At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance

Contributors

Contributors Douglas A. Cunningham is a doctoral student in film studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary research interests are the study of race and gender in cinema, particularly representations of whiteness and masculinity. He has published articles in the Moving Image (U of Minnesota P), War, Literature, and the Arts (U.S. Air Force Academy), Critical Survey (Berghahn Journals), and Screens (Oxford UP). His dissertation centers on the history of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ first Motion Picture Unit during World War II and constructions of masculinity in its training films. He was born and grew up in Salt Lake City. Kimberly Chabot Davis received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. She is presently assistant professor of twentieth-century U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences (Purdue UP, 2007) and has published essays on race in contemporary American culture in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, LIT, South Atlantic Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth Century Literature. Her essay in this collection is drawn from a book manuscript in progress, “Beyond the White Negro: Cross-Racial Empathy, White Audiences, and Contemporary AfricanAmerican Culture.” Dr. Davis was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. Renée D’elia-Zunino, a lecturer of Italian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, graduated with an M.A. in comparative literature, achieving the License of Doctor in Modern and Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Genova. Her first article on whiteness, “Passing for Black or Passing for White: Authenticating Middle-Class American Whiteness Through Blackness,” appeared in Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation (Bordighera, 2004). A native of the province of Genova, Italy, she moved to the United States in 1998. Dawn Duke completed a Ph.D. in Latin American literature at the University of Pittsburgh and is presently assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She previously taught at the University of Guyana. Specializing in issues of race, gender, and writing in Hispanic, Caribbean, and Brazilian literatures, she is the author of Contributors 286 Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Towards a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers(Bucknell,2008).AnativeofGeorgetown, Guyana, Dr. Duke has also lived and studied in Brazil. Baltasar Fra-Molinero completed a Ph.D. at Indiana University and is now associate professor of Spanish at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. His research focuses on the representation of blacks and racial difference in Spain, Latin American, and Equatorial Guinea. Among his publications are La imagen del Negro en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Siglo XXI, 1995) and “Juan Latino and Racial Difference,” included in the volume Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge UP, 2005). He is a native of Ponferrada in northern Spain. Peter Höyng earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is presently associate professor of German in the German Studies Department at Emory University. His areas of research are German drama and theater of the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries and German-Jewish culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. His publications include The Stars, Censorship and Fatherland: History and Theater in the Late 18th Century (Böhlau, 2003) and Embodied Projections of History: George Tabori’s Theater Work (Francke, 1997), an edited collection of essays on the Jewish playwright. He has also published essays on Beethoven’s intellectual life in Vienna. A native of Germany, Höyng has taught study abroad courses in Berlin and Vienna, emphasizing the German-Jewish cultural and literary influences on both cities. LaViniaDeloisJenningsearnedaPh.D.attheUniversityofNorthCarolina at Chapel Hill specializing in twentieth-century American literature and is presently Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee , Knoxville. Her books include Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Alice Childress (Macmillan, 1995), a critical introduction to the novelist and playwright. Born in Virginia, she has traveled extensively throughout North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe , and Africa. Amy Kaminsky earned a Ph.D. in Spanish at Pennsylvania State University and is presently professor of women’s studies and global studies at the University of Minnesota, where she is also a member of the graduate faculty in Spanish and Portuguese. Among her numerous scholarly essays, the award-winning “Gender Race Raza” (Feminist Studies, 1994)is her most outstanding . Her books include Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Contributors...