James Welch’s Fools Crow is a counter narrative that interrogates the oppressive colonialist power which attempts to exterminate Blackfeet Indians and annihilate their traditions through massacres, deceptive treaties, and imposition of agriculture, farming and ranching, which were alien to them. For Welch, what is more devastating to the Blackfeet beside the external violence is the results of internal colonization characterized by despair, impotent feeling, and self-depreciation. Regaining the confidence and pride as the Blackfeet plays an essential role in the decolonization process. Traditional values and stories, and lives and ceremonies are the essential means to restore the tribal identity and pride. However, it should be noted that the ultimate aim of his decolonization does not lie in negating every trace of the violent colonialist history but in transforming its legacy into a story of survivance. Tribalism is an effective means to start the decolonization process but not an end in itself; it should not be viewed as an exclusive one. His efforts to overcome colonialism does not concentrate on the negation of the colonial past, which has already become an undeniable part of Blackfeet history. The remembrance of the tribal traditions and life styles in a certain period is an important step in Welch’s decolonization and self-appreciation process. Yet, the traditions he tries to remember are not static and trapped in a certain period of the past but dynamic and fluid; they change and progress with exchanges and hybridization between different cultures. Welch’s transcultural tribalism works as a necessary step to free the Blackfeet from the shackles of internal colonization and regain the tribal honor and pride, which will eventually make it possible for them to coexist with Whites on an equal status without being degraded to a mere adjunct to White American history.

When President Obama made a White House spokesman confirm that he has checked the box that says “Black, African Am., or Negro” in the 2010 census, it signalled that a representative American has declared his racial identity on the basis of a politics of the performative which goes beyond the binary opposition between essentialism and constructivism. In order to examine Obama’s census choice of African American, I come up with a concept of ‘the traversing of race,’ which is borrowed from the theory of fantasy in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I also draw on queer criticism so as to elaborate the concept of ‘the traversing of race’ as a citational performing of one’s ethnic identity. Obama’s ‘traversing of race’ can be compared to the Jewish-American Adam Sandler’s performance of the Chanukah Song series. The hilarious lyrics of Sandler’s Chanukah songs celebrate a Jewish ‘coming-out’ festivity which enables American Jews to overcome their divided subject position between inclusion and distinctiveness. Historically, it is W. E. B. Du Bois’s formula of double-consciousness that is concerned with ‘the traversing of race’ in the earliest politico-ethical context of becoming American and not becoming white. Du Bois’s insight into the future of race in America is helpful in figuring out how mixed-race people should negotiate the politics of identity against the backdrop of multicultural America. Unlike mixed-race characters who can pass for white in the late 19th- and early 20th-century situations, mixed-race characters of what a critic calls “new millenium passing novel” are less or no longer suffering from the identity crisis related to neurosis, depression, or schizophrenia, even though a subtle racism is not over. Seen from this post-racial perspective, new millenium mixed-race people are not necessarily afraid of traversing race. With the overall trope of performativity, Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, successfully signifies the way in which a mixed-race American confirms his ever-ongoing identity.

This study focuses on Thea``s overcoming disgust including basic emotions of smells that bunch the nostrils, sights of contaminated things, food that squint the eyes, and the secular people in a protean artistic community who make her feel repulsive. Disgust becomes threatening Thea all the time and leads her to the psychic and moral danger in the process of her being a strong-minded artist with a fundamentally self-securing emotion. Thea who comes from Moonstone, a little town in Colorado, wants to move into Chicago for her dream to come true as an artist. However, while she fights her way to the upper air in Chicago with her own pride, she faces disgusting and timeserving people and artistic communities which consider an art as a business. In this kind of atmosphere, Thea thinks the situation blots out her identity and it is mainly revealed through her own disgust reacting towards the food she has to eat, a sense of offensiveness for the source of pollution, and contamination potency around her etc. In the end, Thea needs glorious air to breathe, so she goes to the Panther Canyon to be inspired by Mother Nature. While she stays in the Canyon, she gets refreshed with pure water, clean air, sunshine, pine trees, and the ruins of the local Indians. After the journey to the Canyon, she gained the vital source of artistic life and is encouraged to do anything in the contaminated artistic world. And finally, she conquers and sings Sieglinde on the stage of the Metropolitan as a magnificent singer, prima donna. It means that she has tried to make her own way towards the perfect fruitage of her genius as a real artist by overcoming all the psychic and moral disgust.

Ernest Gaines has been generally touted by scholars who make a point of registering his unique achievements in distinction from the protest literature that has been prominent in African American men’s literary corpus. There is admittedly something inspiring and invigorating about Gaines’ black male characters who defy their reducibility to the extremes of either tragic victims or militant revolutionaries. Gaines veers away from one-dimensional portraitures of black men, also dislodging dominant society’s embodiments of black men as emasculated and feminized Uncle Toms, or as violence and crime prone predators. And yet, despite the fact that Gaines’ fiction is constructed around everyday people in the intricate and varied networks of family and community, they also trace the ongoing challenges for black men who inhabit a society in which, historically, the categories of race and gender have been mutually defining, and thus incompatible for black men. Gaines’ black male characters struggle to reconcile the contradiction of being “men” and “black.” This essay reads “Three Men,” the third story in Gaines’ short story collection Bloodline (1968), to explore the possibilities and the constraints of black manhood, as played out in black heterosexual relations and on black men’s self-perception and their relationships with other men. In so far as manhood grounds black racial identity and vice versa, I argue that the anti-gay sentiments unabashedly harbored and expressed by the black male characters Procter Lewis and Munford Banzille evolve not just from their limited understanding of manhood, and concomitantly their attempts to obtain black manhood, but from their restrictive understanding of valid black racial identity. The struggle to be a man in the story is thus coupled with and overlaps with the struggle for a legitimate black identity: to be a man and not “a nigger.”

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway portrays the struggles of Frederic Henry, an American soldier working as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. Frederic joins the war in an attempt to prove his masculinity, but in a war where traditional ideals have become no longer attainable, largely due to the war’s lack of validation, men not only lost their reason to fight, but along with it their masculinity that had been promised to them as they signed up for the war. The first section looks into the masculine dilemma. Frederic represents the men struggling to conform to traditional standards of masculinity in a war they have already been disillusioned with. Frederic struggles to keep himself in war, and strains to suppress his emotions that are considered a sign of weakness in men. As a way to alleviate himself from his discordant desires and also maintain a masculine exterior, Frederic resorts to drinking excessively. Alcohol, however, is a momentary diversion. Once the anesthetics wear off Frederic takes the next measure of forcing himself not to think. To remain committed to his duty, he tries to re-illusion himself to the legitimacy of war, ignores the validity of his own actions, and makes himself act like an instrument of the authorities. His efforts fall to no use when he is forced to leave war by the battle police. The second section looks into how Frederic attempts but fails to find his masculinity in war. Frederic is forced to live a life in hiding and ultimately flees to Switzerland to escape arrest. Even as a war fugitive, he is unable to relinquish a sense of guilt and obligation towards war as he searches for ways to employ himself. With no clear occupation he instead becomes increasingly passive and more dependent on his relationship with Catherine. Men joined the war with ambitions of becoming a man. Frederic’s tenacious struggle portrays how strongly the masculine ideal was engraved in the minds of men. Once in war, however, men found themselves emasculated and like Frederic, they were weakened by the war.