The Persistence of Racialization: Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity

The Persistence of Racialization: Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity represents an attempt at unpacking the legacy of modern ideas of race initiated and established during the conquest of the Americas and their current relevance for literary criticism of ethnic writing, also known as minority writing. The book challenges ideas of a post-racial globalized world to question the tendency to devalue ethnic literary writing in general, and ethnic women’s productions in particular, by questioning reductive literary criticism of ethnic writing that perpetuates bias against ethnic writing and its authors. By advocating for a decolonial literary imagination, the book urges literary critics of ethnic writing to consider the complexities of modern race and its enduring impact on contemporary social and cultural narratives. Updated literary analyses of Jewish Argentine, Turkish German, and Chinese American women writers encourage literary critics of ethnic writing to explore alternative transnational frameworks that prioritize equity, diversity, and social justice.

Luz Angélica Kirschner is Associate Professor in the School of American & Global Studies at South Dakota State University. She is editor and author of the volumes Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective (2012) and coeditor and author of Human Rights in the Americas (2021). Some of her publications have appeared in the The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature (2018), The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas (2019), The Routledge Handbook to Culture and Media of the Americas (2020).