Slippery characters : ethnic impersonators and American identities / / Laura Browder

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910815293703321
• Autore: Browder Laura <1963->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Chapel Hill, : University of North Carolina Press, c2000
• ISBN: 979-88-908708-2-7; 0-8078-6060-3
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (326 p.)
• Collana: Cultural studies of the United States
• Disciplina: 810.9/492
• Soggetti: American prose literature - History and criticism; Autobiography; Literary forgeries and mystifications - History; Impostors and imposture in literature; Difference (Psychology) in literature; Identity (Psychology) in literature; Passing (Identity) in literature; Group identity in literature; Ethnic groups in literature; Impersonation in literature; Ethnicity in literature; Self in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [293]-304) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Slave Narratives and the Problem of Authenticity; 2. Staged Ethnicities: Laying the Groundwork for Ethnic Impersonator Autobiographies; 3. Writing American: California Novels of Brown People and White Nationhood; 4. One Hundred Percent American: How a Slave, a Janitor, and a Former Klansman Escaped Racial Categories by Becoming Indians; 5. The Immigrant's Answer to Horatio Alger; 6. Passing As Poor: Class Imposture in Depression America; 7. Postwar Blackface: How Middle-Class White Americans Became Authentic through Blackness; 8. To Pass Is To Survive: Danny Santiago's Famous All Over Town ; Conclusion: Rewriting the Ethnic Autobiography; Notes; Bibliography; Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In the 1920's, 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 1990's, 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