Dividing Lines

Caesar (English, U. of New South Wales) argues against the centrality of Auden in the milieu of British poets during the 1930s and describes a heterogeneity of ideology, style, class origin, and life experience. He reviews the prevailing interpretations of the period, and considers a wide range of major and minor poets and the literary magazines they published in. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

India and China Ð the inheritors of two ancient civilizations and aeons of neighbourly bonds cemented by Buddhism and the bridge-building missions of Fa-Hien, Huen Tsang, Tagore and Kotnis Ð never witnessed strife between themselves till the fateful autumn of 1962, when they fought a short but bitter border war on the desolate heights of the Himalayas. Mutual suspicion and sporadic face-offs have ever since bedevilled relations between the two Asian giants, based on their still-unsettled borders. What caused the tragic estrangement of AsiaÕs leading lights? In this cogent and comprehensive analysis, the author traces the origins of the discord to a legacy flawed by the flip-flops of imperial BritainÕs unilateral border delineation, and the ebbs and flows of Chinese activism in Tibet. The gripping narrative carries us from the post-1947 scenario of initial Panchsheel bonhomie, yielding place to mutual distrust, aggravated, among other causes, by Chinese paranoia over Tibet and the unrelenting pressure of Indian public opinion. IndiaÕs cataclysmic defeat in the war, which remains a young nationÕs humiliation, is attributed to the ill-advised Ôforward policyÕ and failure of the politico-military leadership of the time, revalidating ClemenceauÕs adage, that Ôwar is too important a matter to be left to generalsÕ.

"In all three cities, the white municipal leadership, which had previously been united and intractable, experienced deep divisions, creating the indispensable window that permitted the resistance movements. Dividing Lines shows that the action campaigns in three southern cities that mobilized black resistance to segregation and disfranchisement grew directly from specific events of municipal politics in those cities."--BOOK JACKET.

Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights, and illegal aliens. Weaving a robust new theoretical approach into a sweeping history, Daniel Tichenor ties together previous studies' idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns of immigration policy. He tells the story of lively political battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of the transformative policy regimes they built. Tichenor takes us from vibrant nineteenth-century politics that propelled expansive European admissions and Chinese exclusion to the draconian restrictions that had taken hold by the 1920s, including racist quotas that later hampered the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. American global leadership and interest group politics in the decades after World War II, he argues, led to a surprising expansion of immigration opportunities. In the 1990s, a surge of restrictionist fervor spurred the political mobilization of recent immigrants. Richly documented, this pathbreaking work shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not least changing institutional opportunities and constraints, underlie the turning tides of immigration sentiments and policy regimes. Complementing a dynamic narrative with a host of helpful tables and timelines, Dividing Lines is the definitive treatment of a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the character of American nationhood.

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon’s Rebellion. Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kristeva already engages with their preoccupations. Should the juxtaposition of these practices be conceived as a face-to-face confrontation or rather a gap, a hiatus? Could it be a dialectic? or a diff rance? Should it be thought of in terms of Kristeva's work . . . or Derrida's? Accessible and lively, this book studies the theories on their own terms, in terms of one another, and with regard to the literary text, a privileged object of their attention. It demonstrates that the articulation of the theories shifts under different discursive conditions such that a Derridean reading of the relation is unlikely to coincide with a Kristevan interpretation. It shows why there is no single answer to the question of how the two fit together. And it investigates what is at stake in the strategic uses to which their work is put, whether separately or together.