Nationalizing Narratives: Race, Nationalism, and the American Novel

While American novels can imagine the nation as a multiracial unity, they also provide potent critiques of white supremacy, giving literary form to the cultural expressions of communities of color. We examine novelistic visions of the nation by writers like Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Viet Nguyen along with critical anatomies of nationalism by theorists like Benedict Anderson and Etienne Balibar. Not open to first year students.