Former PLU graduate, Brian J. Norman (99), now Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University, announces the release of his new book, The American Protest Essay and National Belonging, which shows a new response to social divisions within American Protest Literature, Oct. 1, available in hardback or softcover at most university bookstores, via Suny Press.
The collection of esaays notes discrepencies between political promises and accountability drawn from both American and European-born personal essays and speeches of the twentieth century.
Drawing from various spokespersons of American Social movements such as James Baldwin, Vine Deloria Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, the selected authors uncover a sense of national belonging and universal equality through feminist and multicultural studies and experiences of exclusion.
In political oratory, the authors bring specific experiences of exclusion into direct conversation of universal equality and national belonging. Denouncing failed promises of social inclusion and faith realization, the authors Norman studies chronicle the aspirations and achievements of protest essay writing in the USA.
Norman shows how American protest essay continues the democratic legacy of advocating political agendas into a fine art. The novelists he selects typify the uncertainty between idyllic national promises and those that were ignored.
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