1st Edition

The Persistence of Racialization Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity

By Luz Angélica Kirschner Copyright 2025
    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Persistence of Racialization: Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity represents the 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 devaluate 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.

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction: The Persistence of Racialization

    1 Decolonizing Ethnic Literary Criticism: The Implications of Race

    2 Ana María Shua’s and Reina Roffé’s Short Stories: Gender and Power in an Unevenly Globalized World

    3 Cartographies of Shifting Strategies: The Writing of Seyran Ateş and Yadé Kara

    4 Sigrid Nunez’ Salvation City and Gish Jen’ World and Town: The Reparative Power of Endings That Are Not Over

    5 Conclusion

    Index

    Biography

    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).