For the past five centuries, indigenous and African American communities throughout the Americas have fought to maintain and recreate enduring identities under conditions of radical change and discontinuity--conditions often involving demographic collapse, loss of land and other resources, forced relocation, enslavement, ethnic soldiering, ethnocide, genocide, and "historicide." The essays in this ground-breaking volume document this cultural creativity--this ethnogenesis--within and against the broader contexts of domination; the authors simultaneously encompass the entanglements of local communities in the webs of national and global power relations as well as people's unique abilities to gain control over ways of defining their history and identity.
To stimulate a comparative, hemispheric understanding of ethnogenesis that transcends geographic specializations, Hill has organized these essays in a roughly chronological sequence from the early colonial period, through the rise of independent states in the Americas in the nineteenth century, to the contemporary processes of ethnogenesis. From the northeastern plains of North America to Amazonia, colonial and independent states in the Americas interacted with vast multilingual and multicultural networks, resulting in the historical emergence of new ethnic identities and the disappearance of many earlier ones. The importance of African, indigenous American, and European religions, myths, and symbols as historical cornerstones in the building of new ethnic identities emerges as one of the central themes of this convincing collection.
By defining ethnogenesis as the synthesis of people's cultural and political struggles to exist as well as their historical consciousness of these struggles, History, Power, and Identity breaks out of the implicit contrast between isolated local cultures and dynamic global history. In the context of this growing rapprochement between anthropology and history, its lessons will be valuable to anthropologists, historians, ethnohistorians, Latin Americanists, Afro-Americanists, historical archaeologists, and historians of religion.
Contributors: Patricia C. Albers, Kenneth Bilby, David M. Guss, Nancy P. Hickerson, Jonathan D. Hill, Richard A. Sattler, Susan K. Staats, Neil Lancelot Whitehead, Norman E. Whitten, Jr.
Jonathan Hill is associate professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University and the author of Keepers of the Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society.
"This volume is at the cutting edge of cultural-historical studies and contributes to the development of theory and methodology. The authors are aware of and take full advantage of the most recent work on their topics, while at the same time not ignoring previous work in the area. The chapters are theoretically sophisticated but data-based." --Kenneth M. Kensinger, Bennington College
288 pages, 10 maps, 5 figures, 3
halftones
ISBN 0-87745-546-5 cloth:
$32.95s
ISBN 0-87745-547-3 paper:
$15.95s
June 1996
No matter how many letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, memoirs, photographs, and other sources are available to the biographer, omniscience is impossible and memories are faulty. Problems of construction also pose special challenges. Should the biography be a straight narrative or a psychological treatment? Where should it begin? How should it end? These matters and many others are covered in this important collection of nineteen new essays by eminent literary biographers.
The essays in The Literary Biography range from an examination of the traditional biographical form, which studies in detail the relation of a writer's art to his or her life, to psychobiography, which is guided more by psychological theory. The contributors explore with insight and candor the many ways they contend with a wide variety of materials, with ethical and legal and stylistic problems, and with what Victoria Glendinning calls the "lies and silences" in the public records.
Elegantly assembled and presented by one of our foremost literary scholars, The Literary Biography is an indispensable guide for biographers, would-be biographers, and readers in general who are eager to learn about the practical and theoretical aspects involved in recounting a life.
Contributors:
Catherine Aird / Antony Alpers / Anthony Curtis /
Linda H. Davis
Russell Fraser / N. John Hall / John Halperin / Eric Jacobs
Justin Kaplan / Margaret Lewis / Elizabeth Longford
Diane Wood Middlebrook / Andrew Motion / Katherine Ramsland
Dale Salwak / Kenneth Silverman / Natasha Spender
Martin Stannard / Linda Wagner-Martin
Dale Salwak is professor of English at Citrus College in Glendora, California. He has written or edited sixteen books, including The Life and Work of Barbara Pym (Iowa, 1986), Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work (Iowa, 1988), and Anne Tyler as Novelist (Iowa, 1994).
200 pages
ISBN 0-87745-553-8 cloth
$27.95s
October 1996
For sale only in the
United States, its dependencies, and Canada
December 24, 1999