Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and DramaRita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color, written by a well-known Americanist in the European community, is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work. |
Contents
The Aim of Crossing Color | 3 |
1 Rita Doves MacroPoetics of Space | 23 |
2 Rita Doves MicroPoetics of Space | 46 |
3 Movements of a Marriage Or Looking Awry at US History | 95 |
Through the Ivory Gate | 110 |
5 Myths Remakes | 122 |
On the Bus with Rosa Parks | 140 |
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aesthetic African African-American Afro-American Akron Amalia American artistic Augustus Aunt Bachelard Bildungsroman Black Arts Movement blue boundaries Bus with Rosa chapter consciousness critical Crossing Color cultural space Darker Face death Demeter Derek Walcott dreams Earth enspacements experience feel female fiction Fifth Sunday Fred Viebahn freedom gender German girl Greek Gwendolyn Brooks Henry Louis Gates human identity imagination Ivory Gate language literary literature lives lyrical male Medusa memory Mother Love move myth narrative National neighborhood pain past Persephone play poem poet poet's Poetics of Space poetry political puppet race racial Rasha Rita Dove Rita Dove's Rosa Parks sense slave sonnet spatial stanza story symbol things Thomas and Beulah Thomas's tion Toni Morrison Trans transcultural ture turns University Press Vendler Virginia voice W. E. B. Du Bois wings woman writing Yellow House York
Popular passages
Page ix - No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental.