Women & Others: Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Empire (Signs of Race)

224 Pages·2007·1.09 MB·English

by  Celia R. Daileader

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W O
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SIGNS OF RACE
Series Editors: Phillip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor
Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, edited by
Phillip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor (January 2005)
Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop, by
Gary Taylor (January 2005)
English and Ethnicity, edited by Janina Brutt-Griffler and Catherine Evans
Davies (December 2006)
Women & Others: Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Empire, edited by Celia
R. Daileader, Rhoda E. Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz (September 2007)
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  
W O
  ,
P R
,  
G E
Edited by
Celia R. Daileader,
Rhoda E. Johnson, and
Amilcar Shabazz
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WOMEN& OTHERS
Copyright © Celia R.Daileader,Rhoda E.Johnson,and Amilcar Shabazz,2007.
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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ISBN-13:978–0–312–29601–8 (hardcover)
ISBN-10:0–312–29601–0 (hardcover)
ISBN-13:978–0–312–29602–5 (paperback)
ISBN-10:0–312–29602–9 (paperback)
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First edition:September 2007
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This book is dedicated to our memories
of three extraordinary women:
Sylvia Elliott (1937–2005)
Cynthia Malara (1968–2006)
Ute Brosche Winston (1939–2006)
For all those we love for whom tomorrow
will not be another day, we send the
sweet prayer of resting in peace.
—Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone
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Series Editors’ Preface ix
Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor
Acknowledgments xiii
Notes on the Contributors xv
Who Is the Other Woman? An Introduction 1
Celia R. Daileader
Part I Literatures
1 Miscegenation as Consolation in
George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico 25
Joyce Green MacDonald
2 Fear of Family, Fear of Self: Black
Southern “Othering” in Randall
Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits 45
Trudier Harris
3 Looking for Love in All the Wrong
Places: Same-Sex Relations in the
Fiction of Gloria Naylor 67
Maxine Lavon Montgomery
4 Postmodernism, Paul Auster’s
The New York Trilogy,and the
Construction of the Black/Woman
of Color as Primal Other 83
Lawrence W. Hogue
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viii C
Part II Histories
5 The Memsahib Myth: Englishwomen
in Colonial India 107
Indira Ghose
6 Race, Gender, and Leadership:
(En)Countering Discourses that Devalue
African American Women as Leaders 129
Patricia S. Parker
7 Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the
American Christian Right 147
Andrea Smith
8 The Future of Feminism:
What Other Way to Speak? 173
Vron Ware
List of Abbreviations 197
Index 199
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S E ’ P
I have never been to Alabama before, but it is and will forever remain
seared in my memory as the place where black Americans challenged
America to live up to the meaning of her creed so as not to make a
mockery of her ideals.
—August Wilson (September 26, 2001)
T
he first thing you see when you enter the permanent exhibits at the
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is a pair of drinking fountains. Over
one hangs a sign that says “White.” Over the other hangs a sign that
says “Colored.”
As an inquiry into the cultural history of race, the series “Signs of
Race” has its own obvious historical origins. It springs from a series of
symposiums at the University of Alabama—the place where George
Wallace made segregation’s last stand. But the series finds its larger
cultural and intellectual impulses in a deeper and wider history that
surrounds us here. Black, brown, red, and white; African American
and Afro-Caribbean; English, French, and Spanish; Celtic and Jewish;
native American and northern European, creole and mestizo: such
cultural categories, wherever they are found, in whatever combina-
tions, and in whatever arrangements of historical interaction and
transmission, constitute the legacy of the oceanic intercultures of race
in the early modern era. In Alabama, the very landscape is steeped in
such history. Twenty miles to the south of the town of Tuscaloosa,
the home of the university, is a vast city of pre-Columbian mounds,
the capital of a Mississippian empire that flourished at the time of the
Norman Conquest and then disappeared two centuries later. The
town of Tuscaloosa itself is named after a great chief of the Alabamas,
known as the Black Warrior, who engaged the Spanish explorer
DeSoto in the 1540 battle of Maubila, to this day thought to be the
largest single combat ever fought by native Americans against
Europeans. The European settlement of the Gulf Coast pitted
English, French, Spanish, and American colonizers against each other
well into the nineteenth century. The Revolutionary War found native