Title: Dilemma and Transcendence: An Analysis of the Racial Politics in Down These Mean Streets from the Perspective of Transnationalism

Abstract: Race is the core issue of nation-state identification that Piri Thomas elaborates in his memoir Down These Mean Streets. As a second-generation Puerto Rican immigrant, Piri tries to integrate himself into American society without losing his ethnicity, but his physical features shared with African Americans make him into a predicament of racial identification. While in repositioning Piri’s racial identity in a U.S-Puerto Rican discourse, the writer depicts a transnational identity, an alternative vision of nation-state identification, which is capable of transcending both the rigid structures of nationalism and the constraints of racial particularity. It opens the way for new alliances and new resistant strategies, thus expanding the meaning of national-state identification discourse.

Keywords: Racial Politics, predicament, transcendence, transnationalism

Author: Tianran Chen, Lecturer, College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University, Xiamen, Fujian, China.