Malini Johar Schueller - Böcker

This remarkable book, written by former slave David F. Dorr, published in the mid-nineteenth century and only recently rediscovered, is an uncommon travel narrative. In the 1850s Dorr accompanied Louisiana plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes on a tour of the world's major cities, with the promise that when they returned to the United States, Dorr would be given his freedom. When that promise was broken, Dorr escaped to Ohio and wrote of his experiences in A Colored Man Round the World. Malini Johar Schueller has edited and annotated the 1858 text and added a critical introduction that provides a useful context for understanding and appreciating this important but heretofore neglected document. Her edition of A Colored Man Round the World provides a fascinating account of Dorr's negotiation of the conflicting roles of slave versus man, taking into account all of the racial complexities that existed at the time. As a traveler abroad, Dorr claimed an American selfhood that allowed him mobility in Europe, and he benefited from the privileges accorded American "Orientalists" venturing in the near East. However, any empowerment that Dorr experienced while a tourist vanished upon his return to America.The book will be welcomed for the rare perspective it provides of the mid-nineteenth century, through the eyes of an African-American slave and for the light it casts on world and U.S. history as well as on questions of racial and national identity.Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English, University of Florida.

U.S. Orientalisms is the first extensive and politicized study of nineteenth century American discourses that helped build an idea of nationhood with control over three "Orients": the "Barbary" Orient; the Orient of Egypt; and the Orient of India. Malini Johar Schueller persuasively argues that current notions about the East can be better understood as latter-day manifestations of the earlier U.S. visions of the Orient refracted variously through millennial fervor, racial-cultural difference, and ideas of Westerly empire. This book begins with an examination of the literature of the "Barbary" Orient generated by the U.S. Algerian conflict in the late eighteenth century in the works of such writers as Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Washington Irving. It then moves on to the Near East Orientalist literature of the nineteenth century in light of Egyptology, theories of race, and the growth of missionary fervor in writers such as John DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Finally, Schueller considers the Indic Orientalism of the period in the context of Indology, British colonialism, and the push for Asian trade in the United States, focusing particularly on Emerson and Whitman. U.S. Orientalisms demonstrates how these writers strove to create an Orientalism premised on the idea of civilization and empire moving West, from Asia, through Europe, and culminating in the New World. Schueller draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, and Judith Butler and compellingly demonstrates how a raced, compensatory "Orientalist" discourse of empire was both contested and evoked in the literary works of a wide variety of writers. The book will be of interest to readers in American history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and literary theory. Malini Johar Schueller is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Florida. She is the author of The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston.

A call for critical race reading as a step towards creating progressive and democratic politics.Critical race theory (CRT) has been targeted for bans in forty-nine US states and subjected to a flurry of legislative acts surveilling its teaching at all levels of education. Malini Johar Schueller argues that this censorship and scrutiny is fueled by a fear of racial solidarity.This book asserts that a practice of critical race reading and activism is the way to combat the attacks on racial justice teaching. Teaching in Florida, the epicenter and catalyst of these harsh rebukes of CRT, Schueller challenges students to awaken to questions of racial privilege and hierarchy not through comfortable racial identification but through racial reckoning. Complete with a syllabus that any reader can learn from, Teaching Solidarity models critical ways of reading for social justice.

A call for critical race reading as a step towards creating progressive and democratic politics.Critical race theory (CRT) has been targeted for bans in forty-nine US states and subjected to a flurry of legislative acts surveilling its teaching at all levels of education. Malini Johar Schueller argues that this censorship and scrutiny is fueled by a fear of racial solidarity.This book asserts that a practice of critical race reading and activism is the way to combat the attacks on racial justice teaching. Teaching in Florida, the epicenter and catalyst of these harsh rebukes of CRT, Schueller challenges students to awaken to questions of racial privilege and hierarchy not through comfortable racial identification but through racial reckoning. Complete with a syllabus that any reader can learn from, Teaching Solidarity models critical ways of reading for social justice.

Pinpoints the limits of many current globalization theories in challenging racial oppression, and argues instead for local and situated strategies for resisting racism and imperialism.Locating Race provides a powerful critique of theories and fictions of globalization that privilege migration, transnationalism, and flows. Malini Johar Schueller argues that in order to resist racism and imperialism in the United States we need to focus on local understandings of how different racial groups are specifically constructed and oppressed by the nation-state and imperial relations. In the writings of Black Nationalists, Native American activists, and groups like Partido Nacional La Raza Unida, the author finds an imagined identity of post-colonial citizenship based on a race- and place-based activism that forms solidarities with oppressed groups worldwide and suggests possibilities for a radical globalism.

Pinpoints the limits of many current globalization theories in challenging racial oppression, and argues instead for local and situated strategies for resisting racism and imperialism.Locating Race provides a powerful critique of theories and fictions of globalization that privilege migration, transnationalism, and flows. Malini Johar Schueller argues that in order to resist racism and imperialism in the United States we need to focus on local understandings of how different racial groups are specifically constructed and oppressed by the nation-state and imperial relations. In the writings of Black Nationalists, Native American activists, and groups like Partido Nacional La Raza Unida, the author finds an imagined identity of post-colonial citizenship based on a race- and place-based activism that forms solidarities with oppressed groups worldwide and suggests possibilities for a radical globalism.

When exploring the links between America and postcolonialism, scholars tend to think either in terms of contemporary multiculturalism, or of imperialism since 1898.  This narrow view has left more than the two prior centuries of colonizing literary and political culture unexamined.Messy Beginnings challenges the idea of early America’s immunity from issues of imperialism, that its history is not as “clean” as European colonialism.  By addressing  the literature ranging from the diaries of American women missionaries in the Middle East to the work of Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and through appraisals of key postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, the contributors to this volume explore the applicability of their models to early American culture. Messy Beginnings argues against the simple concept that the colonization of what became the United States was a confrontation between European culture and the “other.”  Contributors examine the formation of America through the messy or unstable negotiations of the idea of “nation.” The essays forcefully show that the development of  “Americanness” was a raced and classed phenomenon, achieved through a complex series of violent encounters, legal maneuvers, and political compromises.   The complexity of early American colonization, where there was not one coherent “nation” to conquer, contradicts the simple label of imperialism used in other lands. The unique approach of Messy Beginnings will reshape both pre-conceived notions of postcolonialism, and how postcolonialists think about the development of the American nation.

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery-in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education-might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos had to be educated and civilized, while the Japanese had to be reeducated and “de-civilized.” In Campaigns of Knowledge, Malini Schueller contrapuntally reads state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, and school textbooks alongside political cartoons, novels, short stories, and films to demonstrate how the U.S. tutelary project was rerouted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted. In doing so, she highlights how schooling was conceived as a process of subjectification, creating particular modes of thought, behaviors, aspirations, and desires that would render the natives docile subjects amenable to American-style colonialism in the Philippines and occupation in Japan.