At DiverseBooks.net, we put diversity in the forefront year-round, but April is the national observance of “Celebrate Diversity Month” and that calls for special emphasis. Many of the titles we sell through this website deal directly with the issue of diversity in its many facets. We would like particularly to call your attention to our selections that deal with issues of diversity as it relates to race, gender, religion and ability.
The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn, by Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, $18.70 (list price: $22), University of Mississippi Press, July 1998, ISBN: 9781578060610, pp. 183.
In the wake of news that another publisher plans to neuter the language of Huck Finn by substituting the word ”slave” for Twain’s oft-repeated “nigger” in a special edition, The Jim Dilemma offers a refreshing and spirited defense of teaching this classic in the classroom — as is. The author argues that Huck Finn offers a unique opportunity for students to understand the issues, conflicts and convoluted logic that race presented in the time of Jim and Huck. Joshua, who is director of the American studies program at Dallas Institute for the Humanities, calls for the book to take its rightful place in the classroom and for those who are bothered by that prospect to revisit old assumptions about Twain’s work and to keep an open mind.
The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, by Teresa C. Zackodnik, $42.50 (list price $50), University of Mississippi Press, March 2010, ISBN: 9781578066766, pp. 272.
In contrast to the ante-bellum notions of the mixed race female as a “tragic mulatta,” this book argues that African Americans perceived such women as potent symbols that could be used to advantage in the struggle for equity. In theory, the tragedy lay in the mulatta’s role, supposedly, as outcast from either race. Her very existence, however, could be used to evoke abolitionist sympathy and to challenge ideas about womanhood. Teresa C. Zackodnik, a professor of English at the University of Alberta in Canada, examined antislavery writings and the fiction of a number of women (Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Dorothy Lee Dickens and Reba Lee), reaching conclusions that offer new insights.
Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes Toward American Indians, 1837-1893, by Michael C. Coleman, $21.25 (list price $25), University of Mississippi Press, November 2007, ISBN: 978 1604730074, pp. 236.
When 19th century Presbyterian missionaries went out to Christianize and “civilize” American Indians, the teachers took with them their own attitudes, ideas and values. The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., founded in 1837, dispatched more than 450 missionaries to at least 19 groups of Indians. This book uses letters the evangelizers sent home to examine their spiritual outlook and their thinking – and often prejudices — about the cultures and the people they encountered.
