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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments My teaching and travel, both professional and personal, gave rise to At Home and Abroad, and I wish to thank those near and far who assisted in its production. FirstandforemostImustacknowledgethefineworkandextensive patience of the contributors whose essays appear between these covers and those whose do not. I especially wish to single out Kimberly Chabot Davis, who waited longest and best. I thank my graduate assistant Meredith McCarroll and the Nathalia Wright Research Assistantship that compensated her for the time and energy that she devoted to reading submissions and corresponding with contributors. I wish to thank the internal and external readers whose thorough reports stand as testaments to the intensive work that members of our profession perform anonymously and all too often without proper acknowledgment and remuneration. In the Dominican Republic, I thank poet and television host Blas R. Jiménez; his sister, Eulalia Jiménez; the curator Juan M. Rodríguez of Museo del Hombre Dominicano; MUDHA director Sonia Pierre; theformerambassadortoHaiti,AlbertoDespradel;andFarahHalal, her husband Hector, and their daughter Itzel (Mariposa). In Haiti, I am eternally grateful to Nicole Grégoire in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I thank Richard Dyer for his kind response to my letter. I thank you, John Edgar Wideman. And I thank Jenn Fishman and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. And last, I am indebted to the anonymous patron of the Jefferson Prize. Since receiving your generous gift, I have completed Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and this edited collection of scholarly essays. Another on Zora Neale Hurston is being readied. La Vinia Delois Jennings Knoxville March 2008 ...