Passe Pour Blanc

A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume—on subjects as wide ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo—reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility. Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), a stylized retelling of ancient legends, foreshadows Hearn's later fascination with Asian themes. The exquisitely crafted novels Chita (1889), about the devastation wrought by a Louisiana hurricane, and Youma (1890), about a slave rebellion in Martinique, epitomize his writing at its most luxuriantly romantic, alert to the interactions of diverse cultures and suffused with imagistic splendor. His extraordinary travel book Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), presented here with the many illustrations from its first edition, provides a richly impressionistic account of his long stay on Martinique and other Caribbean islands. More than two dozen examples of Hearn's journalism from the 1870s and 1880s are also included here, evoking vanished worlds with incomparable vividness: a raucous African-American nightclub on the Cincinnati waterfront; an execution; scenes of Mardi Gras and the New Orleans French Quarter; an uncharted village of Filipino fishermen in a remote Louisiana bayou. The volume is rounded out with a revealing selection of Hearn's impassioned letters, many published here for the first time in unexpurgated form. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Passe Pour Blanc depicts the lives and problems of two fictitious Creole families, as members of a multiracial monocultural invisible nation. It is the first book ever written about Creole family problems caused by American racism.

What is being passed on? The questions of heritage and inheritance are crucial to American minority literatures. Some inheritances are claimed; some are imposed and become stifling; others still are impossible, like the memories of oppression or alienation. Heritage is not only patrimony, however; it is also a process in a state of constant reconfiguration. The body – its semiotics, its genealogy, its pressure points – figures prominently as inevitable referent for the minority racial/ethnic subject, the performance, and the writing of difference. This collection of essays analyzes contemporary novels from major African American writers, such as Gayl Jones, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Percival Everett, John Edgar Wideman, and Colson Whitehead, and ethnic American novelists like Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Roth, Gish Jen, and Sergio Troncoso. It also includes the study of a painting by African American artist Robert Colescott. The first section of the book examines the inscription of African American writers’ relation to the nation’s past: the trauma of slavery, the burden of foundational discourses, or the legacy of the classical philosophical canon. The second part of the text is an assessment of the postmodern aesthetics of contemporary black fiction in the construction of history, unveiling the modalities of the palimpsest, fragmentation, intermediality, mises en abyme, in a complex grammar of haunting and denial. Gathering essays on Greek-American, Jewish-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American fiction, the final section delineates new conceptions of ethnicity based on fluidity, hybridity, and performativity. Cross-ethnic experimentations in “super-diversity,” according to which identities become optional, an array of choices rather than forced belonging, seem to be pointing the way to the next stage, that of a “post-racial,” “post-ethnic” society. Yet the conjugated strictures of “race” and class still limit these choices to a significant degree, and the works discussed in this volume often playfully or sarcastically question the validity of the “post.” They ultimately ask: who shall inherit America?

Depuis 1967, année du centenaire de la Confédération, de nombreux épisodes de crise politique et de difficultés économiques ainsi que les événements internationaux ont contribué à la transformation de la société canadienne et continueront de façonner son avenir. En tenant compte de ces diverses difficultés et opportunités rencontrées dans le passé, à quoi ressemble l’avenir du Canada? Dans Réfléchir sur notre passé pour aborder notre avenir, des diplomates, des politiciens, des chercheurs et des personnages en vue dans le domaine des droits de l’homme, dont Phil Fontaine, Michaëlle Jean, Ellen Gabriel, Paul Heinbecker, Bob Rae, Jean Charest et David Suzuki mettent en commun leur sagesse et leur expérience des événements qui ont marqué l’histoire du pays au cours des cinquante dernières années. Réfléchissant au rôle complémentaire à la Chambre des communes du Sénat au Canada, ils examinent des enjeux clés comme la condition des peuples autochtones, les obligations imposées par la Charte des droits et libertés, la reconnaissance des deux langues officielles et les référendums sur l’unité nationale. Les collaborateurs abordent aussi la transformation de l’économie dans un monde numérisé et un système planétaire, le rôle du Canada sur la scène mondiale à une époque de tension croissante, le flot accru de réfugiés, les changements climatiques et l’incertitude entourant l’avenir de l’Arctique, la concurrence scientifique et culturelle sur le marché international et l’avenir de la démocratie parlementaire. Corrigeant les fausses idées à propos du rôle actuel du Sénat et donnant le contre-argument à une réforme radicale du Sénat, Réfléchir sur notre passé pour aborder notre avenir propose de riches perspectives et un aperçu fascinant de l’évolution probable du Canada au cours des prochaines années.

This second annual volume from the Organization of American Historians, containing the best American history articles published between the summers of 2005 and 2006, provides a quick and comprehensiveoverview ofthe topwork and the current intellectual trendsin the field of American history. With contributions froma diverse group of historians, thiscollection appealsboth to scholars and to lovers of history alike.