This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.

Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

This chapter locates a throughline of Indigenous resistance to settler dominance that stretches from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the 2016 NoDAPL movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It is a throughline marked not by warfare and violence, but by diplomacy and strategic action founded in traditional Indigenous responses to the irresponsible use of power. Recognizing how Native peoples, across many cultures and regions, were philosophically aligned toward hospitality and peaceful conflict resolution, disrupts racist notions of savagery, and age-old assumptions of Indigenous peoples as strictly “warrior societies.” By highlighting a number of diplomatic practices and actions occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter suggests the type of movement that took place at Standing Rock, founded in respect for the environment and peaceful resistance to uncivil government, was not a modern-day innovation, but a series of responses in keeping with the long-standing praxis of Indigenous communities.

This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

This chapter assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.

Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.

American writing midwifed the white–nonwhite binary that continues to shape formulations of racial difference in the United States. In surveying the emergence of whiteness in American literature, it becomes evident that the literary record was key to imagining this constructed racial category and making it synonymous with Americanness. Through its portraits of English settlement, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the creation of a slave-for-life caste, and the expansion of national boundaries as divine destiny, American literature cemented an ideological whiteness that defined a single racial group as the inheritors of American rights and privileges and further guaranteed a social stratification that would engender continued racial hauntings.