Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

This chapter locates a throughline of Indigenous resistance to settler dominance that stretches from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the 2016 NoDAPL movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It is a throughline marked not by warfare and violence, but by diplomacy and strategic action founded in traditional Indigenous responses to the irresponsible use of power. Recognizing how Native peoples, across many cultures and regions, were philosophically aligned toward hospitality and peaceful conflict resolution, disrupts racist notions of savagery, and age-old assumptions of Indigenous peoples as strictly “warrior societies.” By highlighting a number of diplomatic practices and actions occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter suggests the type of movement that took place at Standing Rock, founded in respect for the environment and peaceful resistance to uncivil government, was not a modern-day innovation, but a series of responses in keeping with the long-standing praxis of Indigenous communities.

This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

This chapter assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.

Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.

American writing midwifed the white–nonwhite binary that continues to shape formulations of racial difference in the United States. In surveying the emergence of whiteness in American literature, it becomes evident that the literary record was key to imagining this constructed racial category and making it synonymous with Americanness. Through its portraits of English settlement, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the creation of a slave-for-life caste, and the expansion of national boundaries as divine destiny, American literature cemented an ideological whiteness that defined a single racial group as the inheritors of American rights and privileges and further guaranteed a social stratification that would engender continued racial hauntings.

This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

This chapter explains why the topic of Mexican American culture became especially urgent during the 1960s and 1970s, and shows why this emphasis on culture came under question during the 1980s. Arellano describes how the Chicano literary intervention was crucial for exposing reductive caricatures by providing more nuanced characterizations of Mexican Americans. This focus on nuanced characterization, however, ultimately risked obfuscating the damaging effects of class struggle. Referencing the competing visions of Tomás Rivera and Richard Rodriguez, concerning the value of culture, Arellano analyzes literary case studies by José Antonio Villarreal and Arturo Islas, showing how their emphasis on a shared ethnic identity occluded class inequality. Arellano concludes by analyzing Rolando Hinojosa’s novel We Happy Few, which reconsiders the legacy of Chicano activism, demonstrating how Hinojosa disarticulates the novel’s meaning from cultural unity and reconnects it to the needs of workers. The novel thus highlights a view of literature that takes Mexican American humanity as a given and directs readers’ critical attention toward the problems that arise from a society organized by class

Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth- century America. Father of the Beat literary movement, Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac’s literary achievement, as more than forty other books by him have been published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac’s multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz’s life and times. This Companion offers fresh perspectives on Kerouac’s multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s epic “Duluoz Legend,” a series of autobiographical books that form the core of his oeuvre. These books include seminal works such as On the Road, Visions of Cody, and The Dharma Bums, and although such books can be read outside the context of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac saw them as pieces of “one enormous comedy.” This chapter focuses on the Duluoz Legend as a whole, exploring: 1) how the idea of writing a series of autobiographical books “on the run” occurred to Kerouac; 2) how the books comprising the Legend are related; 3) the different literary models for the Legend, with particular attention to the example of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; 5) the various prose styles in the Legend; and 6) how to read the Legend as a record of both Kerouac’s evolving consciousness and the events of his life.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.