Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction

Mark C. Jerng

Published by Fordham University Press 2018

Racial Worldmaking

The Power of Popular Fiction

Mark C. Jerng

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823277780

Overview
Contents

About this book

Examines the relationship between race representation and popular fiction from 1893 to the present, as well as its impact on historiography, economics, and law.

Author / Editor information

Jerng Mark C. :

Mark C. Jerng is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging.Mark C. Jerng is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging.

Reviews

Racial Worldmaking exhibits strong, fluid writing that is academic by design and presentation yet accessible to a wide readership.

—andré carrington:
Racial Worldmaking meets the irresistible demand for scholarship that recognizes the central role of perceiving and speculating about race in American literature and culture. By situating race as a structuring principle within legal doctrines, literary traditions, and economic philosophies, Jerng interrogates the fictions that buttress dominant racial ideologies and calls attention to the imaginative work performed by thinkers who take racism seriously. Racial Worldmaking moves beyond disciplinary conventions to apply lessons learned from critical race theories and advance vital lines of inquiry inaugurated by Black and Asian American intellectuals.

—Thomas Foster:
In a book that pays equal attention to the protocols and history of genre reading and to contemporary critical theories of race, Mark Jerng shows how techniques of worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy and attention to setting as site of literary innovation define textual and interpretive strategies for producing race at levels other than biological differences or overtly racialized characters or authors, shifting the analysis of race and racism away from visual epistemology to allow them to be understood as embedded in fictional worlds.

This book is an important contribution to critical race studies within sf and I recommend it to any reader of SFS interested in race... It is in his careful analysis of the mechanisms of that worldbuilding as they pertain to race that Jerng truly offers us something novel... It is probably those who do not spend as much time thinking about worldbuilding who will find Jerng’s study most revelatory. We make these worlds. We could make them differently.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
introduction. Racial Worldmaking Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
part I. Yellow Peril Genres
chapter 1. Worlds of Color Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
chapter 2. Futures Past of Asiatic Racialization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	50
part II. Plantation Romance
chapter 3. Romance and Racism after the Civil War Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
chapter 4. Reconstructing Racial Perception Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
part III. Sword and Sorcery
chapter 5. The “Facts” of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
chapter 6. Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
part IV. Alternate History
chapter 7. Racial Counterfactuals and the Uncertain Event of Emancipation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
chapter 8. Alternate Histories of World War II; or, How the Race Concept Organizes the World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
conclusion. On the Possibilities of an Antiracist Racial Worldmaking Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Other: 1
Keywords: African American; Asian American; Fantasy; Genre; Plantation Romance; Popular fiction; Race; Science Fiction

eBook

Published: November 7, 2017
ISBN: 9780823277780