A comparative analysis of modern African-American and Jewish-American narratives
In Performing Americanness, Catherine Rottenberg raises important questions about what it means to be American through a wholly original analysis of modern African-American and Jewish-American literature. The book illustrates how the novels of Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan help us to understand the specific ways that gender, class, race, and ethnicity have regulated the identity formation of African and Jewish Americans, as well as the ways these categories have helped produce and sustain social stratification in the United States more generally. Through the author’s comparative lens, new light is shed on fundamental internal and external conflicts—especially of identity—that took place as both groups sought to move from margin to center by carving out a niche for themselves in mainstream American society.
"[Performing Americanness] is a rare, if not unprecedented, effort to compare narratives that trace the immigration of Jews to the United States with the 'assimilation' experience of African Americans . . . an erudite, carefully argued, and singular achievement."—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley
"This ambitious and theoretically informed work promises to become an invaluable resource for scholars in ethnic studies, African-American studies in particular."—Donald Pease, Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Dartmouth College
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Currently a fellow at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute, CATHERINE ROTTENBERG will be an assistant professor in the Foreign Languages and Linguistics and Communications Departments at
Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel, beginning in 2008.
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