Esquilín Gosser, Mary Ann

Race is a pressing issue that pervades discussions of public policy and societal matters in twenty-first century national cultures—even as those populations, paradoxically, turn toward increasing globalization. We need to understand now, more than ever, what race means to us and how and why it means in order for us to understand our deep investments in it. This study explores—through the genres of slave narrative, fiction, and memoir—the process of socio-semiogenesis by which people recognize and perform race; it also examines the customs that allow people not only to form themselves in groups but also to disrupt, remediate, and invert the implicit racial codes that govern human interaction within and among such groups. This study offers a Peircean, triadic approach to the dialectics of race—an approach that seeks to find a space in which dialogue and healing might occur even as it sheds light on those shades of biology and culture that both form and divide us.