The Female Face of the Big Book (Women – Winners of the National Literary Prize BB)

The article studies the gender composition of the Big Book award winners. It is shown what place among the awarded authors and laureates is occupied by women authors and their works. All award-winning works created by women are analyzed. The main common characteristic features of these works are revealed: the creation of a fullfledged biography of one person and/or a family saga against the background of a detailed historical picture of the corresponding era. An attempt is made to determine the place (“ecological niche”) occupied by the “serious” prose of women authors in contemporary literary process.

Toward Camden

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

The Lettered Barriada

In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico's world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico's intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico's national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Conflicting Masculinities in Ha Jin’s Waiting: Talented Scholars and Ruthless Men of Action in China’s Mao and Post-Mao Eras

As a highly acclaimed novel for which Ha Jin won the U.S. National Book Award in 1999, Waiting covers the period from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, encompassing the Cultural Revolution through the early reform era. Its oft-noted central concern is the suppression of emotional life, and by extension humanity, in the totalitarian climate of Mao’s regime. This article offers a new reading, which foregrounds the novel’s use of masculinities as a central theme and driver of the plot. Through the prism of Kam Louie’s wen-wu (literary accomplishment – military prowess) dyad, this study focuses on Ha Jin’s critique of the socialist-era trajectories of two historically prominent Chinese male character types: the intellectually-oriented man of book learning and the physically-driven man of action. It shows how Waiting illuminates the conditions underlying a pervasive social and psychological paralysis of male intellectuals and the contrasting empowerment of a predatory class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs.

Nature's Wild

In Nature's Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like. >Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Maroon Choreography

In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Magical Habits

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient