Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- 1 Bodies in Early US-Atlantic Theater
- 2 Sentimentalism and the Feeling Body
- 3 Slavery, Disability, and the Black Body/White Body Complex in the American Slave Narrative
- 4 Monstrous Bodies of the American Gothic
- 5 Bodies at War
- 6 Decolonizing the Body in Multiethnic American Fiction
- 7 Science Fiction’s Humanoid Bodies of the Future
- 8 Contemporary North American Transgender Literature
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
6 - Decolonizing the Body in Multiethnic American Fiction
from Part I - Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- 1 Bodies in Early US-Atlantic Theater
- 2 Sentimentalism and the Feeling Body
- 3 Slavery, Disability, and the Black Body/White Body Complex in the American Slave Narrative
- 4 Monstrous Bodies of the American Gothic
- 5 Bodies at War
- 6 Decolonizing the Body in Multiethnic American Fiction
- 7 Science Fiction’s Humanoid Bodies of the Future
- 8 Contemporary North American Transgender Literature
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
Multiethnic American fiction frequently centers “hybrid” bodies within locales and stories that draw on multiple ethnicities, languages, and national traditions. By focusing on these bodies, it challenges a national aesthetic formalism that would command conformity and assimilation, unearthing the hybrid genealogies that subtend embodiment across borders. Put differently, by representing embodiments that derive meaning from the interstitial spaces between national projects, such literature decolonializes the seemingly constitutive relationship between the nation-state and the bodies that compose the populations subjected to its political mandates. “Multiethnic” as a literary category contravenes any articulation of a cohesive national identity grounded in notions of the body with faithful monolithic origins.
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- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body , pp. 87 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022