The Cosby Cohort examines the childhood experiences of second generation middle class Blacks who grew up in mostly White spaces during the 1980s and 1990s. This probing book explores their journey to upward mobility, including the discrimination they faced in White neighborhoods and schools, the extraordinary pressures placed upon them to achieve, the racial lessons imparted to them by their parents, their tenuous relationships with Black children of other classes, and the impact that all of these experiences had on their adult racial identities. At young ages, this generation of middle class Blacks, whom Harris coins as the Cosby Cohort, was faced with racial displacement, frustration, and the ever-present pressure to emerge victorious against the pull of downward mobility. Even in adulthood, they continue to negotiate the tensions between upward mobility and maintaining ties to the larger Black community and culture. While these young Blacks may have grown up watching The Cosby Show, as the book reveals, their stories indicate a much more complex reality than portrayed by the show.

Explores how American writers articulate the complexity of twentieth-century suburbiaExamines the ways American writers from the 1960s to the present - including John Updike, Richard Ford, Gloria Naylor, Jeffrey Eugenides, D. J. Waldie, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Daz and John Barth - have sought to articulate the complexity of the US suburbsAnalyses the relationships between literary form and the spatial and temporal dimensions of the environment Scrutinises increasingly prominent literary and cultural forms including novel sequences, memoir, drama, graphic novels and short story cyclesCombines insights drawn from recent historiography of the US suburbs and cultural geography with analyses of over twenty-five texts to provide a fresh outlook on the literary history of American suburbiaThe Literature of Suburban Change examines the diverse body of cultural material produced since 1960 responding to the defining habitat of twentieth-century USA: the suburbs. Martin Dines analyses how writers have innovated across a range of forms and genres - including novel sequences, memoirs, plays, comics and short story cycles - in order to make sense of the complexity of suburbia. Drawing on insights from recent historiography and cultural geography, Dines offers a new perspective on the literary history of the US suburbs. He argues that by giving time back to these apparently timeless places, writers help reactivate the suburbs, presenting them not as fixed, finished and familiar but rather as living, multifaceted environments that are still in production and under exploration.

The Cosby Cohort examines the childhood experiences of second generation middle class Blacks who grew up in mostly White spaces during the 1980s and 1990s. This probing book explores their journey to upward mobility, including the discrimination they faced in White neighborhoods and schools, the extraordinary pressures placed upon them to achieve, the racial lessons imparted to them by their parents, their tenuous relationships with Black children of other classes, and the impact that all of these experiences had on their adult racial identities. At young ages, this generation of middle class Blacks, whom Harris coins as the Cosby Cohort, was faced with racial displacement, frustration, and the ever-present pressure to emerge victorious against the pull of downward mobility. Even in adulthood, they continue to negotiate the tensions between upward mobility and maintaining ties to the larger Black community and culture. While these young Blacks may have grown up watching The Cosby Show, as the book reveals, their stories indicate a much more complex reality than portrayed by the show.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.

A noted Black woman journalist recounts her experiences as an outsider in the newsroom of the Washington Post in the late 1980s.