Reviewed by: Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism by Jodi Melamed Sean Gerrity Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. By Jodi Melamed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. ix + 274 pp. Moving expertly between macrocosmic historical evaluations and microcosmic analyses of literary texts and cultural artifacts, Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy is a timely and rigorous intervention into the discourse surrounding the way we have come to understand race and racism in the United States since World War II. Agreeing with previous scholars like Howard Winant that World War II marked a distinct racial break from “white supremacist modernity” in the United States, Melamed introduces a three part chronology for tracking the development of what she calls “official, state-sponsored antiracisms” during the second half of the twentieth-century. In tracing these three stages—racial liberalism (mid-1940s to 1960s), liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s)—Melamed argues that these state-sponsored “race-liberal orders,” as she calls them, have systematically disarticulated race from material conditions, thereby circumscribing the limits of racial expression and the possibilities for the elimination of racism in the United States. These temporal frameworks provide a convenient way of conceptualizing the evolution of a variety of complex intertwined forces and their impact on the lived reality of individuals and communities, and they really never feel reductive or limiting. Melamed is clear that the date ranges are fluid, recognizing the inevitable overlap of residual and emergent orders within the same time periods. The book’s forays into literary criticism, cultural studies, critical race studies, and sociology, among other things, make it of particular interest to American Studies scholars working on race, capitalism, institutionality, and fiction in the twentieth-century. One also gets the distinct feeling that Melamed’s methodologies could be usefully brought to bear on earlier periods of American history, such as the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years. In a fifty-page introduction, Melamed lays out the basis of her overall analysis and the framework of each of her successive [End Page 157] chapters. At times the introduction seems repetitive, and this feeling is enhanced in later chapters, many of which repeat almost verbatim statements Melamed made earlier. While this repetition can sometimes seem unnecessary, its purpose appears evident at the end of the book. One’s mind is left indelibly imprinted with Melamed’s unique nomenclature, a familiarity with which is required in order to really conceptualize the trajectory of her arguments which are, indeed, articulating entirely novel ways of understanding something we thought we knew so much about. The deployment of so much new terminology—“race-liberal orders,” “race-radical” literary texts, her three periods of evolving race-liberal orders, and so on—is bold but essential if Melamed hopes to succeed in her project of reconceptualizing thought about U.S. racism since World War II. Represent and Destroy makes many original claims and excavates little-recognized historical sources. Two of the most exceptional of the latter are the monumental study of mid-century racial conditions in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, founded in 1917 by a partial owner of Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Melamed 63). Melamed argues that An American Dilemma emblematizes the confluence of forces—governmental, institutional, educational, philanthropic, and social-scientific—that professionalized the study of race relations and produced the first official program for “solving” the race issue in the United States. An American Dilemma married the issues of racism and American global ascendancy, articulating the idea that the United States could find geopolitical success if it improved domestic race relations and made itself a model for the decolonizing world. Thus, significantly, Melamed points out that the issue of race relations became a means to an end in a highly politicized cold war environment, not an end in itself. An American Dilemma was prescient in its recognition that internal systemic racial discrimination would delegitimize U.S. claims to equality and equal opportunity. Indeed, as Melamed also notes, the Soviet Union would exploit U.S. hypocrisy on race relations in its anti-U.S. and anti...

The notion of belonging to a broader cultural landscape becomes obvious in the writer's intentions to offer a poetry that is accessible to the people, while at the same time tackling fundamental identity crossroads pertaining to social status, race and ethnicity, cultural heritage, and language. Attuned to the goal of accessibility, Laviera's poetry is decidedly oral in form, whereas in content it is devoted to the language and circumstances of what he calls "his people" and their everyday experiences.

Reviewed by: Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss Ross K. Tangedal Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood. By Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2011. xii + 246 pp. No book-length analysis has emerged regarding Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood until now. Ralph F. Voss, a native Kansan and retired professor of English, takes as his subjects Capote and his 1966 text in Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood. Only a high school junior when four Kansans were shotgunned to death in their home, Voss provides an intricate evaluation of this seminal American text and its lasting effects. Rather than focus on one textual or social matter, Voss provides an extensive investigation into the various artistic, social, mythical and historical effects wrought by Capote’s book, resulting in a complete cultural overview. Though Voss cuts a wide swath, his approach allows for students not only of Capote and his text, but readers of any background, to engage with and understand the degree to which In Cold Blood changed the American literary establishment and American culture itself. It is here that Voss makes his mark, as he resurrects Truman Capote and In Cold Blood for a new generation of readers. Much has been written regarding the various stages of Truman Capote’s fascinating career, both socially and artistically. Gerald Clarke’s definitive biography (Capote: A Biography, 1988) covers in detail the peaks and valleys of one of America’s most successful and misunderstood literary artists, as does George Plimpton’s oral biography, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (1997). Academic scholarship centers squarely on In Cold Blood, the 1966 “nonfiction” account of a quadruple murder in Holcomb, Kansas, with various pieces covering several aspects of the text’s ingenuity. Hailed as the first “nonfiction novel” and predecessor to both New Journalism and the true crime genre, In Cold Blood manages to complicate an array of analytical perspectives, ranging from queer theory to textuality to psychoanalysis. Indeed, the MLA International Bibliography lists seventy-one notes, articles and book chapters regarding the text and its author, with no other major work receiving more than sixteen. Further, while scholars [End Page 259] have ordained the text as Capote’s magnum opus, subsequent film adaptations of the work (and its creation) have permeated the American marketplace, including Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967), Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005) and Douglas McGrath’s Infamous (2006), again establishing the text as central in both literary and filmic arenas. As a central American text, In Cold Blood has had (and continues to have) a profound effect on the American zeitgeist not only of the 1960s, but on the present day. Voss’s attention to these cultural effects allows for an updated understanding of the text itself, as he dutifully addresses several aspects of In Cold Blood’s infamous existence. His approach, both studied and effective, combines “Capote’s ruinous celebrity, yoked with the resonance of his crime and punishment story, [resulting] in several ongoing cultural legacies.” Voss suggests that not only the text itself, but its varying creative descendants, “bear testimony to the wide cultural influence the book and its creator have had” (15). Such an approach fits the expectancy of In Cold Blood’s first book-length study, as Voss leaves little out in his carefully researched and altogether straight-forward literary/cultural criticism. He is especially successful in condensing the enormous amount of historical information about Capote and his work early on, with excellent chapters on his celebrity, Southern Gothicism, and style. Voss hinges Capote’s legacy on In Cold Blood, the author’s ultimate axis, calling it “the culminating triumph of Truman Capote’s gothic vision, the book that moved him from the secondary ranks among Southern writers of gothic fiction to the front ranks of serious American writers of nonfiction” (49). Here Voss presents his continued paradoxical look into Truman Capote and his work, how one author could both change and be changed by cultural expectancy, literary encumbrance and popular culture itself. From his celebrity and literary abilities came...

