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A literary criticism of the novel "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield is presented. Topics discussed include Redfield's promotion of New Age ideologies, his reaffirmation of hegemonic American culture by using gendered and racialized tropes, and the portrayal of race, gender and salvation in the book.

This article draws on Oscar Wilde's collected works to convey new insights about how he is depicted in biofiction, with a focus on Louis Edwards's 2003 novel Oscar Wilde Discovers America. Edwards creates a protagonist who underplays Wilde's marginalization and who struggles to see the interplay between gender, nationality, and race. The distance between character, author, and text facilitates Edwards's interrogation of biofiction itself—its biases, its lapses, and its opportunities. In part one of my analysis, I track the Judas Kiss motif across works by Wilde and within Edwards's reimagining to discuss how biofiction itself hinges on reversal and betrayal. In part two, I examine how Edwards's biofiction corrects for the historical homosociality of life-writing by surfacing the suffering of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the numerous critical claims of "timeliness" around the recently recovered novel Romance inMarseille as well as Claude McKay's own numerous commitments and challenges as they emerge therein: the multiple and enduring after-lives of slavery, the Bolshevik Revolution and the burgeoning of its stiflingly bureaucratic Thermidor under Stalin, the various theoretical and programmatic complications that issues of race and gender posed for international socialism alongside the promises and disappointments of emancipatory politics writ large. However, in attempting to adjudicate such problematics of difference, McKay also provides the outlines of a dialectical "Black Intersectional International," thereby gesturing toward a "commonism" of the quayside. Keywords racial capitalism, Claude McKay, intersectionality, Black radical tradition, socialism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Carter's portrayal of the intersections of race, gender, and nationalism through imagery drawn from the nationalist tales Momotaro (Peach Boy) and through figuration of the lion and the unicorn in her writing during and after staying in Japan. Analyzing Miss Z and Fireworks , we argue that Carter's depictions of fantastical creatures reveal a proto-intersectional awareness of complex power interconnections between race and gender, specifically in relation to ideas of whiteness and masochism. Like her contemporary Taeko Kono, Carter critiques men's masochism and theorizes a type of feminine masochism. Carter grows in awareness of both racial politics (whiteness) and masochism in Japanese culture and attempts to grasp the "essence of the other's otherness" therein. In doing so, she conceptualizes intersectional power relations of gender and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issues of gender, race and history in the 1800 novel "The Story of Henrietta" by Charlotte Smith and Sophia Lee's book "The Recess." Other topics include the history of colonialism and slavery in the 18th century, the barbaric nature and culture of African American womanhood, as well as the relationship between colonial occupation, gender and race.

The article explores the link between food, race, class, gender and the politics of Hurricane Katrina in the novel "Salvage of the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward. Topics discussed are racism exposed in the storm's aftermath, food as a tool of resistance and form of empowerment, stereotypes of African Americans, effect of food inequality on low-income minorities in rural areas, use of food to counter cultural assumptions about African American masculinity and food imagery as metaphor of female sexuality.

This article presents a literary criticism for the book "Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas," by Faustina Sáez de Melgar. The author comments on the representation of gender and race in the work and examines the role of women in the domestic space. The abolition movement in Cuba during the late 19th century as referenced in the book is also explored.

The article discusses the depictions of race and the pushing of the boundaries of Victorian gender structures in the Dime novels of Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens published by the House of Beadle and Adams. Topics include the characteristics of Stephens's dime novels which was concerned with social reform and a strict moral code and depictions of race and gender in Stephen's novels like "Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter" and "The Indian Queen".

This article presents an interview with Caribbean-American author Opal Palmer Adisa. She comments on the presence of race, gender, and oppression in many of her works and describes the difficulties of being a woman in the literary world. She also discusses her relationship with Rastafarianism, a spiritual belief grounded in Christianity practiced throughout the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica.

The article reflects on the essay titled "Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender" and examined how the writing program administration (WPA) work broadens the roles of identity politics within the university writing programs.

In an oblique homage to Frantz Fanon, this article is a cultural historian’s reading of Doris Lessing’s famous 1950 novel,The Grass is Singing.I approach it as an engaging and sophisticated exploration of gendered racial whiteness, manifest in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia towards the end of colonial rule. I suggest that central to Lessing’s novelistic project is a thinking through of how it might be possible to envisage ‘knowledge’ (truth) if it were to be freed from ‘race’. Arguably, the novel is a fictional embodiment of the thesis that the dismantling of racial whiteness provides the precondition for new thought to happen, both in an epistemological and ethical sense. Deliberately open-ended, and taking as its starting point Lessing’s narrative procedure in the opening pages, the article situates ‘knowledge’ in relation to the emotions and psychic life of characters. In opposition to the imperatives of instrumental reason,The Grass is Singingarguably champions an ethics of ‘principled unknowability’, in which the location of the unconscious is never far away, and the Manichaean certainties of colonial-era whiteness are revealed as pathologically overdetermined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) addresses issues related to race. The "Early Modern Race/Ethnic/Diaspora Studies" at the 2015 SAA Conference is discussed. A number of literary works are mentioned including "Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama" and "The Elizabethan Image of Africa," both by Sierra Leonean Eldren Durosimi Jones and Ania Loomba's "Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama."

Wendy Law-Yone's 2010 novel The Road to Wanting offers a Southeast Asian lens through which one might examine China's southwestern frontier and relationships forged within the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. The Road to Wanting maps an intersectional, interracial terrain where the past is selectively developed through transnational joint ventures and promises of an improved future with localized flair, a speculative modernity that is fabricated by bodies differentially marked by minoritization, mobility, and capital. Offering a view of "the Wild West of China," the novel highlights the interactions among peripheral and marginalized populations that are often homogenized in ethnonationalist terms (e.g., as Chinese, Zhonghua minzu , or Burmese). My analysis highlights how Law-Yone's polyphonic play within this multilingual contact zone generates alternative paradigms for transnational encounters and translocal affective affinities. The essay suggests that an expansive notion of Chinese women's studies might adapt or borrow from recent transnational and methodological turns in ethnic minority studies and US critical race studies that analyze not only the hegemonies operating within one's own "home" field (read: nation, race, ethnicity, or discipline) but also imperialistic relationships with a nation's internal others and geopolitical margins. In this way, then, a transnationally inflected model of feminist sinologies can productively consider the politics of knowledge in the study of Chinese women and men while keeping in mind the effects of Chinese capital and geopolitical power in the nation, in the region, and in the heterogeneous formations of sinophone studies. My reading therefore endeavors to realign our view of what might constitute China studies, feminist sinologies, and Asian/American writing in an increasingly globalized and transnational world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 19th century book "The Soul of Things; or, Psychometric Researches and Discoveries" by William Denton and Elizabeth Foote Denton, focusing on how the book handles the relationship between geology and Christianity. Other topics include the relationship between geology and the Spiritualist movement, information on psychometric readings of objects presented in the book, and how the book ideas about race and gender from the 19th century.

The article discusses the literary works that made significant contributions to international scholarship in 2014. Topics covered include the history- and political science-based approaches that dominated U.S. literature scholarship, the publication of collective works investigating issues or gender and race, and how the aesthetic discourse have triggered the interest of French scholars.

Newer critical treatments of Redburn argue that its significance lies in its critique of antebellum slavery, most saliently in chapter 31, in which Wellingborough Redburn, the fi rst-person narrator, offers an ekphrastic depiction of the Nelson Monument in Liverpool, England. This monument contains an especially significant detail: the four naked, chained male fi gures at the base of the pedestal. Redburn tells us that he can never look at their "swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place." The abjection of the fi gures is significant for understanding not only issues of race and slavery but also the queer aspects of Redburn: the vulnerability of younger males in the grip of more powerful, older males. This essay examines the connections between Melville's striking thematization of race and his representation of gender and same-sex sexuality. Race discourse here functions as a coded means of expressing and negotiating the difficulties of same-sex desire, informed by Melville's awareness of the sodomitical shipboard practices that he, throughout his work, suggested with alternate slyness and horror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the strategies used by French symbolist writer Auguste de Villiers de I'lsle-Adam in his complex representation of both masculinity and femininity. It discusses Villiers' emphasis on narcissism to create gender specific scenarios in his tale "Le Désir d'être un homme," the efforts of Villiers to disprove the myths about women, especially the misapprehension that women hide a secret, and the use of location, gender and race as elements of identity in the tale.

A literary criticism is presented for the books "All the Pretty Horses" and "Cities of the Plain" by Cormac McCarthy, the first and third books in his "Border Trilogy." Themes explored include race, gender, and cross-border interactions between the American and Mexican characters living near the U.S.-Mexican border.

A literary criticism of the book "Can't Quit You, Baby," by Ellen Douglas is presented. Topics discussed include the unusual relationship between a white middle-class woman in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s and her African-American working-class housekeeper, issues of gender and race specifically the possibilities of cross-racial quasi-feminist solidarity or racial reconciliation, and the postmodern literary theory.

This essay analyzes Elizabeth Keckley's controversial exposé of Mary Lincoln,Behind the Scenes, as a rhetoric of intimate disclosure that disrupted nineteenth-century standards of decorum and propriety. Published as a tell-all book of her years as Lincoln's White House dressmaker, Keckley's memoir was greeted with skepticism and hostility by the mainstream press of the day, yet it remains the definitive account of Mary's time as first lady. This essay argues thatBehind the Scenesfunctioned not only as a postbellum slave narrative and as an autobiographical success story—as most contemporary critics have maintained—but also as a rhetoric of intimate disclosure that violated Victorian-era conceptions gender, class, and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the books "Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon and "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir. According to the author, the two books employ similar patterns of analysis. Details on the books' treatment of race, gender, and the concept of the gaze and on their larger role within French existential thought are presented. Fanon's treatment of male-female relations and novelist Mayotte Capécia are also discussed.

The article presents the convergence of race, gender and human sexuality in the novel "Light in August," by William Faulkner, which is included, together with his other novels "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying," in Oprah Winfrey's Summer Book Club in 2005. Topics discussed include a comparison of Faulkner's novels, an overview of Winfrey's personal and professional background, and how Faulkner treated race in his novels. The inter-racial sex in "Light in August" is depicted.

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Oroonoko" by Aphra Behn. Particular focus is given to Behn's treatment of political obligation, sovereignty, and assent in the novella. Details on the relationship between domestic and imperial spaces in the text are also presented. Other topics include race, gender, authority, and ethics.

Jackson is part of a significant strain in American writing by women that attends to houses, housekeeping, and being part of a social polity that emphasizes "proper womanliness." Her work offers a rich critique of middle-class white heteropatriarchy, even when she is writing about it most gently. This paper argues that Jackon's fiction makes an important theoretical point: gender is a relational enactment, suturing together material realities through racialized social relations. Jackson's stories from the fifties can be seen as exemplary of this relational formation of gender. In her work, race, sexuality, class, and gender are made through and with the relations between women and the houses they tend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis of Ntozake Shange's 1975 work for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, I examine two specific elements of the production--the critical responses to the work (primarily from male critics), and the performances of the play in American prisons, for both male and female audiences. I believe an analysis of Shange's work through those lenses permits an accurate discussion of the historical moment in which for colored girls emerged, and how closely linked sexuality, performance, and protest were in Black Power-era America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study "Playing in the Dark and Dirt: Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina and Tomboyism in the American South" offers a new reading of Allison's novel, published in 1992, placing it in the frame of tomboyism, a historical and cultural phenomenon of girls dressing and behaving like boys, of which the novel's protagonist, Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, might be seen as a representative. Tomboyism, usually perceived solely as a gender issue, is here expanded to embrace other categories of identity, especially race, class, and sexuality. By means of intersectional analysis, a methodological tool employed by African American feminists to address the interlocking nature of race and gender oppression, it is possible to show how interconnected and mutually dependent these categories are, and how their transgression by Bone imbues tomboyism with the power to become a viable lifelong identity option, and challenges the interpretational tradition of tomboy narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Another Country" by James Baldwin is presented. It explores the connection between homophobia and nationalism depicted in the novel. It analyzes how Baldwin presents his nationalist idea based on a moral responsibility to redeem the past. It also examines the issues of race, sexuality and gender in relation to one's identity in the novel.

The article presents literary criticism of the play "Our Old Kentucky Home" by Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce. Particular focus is given to the collaboration between Davis and Bruce and to their use of the plantation play genre to present critiques of race and gender relations in the 19th-century U.S. Details on the challenges faced by Davis as an African-American woman writer are also presented.

The article examines the significance of author William Shakespeare's female icons for contemporary discussions of gender, power and race. It suggests that an analysis of the iconicity of Shakespearean characters can help in understanding their role as makers or unmakers of cultural and spiritual meaning. It also mentions that Shakespeare's characters, including Ophelia, Desdemona and Cleopatra, have been used in exploring contemporary images of femininity.

This essay uses an intersectional approach to identify in the drama of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the patterns that Hannah Arendt called "race thinking" and to extend Arendt's approach backwards in time as early as the seventeenth century. Famously, Cavendish—poet, playwright, personality—prided herself on her "singularity" or originality, from her cultivated eccentricity of dress to her insistence, which anticipates the Romantic movement, that her works come from her alone (down to her punctilious annotation of the occasional lines or stanzas or scenes composed by her husband and included in her plays). The combined authority Cavendish appropriates—rank and individual merit—and that she uses to transcend the restrictions placed on her by her gender makes Cavendish an apt instance through which to investigate how or whether merit and rank—and gender—can produce race thinking. I suggest that Cavendish's first play, the two-part Loves Adventures , simultaneously queers or questions heteronormative reproduction and the purity of an imagined bloodline or race and yet restricts the ability to transcend race (understood for Cavendish as bloodline and as gender) to those who can demonstrate merit or (to borrow Patricia Akhimie's invaluable formulation) "cultivation." Similarly, Cavendish's later play The Bridals uses crossor transgender casting and the potential for cultivation not to liberate but to humiliate and racialize its working-class characters. In The Female Academy , wealthy, aristocratic ladies literally become the gatekeepers and guarantors of education and bloodline. The intersectional hierarchies of rank, skin color, gender, and sexual autonomy thus triumph over an imagined innate or even a "cultivated" merit or virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]