Project MUSE®: MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S..daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 34 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.TWOProject MUSE®MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.1946-31700163-755XLatest articles in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.. Feed provided by Project MUSE®(Re)Worlding the Plantation: Vulnerability and Regeneration in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987250
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In Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), which follows an impoverished Black family’s struggle for survival in rural Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, the protagonist Esch observes: “[T]here’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here” (4). Her remark not only underscores the frequency of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast but also speaks to the unrelenting storm of poverty that she and her family endure. As scholars have widely documented, Hurricane Katrina was not merely a natural disaster but a highly racialized, human-made catastrophe that exposed the asymmetrical impacts of climate change on marginalized communities. Clyde Woods describes the longstanding environmental and racial injustices in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall(Re)Worlding the Plantation: Vulnerability and Regeneration in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging2026-04-02text/htmlen-US(Re)Worlding the Plantation: Vulnerability and Regeneration in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1015792026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Settling the Imagined West: Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, Black Women, and the Revision of The Frontier Myth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987251
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The frontier myth is considered a “vital element in shaping American institutions and national character” (Slotkin, Gunfighter 30). Through literature, particularly the Western genre, authors negotiated “a clear concept of a representative American” who was almost always white and male (Slotkin, Regeneration 189). Although revisions of the frontier hero have been ongoing, the rhetoric of white male supremacy must be further interrogated. This necessity is highlighted by the resurgence of the Black Western in US culture, with films such as The Harder They Fall (2021) and television series such as Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023), among others, centering Black cowboys. Beyoncé’s latest country album Cowboy Carter (2024)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallSettling the Imagined West: Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, Black Women, and the Revision of The Frontier Myth2026-04-02text/htmlen-USSettling the Imagined West: Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, Black Women, and the Revision of The Frontier Myth2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®939342026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Synaesthetics of Transracial Adoption in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987252
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In Monique Truong’s 2010 novel Bitter in the Mouth, protagonist Linda Hammerick has a secret ability: she can taste words. Linda experiences auditory-gustatory synesthesia, a neurological condition and invisible difference to those around her in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina. For Linda, words “shed their figurative qualities, their diaphanous layers of meaning, and [become] concrete and explicit. They [leave her] literal and naked,” so much so that the word “matricide,” for instance, tastes like peach cobbler (102). Select words are coupled with what Linda calls “incomings,” the tastes she experiences when particular words are heard or spoken by or around her. In the novel, incomings are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallSynaesthetics of Transracial Adoption in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth2026-04-02text/htmlen-USSynaesthetics of Transracial Adoption in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®797902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02“The Lack of Coherence is a Powerful Disobedience”: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987253
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During his visit to the Toledo Museum of Art in October 2024, Ocean Vuong reflected on his creative process, stating, “I think the lack of coherence is a powerful disobedience, especially for an Asian American subject, who has been legible in this country mostly through labor.”1 Vuong was responding to my question on the role of coherence in art and how making oneself legible to the world is a fundamental concern for many artists, especially minority artists. Throughout his career, Vuong has reflected on the representational limits and possibilities of language and art, the racialized and gendered gatekeeping in the publishing world, and how the demand for racial and ethnic “legibility” can also be a type of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall“The Lack of Coherence is a Powerful Disobedience”: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong2026-04-02text/htmlen-US“The Lack of Coherence is a Powerful Disobedience”: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®752222026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02“That Bit of Art”: Love, Failure, and Maud Martha
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987254
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From its publishing debut, Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), has been entangled with failure. Written on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning success with Annie Allen (1949), the novel was initially written as a series of poems called American Family Brown but was rejected by her editors at Harper and Brothers (Jackson 53). Only after some forced transformation did it become the novel we know today; only after failure, in fact, did it become a novel at all. That failure was also preceded by another: a disparity between how Brooks saw her work and its aims and how it was received by critics.The year that Brooks won the Pulitzer for Annie Allen, for instance, the selection committee consisted of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall“That Bit of Art”: Love, Failure, and Maud Martha2026-04-02text/htmlen-US“That Bit of Art”: Love, Failure, and Maud Martha2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®843672026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Entombed Voices
