1st Edition

The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era

By Linda Joyce Brown Copyright 2004
160 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

156 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

160 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

List of Figures
Preface: Questioning Whiteness
1. Introduction: Race, Whiteness and Women Immigrants
2. Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin's Claim to Assimilation
3. "Why Couldn't We Have been Either One Thing or the Other?": Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far
4. "This Hideous Little Pickaninny" and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism and Willa Cather's My Antonia
5. Epilogue: Assimilation and Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies

Biography

Linda Joyce Brown