Racial Worldmaking : : The Power of Popular Fiction / / Mark C. Jerng.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Jerng, Mark C.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2017]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 1

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named "racial worldmaking" because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- contents -- introduction. Racial Worldmaking -- part I. Yellow Peril Genres -- chapter 1. Worlds of Color -- chapter 2. Futures Past of Asiatic Racialization -- part II. Plantation Romance -- chapter 3. Romance and Racism after the Civil War -- chapter 4. Reconstructing Racial Perception -- part III. Sword and Sorcery -- chapter 5. The "Facts" of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds -- chapter 6. Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism -- part IV. Alternate History -- chapter 7. Racial Counterfactuals and the Uncertain Event of Emancipation -- chapter 8. Alternate Histories of World War II; or, How the Race Concept Organizes the World -- conclusion. On the Possibilities of an Antiracist Racial Worldmaking -- acknowledgments -- notes -- bibliography -- index