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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

BOOK NEWS: How Literary Suicides Expose Biopolitics

The Suicidal State: Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population
By Madoka Kishi



Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197690079

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-suicidal-state-9780197690079?cc=us&lang=en#


The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”

"Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'-- and seriously taking them to historical task -- The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.'" -- Scott Herring, Yale University

"Madoka Kishi's remarkable new book reads white-supremacist anxieties about the threat of 'racial suicide'- a trope whose fatal echo shapes contemporary anti-immigrant discourse - against the backdrop of early twentieth-century literary suicides. Brilliantly weaving together American constructions of nationality, race, and gender with the pursuit of reproductive domination by persons of white European descent, The Suicidal State makes a dazzling case for viewing the choice of non-being as a response to the brutal political ontology that posits certain racialized subjects both as socially dead and as harbingers of death for the racial order of power on which American society rests. This is a must-read book for our times." -- Lee Edelman, Tufts University

"The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death -- New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here -- brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt -- demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.'" -- Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania


Madoka Kishi is a professional in residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2022), and co-translated Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2024) and Judith Butler's Parting Ways (2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

BOOK NEWS: Human monstrosity in Black horror fiction

 Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction 

BY JERRY RAFIKI JENKINS



Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5905-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215364.html


In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction, Jerry RafikiJenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction—the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing—arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due’s The Between, Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is a necessary work that emphasizes the sanity and rationality of monstrous figures. Jenkins persuasively contends that combining Afropessimism and affirmation of Black life in fiction can provide resistance to the deadliness of the racial reality of anti-Blackness.” —Keith Byerman, author of Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is sharp and intellectually daring. Jenkins’s treatment of violence and prospects of Black counter-violence make it a timely resource for Black studies scholars and social and cultural critics of all kinds.” —Greg Thomas, author of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism


Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is a professor in the Departments of English and Humanities, and Multicultural Studies at Palomar College and the author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction.

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Book News: Analyzing the understudied women playwrights of the US South

Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender

BY CASEY KAYSER


UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 978-1-4968-3591-8

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Marginalized


Winner of the 2021 Eudora Welty Prize

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region.

Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

“Nuanced and tempered throughout, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender is a provocative study that greatly extends our understanding of the various minefields that southern women writers navigate when they write for the stage.”

—Will Brantley, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston

"Its greatest contribution, I think, is its advice to critics, readers, and consumers of American theatre: the American South is not a monolith, indivisible and uniform, and southern women’s plays should neither be overlooked nor misread. They are far too smart for that."

—Amy R. Martin, Southern Review of Books


CASEY KAYSER is assistant professor at University of Arkansas. She is coeditor of Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century and Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Pedagogy, Mississippi Quarterly, and Midwestern Folklore.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Book News: Sexual policing in Hemispheric American Literature

Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature

BY JENNA GRACE SCIUTO



UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 9781496833440 Hardcover

ISBN 9781496833457 Paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Policing-Intimacy


In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.


Jenna Grace Sciuto is associate professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in circum-Caribbean literature.