Mixed Race Studies

Her Mammy’s Daughter: Symbolic Matricide and Racial Constructions of Motherhood in Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Her Virginia Mammy”

49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies
Issue 16: Autumn 2005
ISSN: 1753-5794

Laura Dawkins, Professor of English
Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky

The black mother in slavery and beyond has inspired a growing body of contemporary literature by African-American women.  Following Margaret Walker’s lead in her 1942 poem “Lineage,” and—more famously—Alice Walker’s example in her landmark essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983), a significant number of black women writers have honored their foremothers in poetry, fiction, and memoir. Indeed, the celebratory strain in African-American women’s writings about maternal influence upon their lives and work has been so pronounced that Marianne Hirsch, discussing the pervasiveness of daughterly “matrophobia” in twentieth-century literature, admits that she cannot comfortably include works by black women in her parade of examples, since so many of these writers—in contrast to their white contemporaries—seem determined to avoid any hint of “mother-blame” in both fictional and non-fictional works.  Pointing out the “tremendously powerful need [for black women writers] to present to the public a positive image of black womanhood,” Hirsch quotes E. Frances White’s declaration of the African-American woman’s singular obligation to suppress less-than-ideal portrayals of black maternal figures: “How dare we admit the psychological battles that need to be fought with the very women who taught us to survive in this racist and sexist world?  We would feel like ungrateful traitors” (177).

Yet according to Mary Helen Washington, the absence of “matrophobia” in works by contemporary black women writers reflects not a suppression of the issue of mother-daughter conflict (as Hirsch and White suggest), and an impossible idealization of maternal influence (such as critic Dianne Sadoff finds in Walker’s essay), but the actual healthy state of affairs between black mothers and daughters.  Washington affirms the “generational continuity between [black daughters] and their mothers,” an enduring bond that inspires many African-American women writers to “name their mothers as models,” and to “challenge the fiction of mother-daughter hostility” (160).  In Washington’s view, black mothers and daughters, both because of and in spite of the painful historical legacy they share, do not succumb to the anger and upheaval associated with the traditional mother-daughter relationship…

Read the entire article here.

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

• Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
• Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
• Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
• Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
• 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
• 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
• 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
• 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
• Coda “Race Feeling”
• Notes
• Index

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

University of Georgia Press
2002-12-02
280 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2435-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-2724-2

Dean McWilliams (1939-2006), J. Richard Hamilton/Baker and Hostetler Professor of Humanities and professor of English
Ohio University

The first extended exploration of the construction of racial identity in Chesnutt’s writings

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first African American writer of fiction to win the attention and approval of America’s literary establishment. Looking anew at Chesnutt’s public and private writings, his fiction and nonfiction, and his well-known and recently rediscovered works, Dean McWilliams explores Chesnutt’s distinctive contribution to American culture: how his stories and novels challenge our dominant cultural narratives—particularly their underlying assumptions about race.

 The published canon of Chesnutt’s work has doubled in the last decade: three novels completed but unpublished in Chesnutt’s life have appeared, as have scholarly editions of Chesnutt’s journals, his letters, and his essays. This book is the first to offer chapter-length analyses of each of Chesnutt’s six novels. It also devotes three chapters to his short fiction. Previous critics have read Chesnutt’s nonfiction as biographical background for his fiction. McWilliams is the first to analyze these nonfiction texts as complex verbal artifacts embodying many of the same tensions and ambiguities found in Chesnutt’s stories and novels. The book includes separate chapters on Chesnutt’s journal and on his important essay “The Future American.” Moreover, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race approaches Chesnutt’s writings from the perspective of recent literary theory. To a greater extent than any previous study of Chesnutt, it explores the way his texts interrogate and deconstruct the language and the intellectual constructs we use to organize reality.
 
The full effect of this new study is to show us how much more of a twentieth-century writer Chesnutt is than has been previously acknowledged. This accomplishment can only hasten his reemergence as one of our most important observers of race in American culture.

