1990 Publication

Comparative American Identities

from the 1990 English Institute Conference

Comparative American Identities

Routledge 1992

(out of print)

Editor: Hortense J. Spillers

Contributors:

 

Hortense J. Spillers

Who Cuts the Border? Some readings on America

Sylvia Molloy

The Unquiet Self: Spanish American Autobiography and the Question of National Identity

Vèvè A. Clark

Developing Diaspora Literary and Marasa Consciousness

Mae G. Henderson

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as a Historical Text

Kimberly W. Bentson

Re-Weaving the Ulysses Scene: Enchantment, Post-Oedipal Identity, and the Buried Text of Blackness in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Lauren Berlant

National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life

Michael Moon

A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch

Michael Warner

Walden’s Erotic Economy

Robert Schwartzwald

Fear of Pederasty: Quèbec’s Inverted Fictions

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumption known to us as America?

Since the American hemisphere encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified American identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream?

Stretching from Argentina, across the Caribbean to the United States and Canada, Comparative American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of New World cultural identities, questions, and problems. From a formidable array of issues in cultural criticism, these essays stage a dialogue between issues of race, sex, and nationality as aspects of the cultural entity Jose Martí has termed our America.