Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities (Hardback) | Released: 01 Jul 2013

Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities investigates two major issues within contemporary American Studies: cultural representations of various minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual) and of women in intersectional contexts of race, class, and sexuality. The first part of the volume, Gender and Sexuality in Film and Literature, analyzes different film genres and literary accounts in reference to those aspects of gender and sexuality that are related to identity. Various cultural texts are discussed from perspectives deriving from feminist, gender, and LGBT studies, intersectionality theories, as well as film studies. The second part, American Experiences of Ethnic Diversity, dwells upon ethnic and racial problems of American multicultural society and complex interrelationships between the dominant and the marginalized (the center and the periphery). It also focuses on the issue of one's (un)fitting into the dominant culture, mainstream politics, and canon. The chapters focus on various dimensions of Native-American, African-American, and Latin-American presence in the United States-their representations in literature and popular culture, difficult negotiations with the dominant culture, and different attempts to preserve ethnic uniqueness and distinctiveness within-to use Vincent Parillo's words-the ever-changing US mosaic (2010). The book is mostly addressed to scholars and students of American Studies but will also be noteworthy to anybody interested in the United States, literature, and the media. Selected chapters of this volume can be used as a point of departure for discussions-both scholarly and student-on contemporary challenges to the idea of multiculturalism, the complex role of various intersections (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, class, dis/ability, etc.) in shaping minority subjectivities, as well as feminist responses to and reading of dominant women's literary and filmic representations.
About the Author: Aleksandra M. Rozalska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies, University of Lodz and an Affiliate of the Women's Studies Centre, University of Lodz, Poland. Apart from studies on television, multiculturalism, and intersectional approaches to visual culture, her research interests include relationships between the media and politics, minority studies as well as reception theories. She has published on images of minorities and women in film and television (American and Polish), media education, as well as on television narratives in the US after 9/11 and in Poland after the 2004 EU enlargement. Grazyna Zygadlo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies, and an affiliate of the Women's Studies Centre, University of Lodz. Her major areas of expertise are ethnic minorities in the United States, specifically Latinos/as, and border and gender studies. She has been a guest lecturer at the universities in Spain, Finland, Sweden, as well as a recipient of grants from major US universities: University of Idaho, MIT and Florida International University in Miami. She has mostly published on issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender reflected in the works of Chicana writers and activists.