Scholarly Publications
Books
Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita (University of South Carolina Press, 2020)
This volume in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series at the University of South Carolina Press provides a clear and concise introduction to Yamashita’s biography, key motifs in her work, as well as offering research resources for advanced students and scholars. The book addresses major issues including global capitalism, immigration, and environmental justice. This volume serves as a crucial accompaniment to Yamashita’s novels, offering cogent commentary and analysis of her innovative, challenging texts, and providing useful explanations of major critical approaches and thematic concerns.
The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2013)
This book considers the role of minority women writers and reformers in the inauguration of modern American multiculturalism. Public figures like Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the image of the United States (and increasingly the world) as an interracial nuclear family. These women reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women, which result in an incestuous, miscegenated nation. By confronting and conflating the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Linking literature to citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws, as well as transnational cultural and economic exchanges, I identify a more radical history of American multiculturalism than is currently acknowledged.
In The Origin of Others, acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison described The Romance of Race as an “excellent rendition of the means by which ‘belonging,’ that is, creating a coherent nation out of immigrants, took place during the great immigration from southern and eastern Europe.”
Reviews
“Sheffer’s book is an expansive and ambitious work of comparative ethnic studies.”
— Ralina L. Joseph in MELUS
“In this genealogy of multiculturalism and, by extension, multiracialism, the unexpected revelation is that the cultural roots of both phenomena were more critical of nationalist inclusion than the successive discourse a decade later.”
— Habiba Ibrahim in American Literary History
“Sheffer shows that many authors actually worked to pull the heroines out of the shadows. The main characters of the works she analyzes fight to come out of the margins and assume a central position, not only in the nation’s past but also in its future.”
— Beverly Tomek in American Studies
Journal Articles
Introduction: Historical Fiction and the 1960s: Mediating the Past and Reimagining the Future.” Special Issue on “Re-Thinking, Re-Reading, and Re-Seeing Ethnic Historical Fiction,” MELUS 45.4 (Winter 2020), 1-21.
“Interracial Solidarity and Epistolary Form in Precarious Times: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory,” Arizona Quarterly 76. 4 (Winter 2020): 55-84.
With Stefanie D. Hunker, “Digital Curation Collaboration: Pedagogy in the Archives,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 19.1 (January 2019): 79-105.
“The Optics of Interracial Sexuality in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Sherman Alexie’s Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” Special issue on “Native/Asian Encounters,” edited by Hyoejin Yoon and Cari Carpenter. College Literature 41.1 (Winter 2014): 119-148.
“‘Citizen Sure Thing’ or ‘Jus’ Foreigner’?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction,” Journal of Asian American Studies 13.1 (February 2010): 81-105.
“Recollecting, Repeating and Walking Through: Immigration, Trauma, and Space in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land,” MELUS 35.1 (Spring 2010): 141-166.
Book Chapters
“Many Endings, Many Beginnings.” Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita, edited by Ruth Hsu and Pamela Thoma, Modern Language Association, 2021, 76-81.
“Slave to Love: Erotic Excess in Asian American Miscegenation Plots.” Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850 – 1930 (Volume 1), edited by Josephine Lee and Julia Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 264-280.
“Realism and Race.” The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, edited by Keith Newlin, Oxford University Press, 2019. 269-84.
“Standing on Top of the World: Masculinity and Imperialism on Everest.” Linda K. Fuller, ed., Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Global and Universal Contexts. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 293-305.
Essay on The Promised Land by Mary Antin. Abby H. P. Werlock, ed., Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Practitioner Publications
See Leadership & Administration page.
Jolie A. Sheffer 