The Body and Invisible Man

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice Rankine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Therapeutic Value ◽  
Black President

Patrice Rankine’s “The Body and Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Novel in Twenty-First-Century Performance and Public Spaces,” contrasts the artistic uses of physicality in Invisible Man the novel with its 2012 play adaptation. Rankine argues that the stage version’s “focus on the corporeal reality of race” complements what the novel can do to facilitate social or political progress: in short, “there is therapeutic value in ‘staging’ or reliving such experiences.” Staging Invisible Man extends Ellison’s relevance in an age where, though the United States had a black president, the very novelty of the black body illustrates how infrequently that body is seen and hence integrated into society. Rankine distinguishes the novel form as an appeal to reason in contrast to theater, with its emotional or visceral draw, without privileging the novel over its adaptation to the stage.

Teaching the Novel in the Audio Age

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-426
Author(s):  
James F. English
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Adult Readers ◽  
Customer Base ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Steep Decline

According to Practically Every Metric of the Publishing Industry, Audiobooks are Winning the Format Wars. The Codex continues its twenty-first-century struggle to maintain market share, and the e-book has plunged into a steep decline, but the audiobook goes from strength to strength. Sales in the United States are up threefold in the last decade and more than fifty percent just in the last two years (“New Survey”; Watson). In the United Kingdom, unit sales have doubled and revenues tripled since 2014 (“Michelle Obama”). Roughly a quarter of adults in the United States, and half of all adult readers, now listen to at least one audiobook a year. To service this swelling customer base, the industry is producing over five thousand new full-length recordings every month, ten times as many as a decade ago. Audible's studio division has become the largest employer of actors in the New York City area (Kozlowski).

scholarly journals Black Lives Matter: A Theological Response to Racism’s Impact on the Black Body in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Christine M. Mitchell ◽  
David R. Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
National Conversation ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Multiple Domains

After the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, there has been a renewed movement in the United States and across the world in support of black lives. The movement, under the guiding framework of Black Lives Matter, has resulted in a national conversation on police brutality and racism, and the violent effects these have on the black body. Using the framework of black theological thought on the body, this paper identifies the many ways that racism, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “lands, with great violence, upon the body” across multiple domains and levels throughout history and across the life course. The paper closes with some initial recommendations for historically predominantly white churches to offer an anti-racist response to this violence, as informed by black theology.

“A Better Civilization” through Tourism

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Adam Ochonicky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Cultural Sites

Adam Ochonicky, “‘A Better Civilization’ through Tourism: Cultural Appropriation in The Marble Faun” (pp. 221–237) This essay argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) is an attempt to situate the United States within a lineage of “great” nations via the depiction of tourism abroad in the nineteenth century. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne suggests that the historical legacies of nations are dependent on the production of art objects, literature, and cultural sites that demonstrate the sophistication of a given national identity. As such, the novel’s narrative revolves around the experiences of a pair of American artists, Hilda and Kenyon, during their stay in Rome. Hawthorne continually emphasizes the duo’s remarkable skills as evaluators and copyists of Italian art in order to legitimize their—and, by proxy, the United States’—appropriation of Italy’s culture and historical stature. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne disparages the degraded state of then-contemporary Rome, while elevating the comparatively youthful United States as the rightful inheritor of Italy’s illustrious past. Essentially, by situating critical work on the nineteenth-century “realm of leisure” alongside twenty-first-century theories of tourism, this essay provides a framework for understanding the complex interconnections between transnational tourism and the development of American cultural identity in The Marble Faun.

Jazz and the Boundaries of Race

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-708
Author(s):  
Charles B. Hersch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Black President

What does racial identity mean in twenty-first-century America? Some say we live in a “postracial” world, and increasing numbers of Americans have multiethnic backgrounds. We academics recognize that race is a social construction, yet Americans remain attached to traditional racial categories. In 2008, approximately 15% of all marriages in the United States were interracial, and beginning with the 2000 census, Americans have been allowed to check more than one racial category. Yet 97% of Americans in 2010 reported only one race. We are proud of electing our first “black president” even though his mother was white and he grew up barely knowing his African father.

Intra-minority Intergroup Relations in the Twenty-First Century

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Richeson ◽  
Maureen A. Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identification ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
First Century ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Black President ◽  
The U.S

Recent projections indicate that by the year 2050, racial minorities will comprise more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. That is, the United States is expected to become a “majority-minority” nation. This essay adopts a social psychological approach to consider how these dramatic demographic changes may affect both racial minorities and white Americans. Specifically, drawing from theoretical work on social identification, the essay examines the likely psychological meaning (if any) of a majority-minority nation for racial minorities' self-concepts and the resulting effects on their evaluations of members of other racial minority groups. In addition, the potential reactions of white Americans to the possibility of becoming a numerical minority are explored. Drawing on reactions to the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States, the authors conclude by discussing the implications of America's shifting racial demographics for the U.S. racial hierarchy.

scholarly journals Ellison's Invisible Man: A Journey from Invisibility to Self Definition

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
Rajendra P. Tiwari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
To Come

This article concerns with the causes of the loss of identity and the ways to establish the identity of the African Americans in the United States as revealed in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The article contents that the sense of racial discrimination in the white and the weaknesses among the black are the causes for the suffering and establish self identity of the black as revealed by the unnamed narrator of the novel. It explores the protagonist's journey to find ways to come out of the suffering and establish self identity. It reveals how the narrator attempts to prove himself by contributing to the society as a complex individual rather than following the prescribed roles of the system of the society.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Breaking Free

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre David
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Male Homosexuality ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Family

In the mid- to late 1950s, Pamela emerged as a critically acclaimed novelist, particularly after the family returned to London. In perhaps her best-known novel, The Unspeakable Skipton, she explores the life of a paranoid writer who sponges on English visitors to Bruges. The novel was hailed for its wit and sensitive depiction of the life of a writer. She also published a fine study of a London vicar martyred in marriage to a vain and selfish wife: The Humbler Creation is remarkable for its incisive and empathetic depiction of male despair. The Last Resort sealed her distinction as a brilliant novelist of domestic life in its frank depiction of male homosexuality. While continuing to publish fiction, Pamela maintained her reputation as a deft reviewer. In 1954, she and Charles travelled to the United States—the first of many trips that were to follow.

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