Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric and Injury

Carl Gutierrez-Jones

NYU Press, 2001 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 214 pages

The beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, and the LAPD Rampart Scandal: these events have been interpreted by the courts, the media and the public in dramatically conflicting ways. Critical Race Narratives examines what is at stake in these conflicts and, in so doing, rethinks racial strife in the United States as a highly-charged struggle over different methods of reading and writing.
Focusing in particular on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debatesincluding The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Working through Racial Injury: 19
• The Contours of the Contemporary Race Debate: 21
• ColorBlindness Acting Out and Culture: 48
• Narrative Interventions: 67
• Critical Race Stories and the Problem of Remedy: 69
• Historical Properties Uncommon Grounds: 90
• The Sociology of Racialized Crime: 114
• Genetic Liabilities and the Paradox of Altruism: 146
• Conclusion: 168
• Notes: 177
• Works Cited: 195
• Index: 207
• About the Author: 214

About the author

Carl Gutierrez-Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the author of Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric and Injury; Volume 42 of Critical America
• Author: Carl Gutierrez-Jones
• Publisher: NYU Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0814731449, 9780814731444
• Length: 214 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Rhetoric; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Social Science / Discrimination; Social Science / Minority Studies; Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations