San Antonio College Library

""The stereotype spells death to the imagination by shrinking all possibilities to one. Generalizations encourage us to stop considering what can be."--The Introduction The sheer number of different ethnic groups and cultures in the United States makes it tempting to classify them according to broad stereotypes, ignoring their unique and changing identities. Because of their growing diversity within the United States, Latinas and Latinos face this...

"Rednecks" have long been subjects of scorn and ridicule, especially in the South because of an antebellum caste and class system, parts of which persist to this day. In A Question of Class, Carr probes the historical and sociological reasons for the descent of "rednecks" into poverty, their inability to rise above it, and their continuing subjugation to a stereotype developed by others and too often accepted by themselves. Carr also records the progress...

In Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, Diane Roberts examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. The very mention of "the South," Roberts observes, conjures up a crazy quilt of images - from the romantic to the violent, from the gracious and glamorous to the backward and racist. The phrase "southern woman" likewise evokes...

"Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate...

Her bright eyes and jolly face gaze upon us from the covers of old cookbooks, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars. She is a prominent figure in literature, movies and folk art. She is Mammy. But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? And why is she nearly always represented as a large, dark woman with a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit understanding and acceptance...