Race-ing Representation

This collection takes on the problem of representing race in the context of a master language and culture. These essays discuss this problem in terms of the ongoing struggle to redefine the self as speaker, that is, to re-construe our understanding of history, sexuality, and speech itself in a continuing battle for self-definition. As a totality, these essays explode the notion of race as a natural boundary between groups and pose a variety of possible constructions that force us to accept race not as a category, but as a practice.

Kostas and Linda Myrsiades have brought together scholars whose varied essays explore the issues of voice, history, and sexuality in such diverse venues as detective fiction, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the witches of Salem, the Harlem Renaissance, and the work of Toni Morrison, demonstrating that resistance to race-ing is both meaningfully engaged as a cultural possibility and rewritten as a linguistic practice.