Racial Frontiers

Both a synthesis of the recent literature and an explanation of what happened when distinctly identifiable races interacted on the frontier.

What do race, ethnicity and nationalism have to do with sex, and vice versa? This title uses examples to examine how sex shapes ideas and feelings about race, ethnicity and national identity and how sexual images, fears and desires shape racial, ethnic and national stereotypes and conflicts.

Revisiting the racial origins of the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery” in twentieth-century America The atomic age brought the Bomb and spawned stories of nuclear apocalypse to remind us of impending doom. As Patrick Sharp reveals, those stories had their origins well before Hiroshima, reaching back to Charles Darwin and America’s frontier. In Savage Perils, Sharp examines the racial underpinnings of American culture, from the early industrial age to the Cold War. He explores the influence of Darwinism, frontier nostalgia, and literary modernism on the history and representations of nuclear weaponry. Taking into account such factors as anthropological race theory and Asian immigration, he charts the origins of a worldview that continues to shape our culture and politics. Sharp dissects Darwin’s arguments regarding the struggle between “civilization” and “savagery,” theories that fueled future-war stories ending in Anglo dominance in Britain and influenced Turnerian visions of the frontier in America. Citing George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” Sharp argues that many Americans still believe in the racially charged opposition between civilization and savagery, and consider the possibility of nonwhite “savages” gaining control of technology the biggest threat in the “war on terror.” His insightful book shows us that this conflict is but the latest installment in an ongoing saga that has been at the heart of American identity from the beginning—and that understanding it is essential if we are to eradicate racist mythologies from American life.

Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley each inhabited the shared but contested space at the frontiers of race. Gregory Stephens shows how their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in a previously hidden interracial consciousness and culture, and integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one 'racial' or national group. Douglass ('something of an Irishman as well as a Negro') was an abolitionist but also a critic of black racialism. Ellison's Invisible Man is a landmark of modernity and black literature which illustrates 'the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness'. Marley's allegiance was to 'God's side, who cause me to come from black and white'. His Bible-based Songs of Freedom envisage a world in which black liberation and multiracial redemption co-exist. The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of 'race' have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.

Author Stephen Hall weaves together the scientific, social and political threads of this story - the fierce rivalry between labs, the fateful clash of egos within labs, the invasion of academia by commerce, the public fears about genetic engineering, the threat of government regulation, and the ultimate triumph of modern biology - to give us an outstanding tale of scientific research."--BOOK JACKET.

The authors discuss cultural, racial, and ethnic relations and ideas about the contacts of peoples and the situations in which such contacts occur.

Challenging Frontiers: The Canadian West is a multidisciplinary study using critical essays as well as creative writing to explore the conceptions of the "West," both past and present. Considering topics such as ranching, immigration, art and architecture, as well as globalization and the spread of technology, these articles inform the reader of the historical frontier and its mythology, while also challenging and reassessing conventional analysis.

This long-awaited collection of essays consists of selected writings from Guggenheim Fellow Marlene Nourbese Philip's wide-ranging appearances in magazines, newspapers, and journals, including FUSE. Biting, elegant, by turns fiercely questioning, magically lyrical, and gently probing, Philip's examination of contemporary issues of race and culture is always eloquent and commanding.