Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity

by Becky Thompson (Editor), Sangeeta Tyagi (Editor)

Overview

Names We Call Home is a ground-breaking collection of essays which articulate the dynamics of racial identity in contemporary society. The first volume of its kind, Names We Call Home offers autobiographical essays, poetry, and interviews to highlight the historical, social, and cultural influences that inform racial identity and make possible resistance to myriad forms of injustice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415911627
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/27/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Becky Thompson teaches African American Studies and Sociology at Wesleyan University. Sangeeta Tyagi is Director at the Exploration Summer Program, a curricular and co-curricular summer program for high school students.

Table of Contents

I: Blood Ties, Communal Relations; 1: “When we Are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to See”; 2: Mrs. Brent; 3: Red and Black in White America; 4: Writing in Search of a Home; 6: Alice's Little Sister; 6: Place and Kinship; II: Piecing Together History; 7: Locating Biafra; 8: Afro Images; 9: Time Traveling and Border Crossing; 10: A Hyphenated Identity; 11: Jews in the U.S; 12: Chattanooga Black Boy; III: Love Letters and Conversations; 13: My Dear Niece; 14: Oxydol Poisoning; 15: Wrting Life; 16: Birth of a Negation; 17: Jippin' the Furniture; IV: “Acts of Creation: Sweat, Blood, Bone“; The Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind; Eating Salt; Turning the Myths of Black Masculinity Inside/Out; “Wandering between Two Words, One Dead, the Other Powerless to Be Born”; Playing the Devil's Advocate; Black Women and the Wilderness; Toward the Light; Waiting for a Taxi

Editorial Reviews

"This is not a woe-is-me, tear-jerking collection: It is a dynamic call to action. The many different stories illuminate options, real possibilities for real people to develop strategies to navigate the racist shoals in today's shallow cultural waters. What makes this book groundbreaking are the ways in which the editors use personal stories to validate cultural theory." — Middletown Press

From the Publisher

Provides an ontological characterization of texts to complete the discussion begun in Gracia's A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology (1995). In an argumentative style that avoids some of the extreme views espoused by other contemporary authors, he explores the issues raised by the identity of various texts, and proposes a view of the identity and function of authors and audiences and of their relations to the texts. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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