Overview

In Absorption Narratives, Stephanie M. Pridgeon explores cultural depictions of Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity within a comparative, inter-American framework. The dynamics of Jewishness interacting with other racial categories differ significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with those in the United States and Canada, largely due to long-standing and often disputed concepts of mestizaje, broadly defined as racial mixture. As a result, a comprehensive understanding of Jewishness and the construction of racial identities requires an exploration of how Jewishness intersects with both Blackness and Indigeneity in the Americas. Absorption Narratives charts the ways in which literary works capture differences and similarities among Black, Jewish, and Indigenous experiences. Through an extensive and diverse examination of fiction, Pridgeon navigates the complex connections of these identity categories, offering a comparative perspective on race and ethnicity across the Americas that destabilises US-centric critical practices. Revealing the limitations of US-focused models in understanding racial alterity in relation to Jewishness, Absorption Narratives emphasises the importance of viewing the narrative of race relations in the Americas from a hemispheric standpoint.

Full Product Details

9781487527716

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Reviews

""Absorption Narratives is a fascinating study of texts that thoroughly examines the intersectionality of Jewish, Black, and Indigenous identities throughout the Americas. Deeply informed, meticulously researched, and with an amazing breadth of scope, Pridgeon's book is a scholarly tour de force that explores heretofore uncharted territory in comparative literary and cultural studies.""--Darrell B. Lockhart, Vice Provost and Professor of Spanish, University of Nevada, Reno ""This timely book powerfully elaborates the framework of absorption to illuminate the complex relationship of Jewishness to racial paradigms in the Americas. By triangulating Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity, and by centring South American writing and concepts, Stephanie Pridgeon makes a major contribution to the emerging scholarship on Jews and settler colonialism.""--Sarah Phillips Casteel, Professor of English, Carleton University ""Stephanie Pridgeon's Absorption Narratives arrives at a time when the need to wrestle with the complexities of race, culture, and ethnicity is particularly vital, especially as it pertains to Jewish, Black, and Indigenous people in the Americas. Pridgeon offers a lucid comparative perspective contrasting the syncretism that defines mestizaje in Latin America and the Caribbean from Canada and the US that tend to read race in a Black-white binary. While issues of racial and social inequality intersect with ethnicity, gender, and sexual identities all over the world, these intersectionalities are specific to place and time. Pridgeon's precise and sophisticated analysis of literature and film in the Americas sheds light on the complex tensions and cultural connections that have taken place between Jewish, Black, and Indigenous people at different moments in history and in vastly different contact zones such as São Paulo, Brazil, in the seventies and North Dakota at the end of the First World War. This ambitious project is a must-read for students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning about how diverse conceptualizations of race, culture, and ethnicity are in the Americas.""--Ariana Huberman, Associate Professor of Spanish, Haverford College

Author Information

Stephanie M. Pridgeon is an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Bates College.

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