Reading Race

Reading Race examines the work of twentieth-century white American poets from Carl Sandburg to Adrienne Rich, from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg, revealing within their poetry and casual writings a body of literature that transmits racism, even as it sometimes speaks against it. Tracing the persistence of racial discourse, Aldon Nielsen argues that white Americans, throughout their history, have used a language of their own primacy, a language that treats blacks as an abstract other--an aggregate nonwhite--to be acted upon and determined by whites. White discourse drapes over blacks an intricate veil of images and understandings--assertions of inferiority; metaphors of exoticism; similes of animals; tropes of fertility, nothingness, and death--through which whites read race and beneath which blacks remain imprisoned. "Words," Nielsen writes, "create and maintain relationships of power as surely as do prisons and arms." Speaking of the discourse of race in America, Nielsen identifies "dead metaphors"--words, images, ideas--that operate in much the same way as the "charged detail" of Pound or the "objective correlative" of T.S. Eliot. Embedded in the language, they are instantly recognizable to the native speaker. Poets, when they draw upon these metaphors, demand racist thinking in order to be understood.

Arthur promises to buy ice cream for his little sister, D.W., if she can read ten words. The twosome race to the park, where D.W. is quick to recognize signs such as ZOO, DON'T WALK, POLICE, and ICE CREAM. When she reads WET PAINT before her big brother does, Arthur is in for a colorful surprise!

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

Freddy is back, and ready to compete in the Reading Race! Freddy's class is competing in a read-a-thon, and the student who reads for the most minutes will win five free books -- and the class will win an author visit, too! Freddy plans to win this contest... even if it means staying up all night!

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do. Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

A new, interactive approach to storytime, The Whole Book Approach was developed in conjunction with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and expert author Megan Dowd Lambert's graduate work in children's literature at Simmons College, offering a practical guide for reshaping storytime and getting kids to think with their eyes. Traditional storytime often offers a passive experience for kids, but the Whole Book approach asks the youngest of readers to ponder all aspects of a picture book and to use their critical thinking skills. Using classic examples, Megan asks kids to think about why the trim size of Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline is so generous, or why the typeset in David Wiesner's Caldecott winner,The Three Pigs, appears to twist around the page, or why books like Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar are printed landscape instead of portrait. The dynamic discussions that result from this shared reading style range from the profound to the hilarious and will inspire adults to make children's responses to text, art, and design an essential part of storytime.

Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation. In charting the path of racial change, Douglas considers the relative efficacy of the black community's use of public demonstrations and litigation to force desegregation. He also evaluates the role of the city's white business community, which was concerned with preserving Charlotte's image as a racially moderate city, in facilitating racial gains. Charlotte's white leadership, anxious to avoid economically damaging racial conflict, engaged in early but decidedly token integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the black community's public protest and litigation efforts. The insistence in the late 1960s on widespread busing, however, posed integration demands of an entirely different magnitude. As Douglas shows, the city's white leaders initially resisted the call for busing but eventually relented because they recognized the importance of a stable school system to the city's continued prosperity.

What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States' class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection. At the same time, Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.