An exploration of racial assumptions in American culture.

Erasing Public Memory is an inquiry into the canon of Western civilization that exposes the ubiquity and contiguity of racialized rationalism and how it constitutes standardized notions of beauty, memory, and public culture.
Such an analysis is cosmically instructive, even though the editors and contributors may find themselves at the cusp of a crucible, an intellectual practice that might grant interrogations of racially inflected paradigms not all equal in import. The axis of race in the Western canon, uninflected and theorized, the goal of Erasing Public Memory is a move toward the de-reification of race as a priori ground of Western knowledge.

JANA EVANS BRAZIEL is author of articles in Cultural Critique; Small Axe; Callaloo; Comparative American Studies; Women & Performance; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Journal of Haitian Studies; Popular Music and Society; A/B: Auto/Biography Studies; Tessera; Journal x; Studies in the Literary Imagination; and The Journal of North African Studies. She has also coedited three books.

JOSEPH A. YOUNG is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, where he teaches writing and African American Literature. He is author of Black Novelist as White Racist: The Myth of Black Inferiority in the Novels of Oscar Micheaux and has also published in MELUS and co-edited another book with Dr. Braziel entitled Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy.

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