The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation

This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Brown investigates how the superficially separate categorical systems of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity intersect in the formation of whiteness in the US. More specifically, she examines how texts by and/or about immigrants construct racial, ethnic, and national subjectivities, how these subjectivities infuse the changing definition of whiteness in the early 20th century, and how the texts reify and resist hegemonic racial ideology. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR