America Day by Day

Sinopse

Ainda não disponível em português — exibindo a versão em inglês.

America Day by Day is a 1948 book by Simone de Beauvoir chronicling her trip by road across the United States of America over four months in 1947. It included visits to New York, Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Virginia, L.A., San Francisco, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, Florida and New Orleans. The text takes the form of diary entries, focusing on Beauvoir's daily observations on American life and society. The book was published in French in 1948. It grew from the essay "An Existentialist Looks at Americans", published in The New York Times Magazine in 1947. The first English translation of the book came out in Britain in 1952. An American version entered the market in 1953, but the primary sections of the text that discussed racial segregation were excluded. Finally, in 1996 another translation was published by the University of California Press. It was done by Carol Cosman with a foreword by Douglas Brinkley. America Day by Day includes Beauvoir's sociological observations of Americans and American life. In particular, she documents the racial dynamics that she observed, citing the work of Dr. Gunnar Myrdal in his study, An American Dilemma. Beauvoir frames the attitude of white American's toward Black people in terms of bad faith, highlighting the contradiction between the treatment of Black people and the importance of the belief in "the essential dignity of human beings, the basic equality of all men" to white Americans. While it is not one of Beauvoir's most widely studied texts, scholarship on America Day by Day has explored Beauvoir's experience of her own whiteness and puts the text in conversation with Critical Whiteness Studies. Scholars have also read the text through a postcolonial lens to investigate how Beauvoir engages with the settler colonialist history of the United States.

Licença do texto: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Fonte

Detalhes

Tipo

Livro

Lançamento

1 de janeiro de 1948

Criado por

Simone de Beauvoir

Países

France