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987255
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Pintos are at the intersection of our colonial reality and our revolutionary potential.This article explores the intersection of necropolitics—the power to determine who lives and who dies—and social death, the living entombment of captives in the American carceral system, or “backyard colonialism” (raúlrsalinas, “I Was Armed”).1 It examines the work of two pinto (convict) poets: raúlrsalinas’s Un Trip through the Mind Jail (1999) and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s What’s Happening (1982).2 Writing during the mid- to late twentieth century, a time of rapid carceral expansion, these Chicano poets use rhetorical devices to resist judicially sanctioned “legal sorcery” that reduces individuals to objects or the “dead-in-law,”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallEntombed Voices2026-04-02text/htmlen-USEntombed Voices2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1273032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Reimagining Allotment Discourse: Charles Alexander Eastman’s “O-hee-ye-sa” and the Dakota Sonic Critique of Land Allotment in From the Deep Woods to Civilization
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987256
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In the prologue to Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America (2019), Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk reflects on her experience as an Inupiaq classical violinist. Instead of playing musical scores as written by Western composers, Senungetuk reinterprets them from the perspective of her lived experiences as an Inupiaq (xv). Overall, the edited monograph focuses on how Indigenous sonic culture in the early twenty-first century undermines the settler-colonial configuration of modernity and Indigeneity as mutually irrelevant and disjunctive. Alternatively, Senungetuk’s musical experience indicates that Indigeneity and modernity are mutually constitutive, thereby demonstrating how “Native politics often exceed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallReimagining Allotment Discourse: Charles Alexander Eastman’s “O-hee-ye-sa” and the Dakota Sonic Critique of Land Allotment in From the Deep Woods to Civilization2026-04-02text/htmlen-USReimagining Allotment Discourse: Charles Alexander Eastman’s “O-hee-ye-sa” and the Dakota Sonic Critique of Land Allotment in From the Deep Woods to Civilization2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®889032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction by Robin Brooks (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987257
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In Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction, Robin Brooks offers a compelling study of how contemporary African American and Caribbean women novelists illuminate the relational, material, and structural features of class within Black life. Through close readings that privilege imaginative practices of literary production as forms of socioeconomic and political inquiry, Brooks argues that the writers under discussion “advocate for a reassessment of economic, social, and political practices within U.S. and Caribbean societies while leading readers to greater class consciousness” (2). Her work reveals how Black literary culture offers an analysis and critique of the impact of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallClass Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction by Robin Brooks (review)2026-04-02text/htmlen-USClass Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction by Robin Brooks (review)2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®101432026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life by Seulghee Lee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987258
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What is common between Blackness and Asianness? In Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life, Seulghee Lee answers this question by bringing a brand-new perspective and methodology to Afro-Asian studies through the concept of “AfroAsian love-being,” a political ontology that “refut[es] any notion that lovelessness defines minoritized life” (3). Differing from traditional Afro-Asian solidarity discourse articulated through leftist politics, internationalism, and Third World Marxism, Lee theorizes “AfroAsian love-being” as a counter-discourse to Afropessimism and Asian American melancholia, which are generally examined through the lens of white psychoanalytical theory and emphasize lack in their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallOther Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life by Seulghee Lee (review)2026-04-02text/htmlen-USOther Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life by Seulghee Lee (review)2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®93542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora ed. by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong and Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987259
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To “cleave” means to split something (or someone) apart or open; paradoxically, it also carries the opposite meaning—to cling or adhere closely. In the case of Việt Nam, it is a severance experienced by the Vietnamese diaspora, a people cleaved from a nation to which they still have close ties, a nation that has survived centuries of war and occupation. Myriad stories have been rendered by Vietnamese diasporic creatives, many of whom were displaced by the nation’s civil war and the US interventionist, Cold War politics that exacerbated it. In The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, “diaspora” is not just a noun but, as Lan P. Duong writes in the introduction, it is also an analytical lens that brings
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallThe Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora ed. by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong and Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)2026-04-02text/htmlen-USThe Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora ed. by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong and Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®96872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987260
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s latest work, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, compiles his six Norton Lectures from 2023 and 2024. Throughout, he examines writers’ relationships to otherness. Nguyen interlaces literary criticism and personal anecdotes, sharing his process of becoming a writer while reconciling the impact of displacement. He emphasizes the multifaceted and nonlinear nature of the refugee experience and the artist’s/scholar’s responsibility to answer the political call through writing. Nguyen’s book is significant in its timeliness and timelessness; it articulates a theory of writing as an Other and enacts that theory. Emerging from a political love for writing as a means of undoing harm, To Save and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallTo Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)2026-04-02text/htmlen-USTo Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®84052026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing by Anna LaQuawn Hinton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987261
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Anna LaQuawn Hinton’s Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing begins with a bold claim. “The material consequences of misogynoir are violently writ on Black women’s body, mind, and spirit” (4), Hinton says, immediately drawing our focus to the ways Black women cannot escape violence, as it is inscribed in their entire being. Rather than focus on the surrounding circumstances that lead to such inscription, she focuses on its material effects, arguing that disability shapes the stylistic elements of Black women’s literary tradition. In other words, this is not merely a study of how disability is written onto the body, but a study of the systems that create it and the ways Black women write
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallRefusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing by Anna LaQuawn Hinton (review)2026-04-02text/htmlen-USRefusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing by Anna LaQuawn Hinton (review)2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®96992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Out of the Darkroom: Michael S. Harper’s Photographs
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987263
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There are no photographs in Michael S. Harper’s great poetic sequence Photographs: Negatives: History as Apple Tree (1972).1 It is not an illustrated text. Yet the sequence theorizes photography’s mediations of personal memory and social history, framing—through its unconscious optics, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term (237)—oppositional metaphors of selfhood and engagement. Harper proleptically interrogates, predating Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes, photography’s affinities with the psychic processes of grieving. He situates his nine-poem sequence in and around the darkroom of his marriage, which is haunted by the almost photographic specters of two sons lost in infancy. Images rise irrepressibly from memory as if
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallOut of the Darkroom: Michael S. Harper’s Photographs2026-04-02text/htmlen-USOut of the Darkroom: Michael S. Harper’s Photographs2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1012082026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Kindred Beholden-ness: A New Name for Kinship, from Octavia Butler to Ocean Vuong
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987264
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Strange that the rule of the blood tie casts so many of our relations as secondary and fictive when it is precisely in fiction that the ruse of that symbolic order is exposed.In response to Judith Butler’s above-cited literary criticism of the novel Kindred (1979), written by the African American author Octavia Butler, this article adopts an eponymous new name for the complex forms of kinship that arise in queer diasporic contexts. Heeding Hala Halim’s call for “non-Eurocentric modes and models of comparatism” (563), I create a dialogue between Kindred and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong. Following Colleen Lye’s call for “comparative thinking” about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallKindred Beholden-ness: A New Name for Kinship, from Octavia Butler to Ocean Vuong2026-04-02text/htmlen-USKindred Beholden-ness: A New Name for Kinship, from Octavia Butler to Ocean Vuong2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1020752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Announcement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987265
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Due to his election as MELUS president, Dr. Christopher González is stepping down from his role as book review editor for MELUS. Dr. González is a renowned scholar and professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Endowed Chair. With expertise in twentieth-century American literature, multiethnic literatures, film, comics, and narrative theory, Dr. González is the author, coauthor, and editor of numerous books, including Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV (U of Arizona P, 2019), which won the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (Ohio State UP, 2017), awarded Honorable Mention
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallAnnouncement2026-04-02text/htmlen-USAnnouncement2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®39612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Announcement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987266
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The MELUS Book Award Committee—Fred L. Gardaphé (chair), Amy Gore, Gary Totten, and Wenying Xu—is pleased to announce the winners of the first biennial MELUS Book Award.The competition was open to academic monographs, published during the 2023–24 period, that aligned with the mission of MELUS as articulated in its Constitution and primarily focused on multiple ethnicities, comparative ethnicities, or mixed identities. (No edited collections, anthologies, or creative writing were considered.) The monograph had to be single-authored or co-authored, and published by a university or trade press. Eligible books focused on literature, culture, rhetoric, theory, or biography and contained a significant literary component
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallAnnouncement2026-04-02text/htmlen-USAnnouncement2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®30282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02