Race characters : : ethnic literature and the figure of the American dream / / Swati Rana.

• Superior document: North Carolina scholarship online
• VerfasserIn: Rana, Swati,
• Place / Publishing House: Chapel Hill : : The University of North Carolina Press,, 2020.
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: North Carolina scholarship online.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (273 pages) :; illustrations
• Notes: Also issued in print: 2020.

A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial for they promise to atone for racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. In this book, Swati Rana builds on studies of character and racial form and offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates, through literary analysis, a fuller social reading of race. Rana focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit an oppositional framing of ethnic literature. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, Jose Garcia Villa, and Jose Antonio Villarreal explore different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility.

Table of Contents

Reading race and character -- Superman of America vs. Ameen Rihani: the hyperproduction of character -- José Garcia Villa's book of grotesques: character and compulsion -- Many parts of Pocho: the discontinuous characters of José Antonio Villarreal -- Building American character: Dalip Singh Saund's model of minority -- Paule Marshall's Brown girls: structures of character -- The old constellation.