This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Ween
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Book World ◽  
Important Shift

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.

Africa in the Shuffle

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Immanuel Wallerstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
The U.S

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.

James Weldon Johnson

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nowlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
New York University ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

Muslim Representations in Two Post-September 2001 American Novels

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Seyed Mohammad Marandi ◽  
Zeinab Ghasemi Tari
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novels ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
Significant Point

Several novels have appeared after the September 11 attacks which deal directly or indirectly with the effect of the event on individuals, both inside and outside the United States. Though, the novels often claim to deal with the posttraumatic aftermath of the incident, the writers regularly use Orientalist stereotyping, and it seems that after September 11 these attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs have hardened and even strengthened the old Orientalist discourse. This paper shall focus on Don Delillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist because both novels were New York Times bestsellers and both novelists are prominent figures in American literature. It attempts to examine the way in which the novelists have responded to the September 11, 2001 attacks and how Muslims and their ideologies are represented. The significant point is that though these novels have been written in the twenty-first century, where there has been an increase in contacts and information about Muslims, the writers often use the same cliches and stereotypes about Muslims that have existed since the Middle Ages.

Muslim Representations in Two Post-September 2001 American Novels

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Seyed Mohammad Marandi ◽  
Zeinab Ghasemi Tari
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novels ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
Significant Point

Several novels have appeared after the September 11 attacks which deal directly or indirectly with the effect of the event on individuals, both inside and outside the United States. Though, the novels often claim to deal with the posttraumatic aftermath of the incident, the writers regularly use Orientalist stereotyping, and it seems that after September 11 these attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs have hardened and even strengthened the old Orientalist discourse. This paper shall focus on Don Delillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist because both novels were New York Times bestsellers and both novelists are prominent figures in American literature. It attempts to examine the way in which the novelists have responded to the September 11, 2001 attacks and how Muslims and their ideologies are represented. The significant point is that though these novels have been written in the twenty-first century, where there has been an increase in contacts and information about Muslims, the writers often use the same cliches and stereotypes about Muslims that have existed since the Middle Ages.

“Little Plants in the Country”: Henry Ford's Village Industries and the Beginning of Decentralized Technology in Modern America

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 181-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard P. Segal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Word Processors

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.

The Empire of Death: How Culture and Economics Affect Informed Consent in the U.S., the U.K., and Japan

1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
George J. Annas ◽  
Frances H. Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Informed Consent ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medical Intervention ◽  
Jack Kevorkian ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
Legislative Changes

American culture reflects a paradox: the more openly we discuss death and its inevitability, the more money we spend to postpone and deny it. Sherwin Nuland's book How We Die, a frank description of the way our bodies deteriorate with and without medical intervention, topped the New York Times best seller list in the spring of 1994. At the same time, Jack Kevorkian, arguably the world 's best known physician, was being acquitted of violating Michigan 's law against assisted suicide, while a Michigan commission was debating legislative changes to permit physicians to help their terminally ill patients kill themselves. Despite such open discussion of death and expansion of the informed consent doctrine, U.S. medical expenditures at the end of life remain astronomically high. Most of this elevated spending is attributable to new medical technology.In J.G. Ballard 's Empire of the Sun, the United States, British and Japanese cultures are contrasted through the eyes of a young British boy incarcerated by the Japanese army in China during World War II.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

The Role of Religious Value in Political Judgment

1968 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-427
Author(s):  
Quentin L. Quade
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Religious Interventions ◽  
Number Of Citations

In The issues of the New York Times from February, 1965, to November, 1967, religious leaders and groups are reported 185 times commenting on one political issue: Vietnam. If a comparable search were done on an inclusive list of political topics, such as civil rights, the number of citations would be greatly multiplied. Most of these statements are on substantive issues — the United States should do this, do that — rather than on the theoretical questions about religion's role vis à vis politics. Most of these religious interventions presume some connection between religion and politics, whether articulated or not. A similar examination of some leading religious journals, for example, Chrisianity and Crisis, Commonweal, Christian Century, America, produces similar results: in articles and editorials, such publications are deeply immersed in direct commentary on political problems of our time.

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