“What ever was more neutral than you and me?”:Twins and the Comedy of Doubled National Character Lisa Schreibersdorf What ever was more neutral than you and me? We’re neither one thing nor the other, and yet at the same time we’re both. —Elizabeth von Arnim Russell, Christopher and Columbus (39) Elizabeth von Arnim Russell’s Christopher and Columbus appeared on the annual U.S. best-seller list in the year after World War I. The book was eagerly received in England and in the United States by fans of this popular author, who was known only as “Elizabeth.” The novel opens in 1916 as twin girls of English-German descent journey from England, then at war, to the still neutral United States. Dubbing themselves Christopher and Columbus, the girls each take half of the explorer’s name, signifying their complexly doubled existence. The twins are individuals but are treated as a unit. They are both two—Christopher and Columbus—and one—together taking on the role of the single explorer crossing the Atlantic. The twins’ hyphenated ethnicity is equally difficult to categorize in its doubleness. They are, as introduced on the first page, “neither really Germans nor really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both” (Russell 1). This unresolvable doubling makes them both two and none, erasing their connection to any one national identity by confirming their connection to both. The novel’s 1916 U.S. setting is removed from the immediate [End Page 153] military violence of the war. Instead, it focuses on the forcefulness of domestic institutions and explores the contradictory form of nationalism that some saw as a model for postwar Europe. The twins choose Christopher Columbus’s names “because they were setting out to discover a New World,” which holds the promise of neutrality and the possibility of self-creation (2). However, the twins suffer the consequence of connections to Europe that are neither viewed neutrally nor chosen voluntarily. In its depiction of the twins’ troublesome doubling, Christopher and Columbus exposes the unnatural divisions forced upon those of dual-national ancestry by those who insisted on the singularity of national character. In the United States, where this novel is set and where it became a best seller, efforts to define national character were heightened both in the face of immigration in the years before 1914 and in the face of the war. The war years were the height of the “Americanization” project and fostered the growing movements to restrict immigration that were aimed at protecting the health and identity of America. Also during this era, many sought to define American literature by insisting upon a connection between American political and racial character and a specifically American culture. Related debates over the meaning of German-American ethnicity, especially as contrasted with Anglo-American, teased out connections and disconnections among race, nation, culture, and politics that ultimately came to signify more generalized ideas about ethnicity and identity. Many German-American commentators made distinctions between their cultural ties to Germany and their political loyalty to the United States as it allied with England, arguing that they could maintain both by keeping them separate. They often used the term hyphenate or referred to the hyphen between German and American; though this term was used as a powerful insult at the time, these writers reclaimed its earlier, neutral meaning. For many of these writers, the hyphen marked the separation between the sentimental German and political American parts of themselves, and this divide between sentiment and politics became central to developing models of cultural pluralism. Christopher and Columbus is one of fourteen novels depicting [End Page 154] the American home front to reach the best-seller list between 1916 and 1919. A number of World War I novels present conflicts within the American national character, by depicting a single, psychically split German-American character. Fiction that represents duality with twinned characters presents a different sort of challenge to the notion of national character. I use the word character here to point to the connections among three of the term’s meanings: the formal element of literary character, the sense of national character that was salient in scientific...

I had stopped believing that we could ever learn more about the onetime slave maid who literally rescued the Chesnut finances after the war with her shared dairy business. But thanks to this extraordinary photograph, in the published annotation of which I had the good fortune to participate, that inquiry is just beginning.

Thus, part of the strength of Imagining Childhood lies in its contribution not only to early American children’s literary, political, and religious scholarship but also to twenty-first-century legal discourse and the modern classroom.

When “speaking analytically” about literature in Literature, Analytically Speaking , Peter Swirski tells a story of the wayward caprices of literary criticism past and present. His gripe is with what he sees as a pervasive disregard for the common sense truth that context matters. in particular, he seeks to underscore that the ontological status of literature cannot be understood absent consideration of authorial intentions. This enterprise is corrective in nature and entails a lengthy refutation over the first two chapters of all “poststructuralist,” purely text-based approaches to interpretation.

Starets’ work, which also includes a focus on specific linguistic difficulties such as aspect, mood, prepositions and word order, is an excellent review of a fair number of theories and approaches, whose usefulness and applications he sums up in his last chapter in eleven short conclusions. While at times repetitive in regards to contextualization and culture, the book is nonetheless valuable in its clear presentation of influential linguistic principles spanning over a hundred years.