Dean J. Franco - Böcker

In ""Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing"", Dean J. Franco offers a comparative approach to ethnic literature that begins by accounting for the intrinsic historical, geographical, and political contingencies of different American cultures. These contingencies, he argues, dictate critical perspectives that are ultimately ethical and that establish the terms for the study of ethnic literature in the first place. Franco looks at a range of writing, from novels by Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, and Alejandro Morales, to literature and criticism by Tony Kushner, Cherrie Moraga, and Jose Limon, among others. While the early chapters focus specifically on what mourning means in these different cultural contexts in the representation of and response to trauma and loss, the later ones critically examine metaphors of the borderlands, diaspora, and nationalism. Proposing a method that both accounts for what is common in ethnic literary cultures and describes what is at stake in understanding their differences, the author extends current discussions of identity politics, race theory, trauma studies, and multiculturalism into a praxis of comparative ethnic literary criticism that is rooted in an ethics of respect.

Los Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.—and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers—this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.