ALI books

• Harrison-Kahan, Lori. The White Negress: Literature and Minstrelsy in the Black-Jewish Imaginary.
  
  (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press, 2010).
  
  Examines the relationship between representations of blackness and white ethnicity in twentieth-century American literature and culture by placing narratives of passing, in which mixed race protagonists cross to the white side of the color line, alongside narratives of assimilation, in which immigrants transform themselves into Americans. While this project follows in the path of critics such as Toni Morrison, Michael Rogin, David Roediger, and Eric Lott, who argue that formations of whiteness occur at the expense of blacks, it also addresses a lacuna in the current scholarship, which tends to elide gender or privileges men and masculinity. By focusing on the cultural productions of black and Jewish women, such as Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, Sophie Tucker, Anzia Yezierska, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, The White Negress: Literature and Minstrelsy in the Black-Jewish Imaginary tells a more complex story about the interplay between immigrant and African American identities.