Race, gender, and the exotic in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002245 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Atef Laouyene (California State University Los Angeles, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 197-215 |
| Publication date | 2014-07-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989414538867 |
| OpenAlex | W2160887452 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
Focusing on Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald’s critically acclaimed Fall on Your Knees (1996), this essay argues that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness whose strategic exoticization exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that has historically been informed by a latent, economically motivated exoticism. It is in fact this underlying exoticism that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities in North America and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. MacDonald’s novel thus deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic, I want to suggest, can we open up discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative cultural critique
Ethnic group · Exoticism · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · Transformative learning · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |