Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2017) by Mark Jerng, professor of English, looks at the writing of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick to rethink how scholars have addressed racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology.
Mark Jerng joined the UC Davis Faculty in 2006. He currently serves as Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies. He also serves as Faculty Member for the Breadloaf School of English . He was Lead PI of the UC Davis Summer Program for Literary Analysis and Success in the Humanities (UCD SPLASH), a UC-HBCU partnership with Hampton University from 2015-2018. He served as Co-Director with Justin Leroy of the Mellon Initiative on Racial Capitalism from 2017-2021.
His research specializations include Asian American literature and transnationalism, critical race theory, science fiction and fantasy (especially by contemporary Asian American and African American authors), genre and narrative theory, and law and literature. He is currently working on three projects: the work of W.E.B. Du Bois in relation to genre and theorizing sociality; reading superhero comics as a medium of cultural, racial and gendered consciousness and historicity; an analysis of cultural property and racial capitalism. He is the author most recently of Racial Worldmaking (2018). This project takes up particular popular genres - future war; plantation romance; sword and sorcery; alternate history - in order to analyze how genre formations inform our perceptual organizations of 'race' and 'world.' His first book, Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (2010), focuses on the ways in which shifting norms of race and kinship shape and naturalize our conceptions of personhood. It examines the phenomenon of transracial adoption from the 1820s to the present across Native American, African American, and Asian American contexts in fiction, memoir, legal history, and social work literature.
View the book at Fordham University Press