SUNY in Multiethnic Literatures

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

Explores how African American literary representations of maroons in the decade leading up to the Civil War complicate conventional narratives and geographies of slavery and freedom in the United States. Beyond Emancipation revisits classic works of nineteenth-century American literature, especially by Black writers, to uncover a hidden history of maroons-enslaved people who ran away but remained hidden in the South. Sean Gerrity argues that literary depictions of "small acts" of marronage reveal an expanded sense of what freedom might look like and where and when it might occur. While taking care not to romanticize historical realities, Gerrity vividly shows how works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany gesture toward possibilities for Black freedom-making beyond legal emancipation, liberalism, and the white abolitionist literary tradition passed down from Harriet Beecher Stowe. While Beyond Emancipation focuses on texts produced during the brief period between the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Civil War, the book's range of reference and implications are broad, unsettling still dominant ideas and engaging pressing questions in literary criticism, history, geography, and Black studies.

What if increased visibility of marginalized identities-a goal of much socially committed lyric poetry in the United States-does not necessarily lead to increased social recognition? For many contemporary scholars, this is the central question of lyric politics. Unlimited Eligibility? revisits and deeply historicizes this question. Ryan Cull explores the relationship of a diverse set of poets, including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, and Claudia Rankine, to a series of movements intended to build inclusion: the St. Louis Hegelians, cultural pluralism, identity politics, and multiculturalism. In tracing the tensions in lyric poetry's merger with the pursuit of recognition, Cull offers a new history of the political work of lyric poetry while exposing the discursive roots of the nation's faltering progress toward becoming a more inclusive democracy.

Brings together scholars and practitioners to present an ethnic studies framework for studying and teaching youth literature. For decades, youth literature has been reckoning with its role in systemic racism and oppression. In this landmark edited volume, Marilisa Jiménez García and Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez assemble a cadre of well-known women of color scholars and practitioners to make a case for ethnic studies as a path for pursuing racial justice in the field. Ethnic studies, they argue, demands that we go beyond seeing race, ethnicity, culture, and diversity as questions of identity and difference. Instead, it shows us how marginalized positionalities create epistemologies that shape our understanding of age, craft, genre, and knowledge production. Multidisciplinary and intersectional in its approach, Ethnic Studies and Youth Literature analyzes US imperialism through the lens of youth literature and vice versa, shedding light on the roots of our current culture wars and curriculum battles.