The fugitive race

"Stephen P. Knadler adds to the discussion of the "white question" by contending that the white race has been a fugitive one that ignores the need for dialogue with minorities. The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness investigates the creation and perpetration of whiteness, highlighting both the race's exclusion of people of color and minority writers' resistance to this privileged racial category.". "From the antebellum period to the 1980s, the belief in a white racial superiority, or simply a white difference, has denied that people of color might and do have an influence on the supposedly pure or protected character of whiteness. In contrast, this book attempts to define a new way of analyzing minority literature that questions this segregated color line. In addition to creating a new racial awareness, many writers of color tried to interfere in the historical formulation of whiteness. They created unsettling moments when white readers had to see themselves for the first time from the outside-in, or from the critical perspective of non-white writers. These writers - including William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Abraham Cahan, Younghill Kang, Zora Neale Hurston, and Arturo Islas - did not simply resist assimilation. They sought to dismantle the white identities that lay as the foundation of the master's house."--BOOK JACKET.