor Hemingway in such realities. The first two chapters on the Nick Adams stories are the strongest in the book and will likely become a standard for future scholarship. In the first chapter, Strong persuasively argues that Nick Adams's identity cannot be fully understood without historicizing his relationship to native Americans, a relationship that she argues is "based on racial domination" (16). Through an effective pairing of "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," Strong captures Hemingway's attempts to present race as both biological and cultural, which allows him to play with racial categories in ways that capture the unstable and shifting power dynamics between Indians and whites. The next chapter focuses on Nick's relationship to...

THE SAVAGE MAGNET: RACIALIZATION OF THE OCCULT BODY IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION

“The Savage Magnet: Racialization of the Occult Body in Late Victorian Fiction” considers how late Victorian occult fiction written by women employs the racial identities of its characters. The essay analyses Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire (1897), Cora Linn Daniels’ The Bronze Buddha (1899) and Marie Corelli's Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which all feature non-white characters with occult powers. Aligning dark bodies with dangerous, mysterious, magnetic abilities, this fiction often embodies imperialist and nationalistic assumptions about British subjects in non-English bodies. These dark bodies, in turn, provide allegories about the British Empire and its internal race-based conflicts and power structures. In these novels a quadroon Jamaican heiress, a half-Indian, half-American Brahmin and a Chaldean beauty provide examples of how mixed-race or non-English characters vacillate between heroic and villainous roles, reinforcing Victorian concepts of white racial and cultural ascendancy.

Big Breasts and Bad Guys: Depictions of Gender and Race in Video Games

ABSTRACT Video games have become a powerful force in the culture. Depictions of women in video games are scarce and highly stereotypical. Women are usually minor characters, are seen as victims rather than heroines, and are depicted in highly sexualized ways. Whereas early games had only a few representations of people of color, people of color were often depicted in derogatory and unflattering ways. Current games continue to employ racial stereotypes by limiting the roles and representations of non-White characters. Gender and racial stereotyping in video games is discussed, and ways to raise awareness of the issues are suggested.

The Modern(?) Korean Woman in Prime-Time: Analyzing the Representation of Sun on the Television Series Lost

This article investigates the representation of Sun, the most prominent non-white female character on ABC's Lost. Given the importance of Sun's character in terms of visibility for Korean women specifically (and Asian women generally) coupled with the fact that Lost under-represents women in general, her role provides a substantial case-study of gender within the science fiction genre. Through a narrative analysis of the first season, we demonstrate the simultaneously flawed and empowered dimensions of Sun, who challenges some of the stereotypes viewers have come to expect from prime-time drama. Elements of colonialism, interpersonal relationships, and the castaway narrative in Lost are also explored.

Race, Class, and the Pressure to Pass in American Maternal Melodrama: The Case of Stella Dallas

THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella (1937) attests to the richness of the film and to its capacity to illuminate the complex representations of motherhood in American culture. Stella tells the story of a working-class woman who aspires that her daughter Laurel might gain acceptance in her father's upper-class milieu, only to discover that her own lack of pedigree threatens her child's social future. Stella chooses, therefore, to sever her relationship with her child so that Laurel might live as a member of the upper class-a decision that raises questions about the nature of class hierarchies and the possibilities of class mobility in American society. Scholarly analyses of Stella struggle with these questions, particularly when it comes to Stella's capacity to make choices and follow her own desire, for while Stella demonstrates that she can behave in an upper-class manner when she must, she apparently chooses not to and thereby estranges herself from her beloved daughter, an act that seems incompatible with Stella's maternal devotion. My contribution to the discourse on Stella's ostensibly paradoxical acts of selfactualization and self-sacrifice is to contend that much of the film's narrative logic emerges from the tradition of racial passing narratives, specifically scenarios where a person with black parentage is able to pass for white. Stella employs the logical structure of passing scenarios and associates Stella's character with stereotypes of black womanhood in order to present Stella's class status as a physical and inherited trait-a conceit that allows audiences to accept Stella's self-exclusion from the promise of the American dream. drama of self-sacrifice and maternal disappearance in Stella corresponds to larger patterns in American maternal melodrama. Christian Viviani outlines this trend in Who Is Without Sin?: Maternal Melodrama in American RIm, 1930-39, where he explains that in the 19305 the pressures of the Depression made Americans less interested in melodramas set in a romanticized European milieu and more determined to address domestic issues, either by representing Americans' economic and social problems or by offering escapism to a beleaguered population (85). Thus began the Americanization of the maternal melodrama, where maternal sacrifice became a high priority: The maternal melo in its American vein is an apologia for total renunciation, total sacrifice, total self-abnegation (96). Stella's sacrifice of her maternal bonds corresponds to this American model; unlike the mothers in European melodrama, who have their children confiscated, American mothers give up their children in order to protect them from their damaging social influence. I argue that American melodrama's substantial variations from the European model are founded on the unique racial dynamics of American society, where one's racial identity, both actual and perceived, has a central role in kinship structures and social relations. My analysis of Stella will Illustrate how the emphasis on maternal sacrifice in the Americanized maternal melodrama emerges from America's racial history and its corresponding narrative tradition of the child whose social capital rests on the mother's disappearance and anonymity. Typically, the melodrama scholarship on race focuses on films featuring multiple nonwhite characters and directly addressing racial conflicts. Stella may seem like an unusual choice to extend the discourse on race, for although are black characters in the film, their appearances are brief and scattered, to the extent that some viewers might not even notice their presence. Indeed, E. Ann Kaplan, In her seminal article Mothering, Feminism and Representation: Maternal Melodrama and the Women's RIm 1910-40, asserts that there is no race issue in Stella Dallas (133). However, if we closely examine the narrative functions of the black characters, each playing a mammy or Aunt Jemima role, while reevaluating the complexities of Stella's motherhood within the parameters of race drama, It becomes clear that American traditions of racial passing narratives, representations of black women's motherhood and sexuality, and the peculiar relationship between race and class In American society together account for the unique characteristics of American maternal melodrama, and not only in instances where race Is clearly at issue. …

Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing and De-Colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity

There is, in Herman Melville’s works, a constant struggle to situate the narrative within the context of a racial and ethnic “Other.” Melville’s narrators—almost invariably white, Euro-American males—appear at times in tense opposition to, and at other times in social harmony with, the African, Native American, Polynesian, and Oriental presences in his texts. In essence, Melville situates these non-white characters against the dominantly-raced narrator as racial “Others.” This ethnic “othering” entails a dangerous politics of racial separation, hierarchizing, and colonization, yet simultaneously allows for and even encourages a social critique of nineteenth-century white American imperialist attitudes toward non-white peoples. Indeed, this is what makes Melville such a difficult figure to decipher both literarily and historically. By marking these races as alien and “other,” indeed by striving to “mark” them at all, Melville at once conducts a constructive anthropological study as well as sets the destructive foundation for a race-driven, American imperialist project aimed at alienated and “othered” races. Indeed, Melville constructs for his readership a difficult paradox; his texts on the one hand call for white intervention and colonization of ethnic and racial spaces, and on the other, they illuminate the counter-productivity of such colonization. What, then, was Melville’s relationship to the ongoing imperialist project of nineteenth-century America? To reach an answer to this question we will examine Melville’s political relationship to two Pacific Ocean land groups (the Marquesan Islands and the Sandwich Islands), establish a pattern to his paradoxical imperialist and anti-imperialist philosophies, and finally, construct a model of his international, inter-ethnic political philosophy.

Advanced Data Reduction and Control of High-Precision Low-Temperature Experiments

Advances in low-temperature techniques allow us to measure temperature with a precision approaching one part in 1011. Using an rf-biased Josephson-array voltage source, we can control the power dissipated in electric heaters to the same level. At this level of precision, the algorithm used for thermal control and its sensitivity to the non-white character of the input noise become important factors limiting the temperature stability of fundamental physics experiments. We consider the problem of measuring slowly changing data in the presence of both while noise and sudden, short noise spikes. Such data is obtained in high-resolution experiments in earth-orbit, where the thermometers are struck and heated by charged particles. We devise control schemes that improve upon traditional methods. Specifically, a proportional-integral/proportional controller has a better step response, and applying a Kalman filter to the input signal significantly decreases noise injected by the feedback loop. We also describe a new algorithm for spike removal that is robust and has a fixed worst-case execution time. It is significantly faster than the algorithm used in experiments previously flown in space.

Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lee's "China Boy"

Would Ahab have been content merely to go the distance with the White whale? --A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (1956) would not have written Boy had my stepmother been alive. --Gus Lee, qtd. in Sherwin In his semi-autobiographical first novel, Boy (1991), Gus Lee raises serious issues with the solemnity of a stand-up comedian. Reflecting on his childhood, the protagonist/narrator says, I was trying to become an accepted black male youth in the 1950s--a competitive, dangerous, and harshly won objective. This was all the more difficult because was (14). While the issues are assimilation, violence in America, and the construction of national, racial, ethnic, and gender identities, the tone of self deprecation and rendering of childhood experiences without sentimentality has echoes of comic monologues by Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. But Cosby and Allen never created a mother like Edna. Here the similarities end. For the Chinese experience of assimilation is different from those of Blacks and Jews just as their experiences of assimilation differ. (1) Although Edna does personify the wicked stepmother of legend and fairytale, her racial otherness as white complicates the stereotype and is integral to Lee's engagement with white America. (2) Given that she is seen solely through the eyes of her seven-year old Chinese American stepson Kai Ting, it is not surprising that she is first described in terms of her difference to his Chinese birth mother. But the absence of any other white characters in the novel, in particular the absence of any positive white characters, implies that his stepmother is meant to be a representative white figure and that whiteness, power, and oppression go together. (3) In contrast, the range of black characters makes it impossible to equate Blackness solely with either good or evil. (4) As this essay will demonstrate, the conflict between the novel's Chinese American protagonist and his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stepmother is racialized in ways that the conflict between Kai Ting and his African American antagonist Big Willie is not. This makes confronting whiteness a significant, though not immediately obvious, theme of the novel. Boy is packaged by its publishers (in its cover design and in its inclusion of the protagonist's family-tree, for example) to suggest that it will meet an American audience's expectations of Oriental exoticism. However, from the novel's first paragraphs, in which Kai Ting recalls being soundly beaten and called China Boy shitferbrains by a black rival on the streets of San Francisco, Lee's concerns are with violence, race, and gender in a specifically American context. While studies of Lee's text have up to now focused on the motif of violence and its status as a marker of differences between Chinese American and African American characters, whiteness and the protagonist's attitude toward it have not received any substantial attention. (5) As a result, Boy can be mistaken for much contemporary writing which, according to bell hooks, makes race always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even (hooks 54). Undeniably, there is much in the novel that might suggest this (for example, the fight scenes between Kai Ting and Big Willie); however, an examination of the role of Kai Ting's stepmother within the text indicates that Lee has a broader agenda. The novel is one of resistance. In Boy Kai Ting confronts American whiteness in the person of his stepmother. He acquires strength to defeat her by association with other non-white characters and through boxing. Like most Chinese American novels, Lee's text is about the complexities and tensions of assimilation within US society and culture. Kai Ting's father clearly wishes his Chinese son to adopt what he sees as American ways. Kai Ting describes himself as having understood calligraphy and valued food as a result, but physical games and sports . …

Le Docteur noir : A French Romantic Drama in Blackface

In recent years, studies of black and Orientalist characters in nineteenth-century French prose fiction and poetry have proliferated. 1 Scholarly attention to theatrical works featuring people of color, while growing, has developed far more slowly. 2 This disparity may be explained, to some extent, by the non-canonical status of the majority of those playwrights whose texts include non-white characters and by the conventional nature of their pieces, most of which were written for the popular theaters located on the Boulevards of Paris. Yet given the resurgence of interest in French melodrama over the past twenty-five years, such an explanation is not entirely satisfactory. 3 My purpose here, however, is not so much to explain why there have been relatively few scholarly analyses of non-European figures in nineteenth-century French drama as it is to add to existing studies on the subject. To that end, I propose to undertake an examination of Le Docteur noir, a Romantic (melo)drama by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Philippe Dumanoir that opened a successful run at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin on 30 July 1846 and was soon consecrated by the creation of a parody entitled Le Docteur blanc, ou Pierrot dans les colonies at the Théâtre des Funambules (12 Oct. 1846). 4

Romancing the shadow: Poe and race

Edgar Allen Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century Southerner, Poe was a deeply ambiguous figure, evading race issues while living among them, and traversing the North-South border with little sensitivity to its political implications. In this tightly organized volume, a handful of leading Americanists revisit the Poe issue, re-examining what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.

The Cow, the Cook, and the Quaker: Fifty Years of Spokes-Character Advertising

This study explores how spokes-characters in print ads have changed over time from the 1950s to the present. A content analysis of spokes-character ads in one men's and one women's magazine shows that spokes-character advertising is an important communication tool directed at both male and female audiences. Contrary to previous speculation, the use of spokes-characters in magazine ads does not appear to be increasing. Spokes-character ad styles have changed over time but no increase in female or non-white characters seems to have occurred since the 1950s. Differences between the types of spokes-characters used to appeal to male and female audiences are noted.