Race Characters

“Swati Rana brilliantly breaks open the problem of the American dream as it relates to character. A dazzling work, Race Characters centers a literary corpus that dramatically unveils the privilege, burdens, and costs of pursuing the American dream. It also tackles an extensive historical array of exclusionary processes ranging from racial nativism to colonial subjection. This is an incandescent melding of narratological analysis, literary criticism, and comparative race studies.”—Stephen Hong Sohn, University of California, Riverside

“Fascinating, informed, and relevant, Race Characters prompts us to grapple with our blind spots around how we define our archives and how we engage as readers. Rather than solely celebrating or condemning problematic characters, Swati Rana’s work theorizes these figures as narrative strategies that reveal the negotiations that immigrant writers have made in order to make sense of their own lives, be legible to mainstream audiences, and work under certain ideological and market pressures. A standout example of comparative ethnic scholarship.”—Elda María Román, University of Southern California

“Race Characters is a beautifully written, well-conceived, and astute new formalist analysis of character that transforms our understanding of minoritarian identity and ethnic literature. Swati Rana’s pathbreaking study allows us to read ‘character’ in a fuller sense and better grasp how minority identity is worked out through literary characterization.”—Gary Totten, University of Nevada, Las Vegas