Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan

Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan

A key concern in postwar America was who's passing for whom? Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War I, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety.

The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa).

Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others.

Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.

Gloria and her husband Joseph moved from Detroit to the woods of northern Michigan several years ago. Many of Gloria's books take place during the summer -- because she does a lot of her writing during the northern Michigan blizzards! Gloria has been telling stories for as long as she can remember. Before she could read or write, she used to dictate stories to her baby-sitter, who would type them out. Being an only child, many of Gloria's stories were about having a brother or sister. Gloria would like to have written Little Women, because Jo March was one of her role models growing up! Gloria once had a set of five wtching guinea pigs, all named after Detroit Tiger baseball players!

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780060541132
ISBN 10	006054113X
Titel	Burying the Sun
Autor	Gloria Whelan
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Verlag	Harpercollins
Erscheinungsjahr	2004-10-01
Seitenanzahl	224
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar