September 3, 2005
LaCapra, Dominick, Ed. The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
The Bounds of Race provides a subtle analysis of the variable role of racial ideologies and traces the interplay between hegemonic constraints and the strategies of resistance to them. The contributing authors take on questions of language, genre, and politics with reference to African American, Anglo-American, African, South African, Francophone North African, British and Afro-Hispanic texts. Individual chapters discuss writings from an array of genres including homily, autobiography, the novel, children’s literature, and political and scientific discourse. Taken together, the essays persuasively argue that the existing canon must be expanded, that the protocols of interpretation must be transformed to make a prominent place for such issues as race, and that the problem of interpretation cannot be posed in the absence of theoretically informed modes of historical investigation.