Contents

• Preface
• 1. Chesnutt’s Language / Language’s Chesnutt
• 2. Chesnutt in His Journals: “Nigger” under Erasure
• 3. The Future American” and “Chas. Chesnutt”
• 4. Black Vernacular in Chesnutt’s Short Fiction: “A New School of literature”
• 5. The Julius and John Stories: “Hie Luscious Scuppernong”
• 6. Race in Chesnutt’s Short Fiction: The “Lino” and the “Web”
• 7. Mandy Oxendine: “Is You a Rale Black Man?”
• 8. The House behind the Cedars: “Creatures of Our Creation”
• 9. The Marrow of Tradition: The Very Breath of His Nostrils”
• 10. The Colonel’s Dream: “Sho Would ‘a’ Be’n a ‘Ristocrat”
• 11. Paul Marchand, F.M.C.: “F.M.C.” and “C.W.C.”
• 12. The Quarry: “And Not the Hawk”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937

New York University Press
October 2011
228 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780814752555
Paper ISBN: 9780814752562

Julia H. Lee, Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Texas, Austin

2013 Honorable Mention, Asian American Studies Association’s prize in Literary Studies

Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters appear in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? Interracial Encounters attempts to answer this rather straightforward literary question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity.

In this nuanced study, Julia H. Lee argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, Interracial Encounters foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation’s pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The “Negro Problem” and the “Yellow Peril”: Early Twentieth-Century America’s Views on Blacks and Asians
• 3. Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity in The Marrow of Tradition and America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat
• 4. The Eaton Sisters Go to Jamaica
• 5. Quicksand and the Racial Aesthetics of Chinoiserie
• 6. Nation, Narration, and the Afro-Asian Encounter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
• 7. Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

University of Michigan Press
2013
232 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-472-11861-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02890-0

Andreá N. Williams, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Photograph of John and Lugenia Burns Hope and family, undated, Atlanta University Photographs—Individuals, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library (Pictured from left to right: Dr. John Hope, Edward Hope, John Hope, II, and and Lugenia Burns Hope)

New insights on the intersection of race and class in black fiction from the 1880s to 1900s

Dividing Lines is one of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature. Clear and engaging, this book unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities.

By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled popular notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. But even as the writers highlighted middle-class achievement, they worried over whether class distinctions would help or sabotage collective black protest against racial prejudice. Andreá N. Williams argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction’s form. In these telling moments, authors innovatively dared to address the sensitive topic of class differences—a topic inextricably related to American civil rights and social opportunity.

Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

Contents

• Introduction: Contending Classes, Dividing Lines
• 1. The Language of Class: Taxonomy and Respectability in Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy
• 2. Working through Class: The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs’s Overshadowed
• 3. Mapping Class Difference: Space and Social Mobility in Paul L. Dunbar’s Short Fiction
• 4. Blood and the Mark of Class: Pauline Hopkins’s Genealogies of Status
• 5. Classing the Color Line: Class-Passing, Antiracism, and Charles W. Chesnutt
• Epilogue: Beyond the Talented Tenth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow

University of Maryland, College Park
2006
222 pages

Shirley C. Moody

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow establishes folklore as a contested site in the construction of racial identity during the emergence and solidification of legalized racial segregation at the end of the nineteenth century. By examining institutional interests, popular culture performances, and political rhetoric, I demonstrate how representations of black folklore played a seminal role in perpetuating a public discourse of racial difference. Alternately, my work introduces new scholarship examining the counter-narratives posed by nineteenthcentury African American scholars, writers and folklorists who employed folklore in their various academic works and artistic productions as a vehicle to expose
and critique post-Reconstruction racial hierarchies.

In chapter one I reveal how constructions of black folklore in ante- and post-bellum popular culture intersected with emergent white folklore studies to provide a taxonomy for codifying racial difference, while simultaneously designating folklore as the medium through which racial representation would be debated. Chapter two recovers the important, but virtually unacknowledged role of African American folklorists in brokering public and academic access to black folk culture and in providing an alternative to the racist constructions of black folklore prevalent in the post-Reconstruction era. Chapter three re-contextualizes Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman as both a response to the larger national discourse surrounding black folklore and also as part of a concerted effort among black intellectuals to first expose how perceptions of racial realities were constructed through representations of black folklore, and then to redefine the role of black folklore in African American cultural and literary works.

In sum, my dissertation provides a cultural history of a formative moment in the construction of a late nineteenth century racialized discourse that placed representations of black folklore at its center. My research both recovers the neglected role of early black folklorists and writers in studying and interpreting black cultural traditions and asserts the profound significance of representations of black folklore in negotiating the perceptions and practices that have worked to define US racial ideologies in the nineteenth century and beyond.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Folklore at the Birth of Jim Crow
• Chapter II: The Hampton Folklore Society and The Crafting of a Black Folk Aesthetic
• Chapter III: Conjure Justice: Charles Chesnutt and the Stolen Voice
• Conclusion: “We Don’t Remember Enough:” Customary Folklore in Ralph Ellison’s “Flying Home”
• Bibliography

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• 1. Thomas Rice as Jim Crow (circa 1830)
• 2. The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels (Boston, 1843)
• 3. Oliver Scott’s “Refined Negro Minstrels” (1898)
• 4. “The Old Folks at Home”
• 5. “A Hampton Graduate at Home”
• 6. “The Spirit of Hampton”

From page 64:

In a society fraught with racial tensions it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of the popular representations of the black folk, coupled with the intellectual and “scientific” assessments of black folklore, on turn of the century racial politics. As many cultural commentators, past and present, have observed, demarcating racial difference in light of the increasing biological, social and cultural miscegenation came with a host of attendant difficulties. The judges and legislatures who constructed and supported the “one drop rule” recognized the difficulty of visually distinguishing race, realizing that racial identification had to move beyond physical markers. But if discerning race based on physical appearance was difficult, identifying the color of a person’s blood presented an obvious paradox. This dilemma required new indicators of racial identity, and those indicators were found in attention to what were, ostensibly, racially differentiated behaviors, i.e. folk customs. There was an insistence, for example, that blacks could not imitate whites; that the behavioral differences, if not inherent, were so ingrained that they had become “spontaneous” and “natural.” Clearly, dominant interpretations of black minstrelsy as inherent and authentic worked to legitimize segregationist agendas by supplying examples of the kinds of uncivilized behaviors which blacks supposedly exhibited as vastly different from civilized white society.

Read the entire dissertation here.

White Negroes

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
Spring 2013

Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates “whiteness” and “blackness” as unstable and fractured ideological constructs. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less “real” in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. Includes works by Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, John Howard Griffin, Sandra Bernhard, and Warren Beatty.

Staged Bodies: Passing, Performance, and Masquerade in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
pages 69-91
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0062

Margaret Toth, Assistant Professor of English
Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that “one of the ironies” of the New Negro Movement “is that words, not the tactics of visual representation, were the tools blacks used to assert their self-image” (xliv). While we can point to exceptions that complicate this observation—James Van Der Zee’s photography, Archibald Motley’s paintings, or W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographic collection Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U. S. A. (1900)—Gates identifies an important gap in the history of African American self-imaging. What happens, however, when we open up Gates’s terms to examine how authors using words might simultaneously employ “tactics of visual representation”? These written and visual representational modes are not easily or neatly separated. In fact, early African American literature regularly combined them. The first African American novelists creatively integrated these methods of representation in their texts, strategically dismantling racist visual iconography by developing an ocular language that invited consumers of their fiction not just to read their words but also to see the images those words conjured. This practice became even more prevalent during the New Negro Movement, particularly in passing novels that sought to embody mixed-race characters for socio-political purposes. This essay thus revises Gates’s claim that “until the 1920s there was virtually no black counterpoint to the hegemony of racist visual images that dominated the popular arts and more subtly infiltrated the fine arts” (xliv). Authors of the written word were developing a specific language, a visual discourse that sought to topple the hegemony Gates describes.

Visual discourse builds on the practice of “word painting” that dominated US realist writing by the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Wharton identifies word painting as highly descriptive language that “help[s] to make [a character] bodily visible” (485). While not the only tool available for “conferring visibility” to “the reader’s mind” (484), the artist’s brush, when applied to the written page, aided realists who sought to convey an “acute visibility which makes the [reader’s] heart throb and the marrow tingle at the flesh-and-blood aliveness” of literary characters (481). Word painting facilitates the textual or readerly gaze; it encourages the reader to picture or see a character.

Authors deploying visual discourse certainly rely on evocative word painting, but they push beyond descriptive language into a more complex discursive register. They emphasize ocularity by consciously staging their descriptions. For example, when William Wells Brown provides his first portrait of the eponymous heroine in Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter (1853)—describing her creamy skin, “her long black wavy hair done up in the neatest manner; her form tall and graceful” (47)—he embeds it within a framework that underscores the act of looking. Specifically, Clotel is on the auction block, being inspected by a crowd of potential buyers. In this passage, which the narrator explicitly refers to as a “scene” (48), the straightforward description of Clotel, or what Wharton calls the “vivid picturing” (485) of a character, functions within a layered linguistic system that both relies on and foregrounds the mediated gaze. Fictional characters within the novel look at Clotel, and readers look along with them.

Moreover, authors exploiting visual discourse often allude to—and sometimes rework the codes of—traditional visual and performing arts such as painting and theater, photography, and, by the early twentieth century, silent film. Another early text, Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste; Or The Slave Bride (1865), provides an informative illustration of how this practice functions to generate the textual gaze. In the ekphrastic veiled portrait scenes of the novel, readers behold Richard rendered as art: his haunting face dominates the vivid oil painting, which appears “lifelike and breathing” (57). At the same time, readers are compelled to see the similarities between Richard and his mixed-race daughter Claire, who gazes at the image’s “dark, noble beauty, with quivering lips and flushed cheeks”; as the narrator puts it, the “two…

“Passing” in a White Genre: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Negotiations of the Plantation Tradition in “The Conjure Woman”

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910
Volume 27, Number 2 (Winter, 1995)
pages 20-36

Robert C. Nowatzki

When Charles Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman was published in 1899, the immensely popular plantation tradition in fiction had become heavily codified and limited the formal and thematic possibilities of any new texts produced in that tradition. Thus, in writing The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt was largely restricted by the conventions of the plantation tradition in fiction. Yet he also had some limited success in transforming and critiquing the ideologies and conventions which informed that tradition. This essay focuses on the relations between The Conjure Woman, the plantation tradition in fiction, and late nineteenth-century beliefs regarding racial difference and racial relations. More specifically, my analysis examines Chesnutt’s use of the frame narrative device common in plantation fiction, as well as his depiction of the black storyteller, the contrast between his black storyteller and his white narrator, and his depictions of slavery. By analyzing these features of The Conjure Woman in the context of plantation fiction conventions and the predominant racial ideologies of the time, we can see how Chesnutt’s writing was determined by these ideologies and conventions, and conversely, how he was able to critique them.

The Conjure Woman and Its Predecessors

The Conjure Woman consists of seven stories: “The GoopheredGrapevine,” “Po’ Sandy,” “Mars Jeem’s Nightmare,” “The Conjurer’s…

Mining the garrison of racial prejudice: The fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt and turn-of-the-century White racial discourse

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1995

Robert Carl Nowatzki

This dissertation analyzes the fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), the first black fiction writer published by a major American firm and widely reviewed and read by white critics and readers. My analysis focuses on the conflict between Chesnutt’s anti-racism and his attempt to make his critiques less threatening to his white publishers, critics, and readers. In order to demonstrate the ideological and discursive forces that Chesnutt resisted, I juxtapose his works with fiction and nonfiction prose by popular white authors and reviews of his work by white critics.

Chapter One provides the biographical, historical, ideological, and literary contexts of Chesnutt’s work. Each of the following five chapters examines one of Chesnutt’s books of fiction alongside literature by whites which deals with similar subjects and often expresses popular racist assumptions that Chesnutt’s fiction contests. Each chapter also demonstrates how white reviewers of his work often reiterated the racism that he resisted and dismissed him as a biased “Negro” author. Chapter Two interprets Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman (1899) along with plantation fiction by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris and pro-slavery nonfiction essays by Page and Philip Alexander Bruce. Chapter Three examines the treatment of miscegenation and depiction of mulattoes in Chesnutt’s collection of stories The Wife of His Youth (1899) in conjunction with anti-miscegenation literature by Page, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Smith, and William Calhoun. Chapter Four focuses on the issue of passing and the “tragic octoroon” convention in Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and in novels by William Dean Howells, Gertrude Atherton, and Albion Tourgée. Chapter Five analyzes how Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition critiques the black disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence defended by Page, Dixon, Calhoun, Smith, and Bruce. Chapter Six interprets Chesnutt’s critique of sectional conflict and the “New South Creed” in his 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream along with Henry Grady’s 1886 “New South” speech and literature by Tourgee, Harris, Page, Dixon, and Bruce. Chapter Seven briefly surveys the neglect and subsequent recovery of Chesnutt’s fiction since his death, and emphasizes the importance of studying his work in its historical, ideological, and literary contexts.

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