Ethnic Stereotypes

In this extensive study of ethnic labeling in the United States' popular speech and usage, the author explores the major traditional themes behind the development of ethnic slurs. Viewing U.S. slang as a reflection of social diversity, rapid change, and the complexity of U.S. society, Allen gives a special insight into the social workings of U.S. culture, both past and present. The book offers an overview of the major traditional themes used in the making of ethnic slurs as well as the most recent fads of covert and devious slurring with codewords and various kinds of sly word games. Unkind Words delivers its message with unusual clarity, that too often shoddy language shapes our thinking about the politics of ethnicity.

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative ###I Am a Woman -- and a Jew#; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, ###The Education of Little Tree#. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s -- against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music -- Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.

This work combines Jungian analysis with certain West African religious principles in an examination of fictional characterizations of white women in African-American literature. Taking neither a purely African nor Western approach to the material, the author offers analyses of white women as the terrible mother, the bitch goddess, the seductress, the initiator, the femme fatale, the benevolent witch, and the confidant. Both the particular stereotypes of white women and their mythic roles are explored, in terms of both social and mythical archetypes.

Young compares and contrasts the histories of African-American and Chinese-American women, then analyzes each group's response to the stereotyped images that have become a part of American cultural history. Her vehicle for this study is fiction from writers as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, William Wells Brown, Ambrose Bierce, and Frank Chin, and from Euro-American, African-American, and Chinese-American writers who created the dominant stereotypes. Young examines the response to these stereotypes in the writings of key African and Chinese-American women writers such as Linda Brent, Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Sui Sin Far, Chang Hua, and Amy Tan.

Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, critics such as Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish "the artistic emancipation of the Negro," a project that logically extended to other groups systematically misrepresented in the comic imagery of the period. From the influential "Editor's Study" at Harper's Monthly, William Dean Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery as an alternative to romanticism's "pride of caste," which is "averse to the mass of men" and "consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise." Yet if literary realism pursued the interests of democracy by affirming "the equality of things and the unity of men," why did its major practitioners, including Howells himself, regularly employ comic typification as a feature of their representational practice? Critics have often dismissed such apparent lapses in realist practice as blind spots, vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with realism's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. Henry B. Wonham argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the period's most demanding literary and graphic works. The seemingly anomalous presence of gross ethnic abstractions within works by Howells, Twain, James, Wharton, and Chesnutt hints at realism's vexed and complicated relationship with the caricatured ethnic images that played a central role in late nineteenth-century American thinking about race, identity, and national culture. In illuminating that relationship, Playing the Races offers a fresh understanding of the rich literary discourse conceived at the intersection of the realist and the caricatured image.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays assesses Jewish humor as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry. Scholars from England, France, the United States, Denmark, Israel, and Australia explore Jewish humor from a variety of perspectives, including anthropology, literature, psychology, sociology, and religion. Individual essays focus on linkages with language, religion, and historical traditions; study characteristics such as gallows humor, self-disparagement, and stereotyping; analyze distinctions between humor in Israel and in the diaspora; and discuss the contributions of Jewish humorists and comic performers and Jewish theorists of humor.

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, & scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, & the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon & Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire & primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, & anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus. The book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, & natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature & colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, & Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker's popular Princesse Tam Tam, the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers & activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries. Both intellectually rigorous & culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students & scholars in the fields of nineteenth- & twentieth-century French literature, feminist & gender studies, black studies, & cultural studies.