Mixed Race Studies

The Cry of Black Rage in African American Literature from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright

Edwin Mellen Press
2013
176 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-4077-1; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4077-7

Steven Troy Moore, Assistant Professor of Language and Literature
Abilene Christian University, Abilene Texas

This book examines the contrasting experiences of black rage that is exhibited in the writings of male and female African American authors. It boldly captures the compelling theme of the white silence and the black rage that battled each other from the early days of slavery up to the pre-Civil Rights Movement. It exposes the birth of black rage and the African American experience through such writers as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs. Next, it gives a painful glimpse into the complicated experience of the biracial in the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen. Finally, this study concludes with an astounding view of the modern state of black rage through the controversial writings of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. Currently, many studies present a one-dimensional analysis of black rage; however, this book provides a comprehensive examination of this phenomenon. From the viewpoint of African American authors, it traces the gender differences of black rage that span one hundred years and includes valuable insights from such brilliant scholars as bell hooks, Cornel West, Barbara Christian, Martha J. Cutter, Deborah E. McDowell, and James Baldwin.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Maureen Honey
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• “Get Over It”
• Chapter 1: Examining a Century of Silence and Rage in African American Literature, 1865-1946
  • Introduction
  • Literature Review
  • The Duality of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs
  • The Biracial Worlds of Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen
  • Richard Wright’s Explosive Rage
• Chapter 2: Silent Trees: Personal Reflections on Silence and Rage
  • The Silence
  • Silence and Rage
  • Mark
  • Blackness: Silence and Identity
  • Words from bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X
• Chapter 3: Witnessing the Birth of Black Rage in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Ann Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
  • The Enduring Pain of Slavery
  • The Autobiographical Rage of Frederick Douglass
  • Impotent Rage
  • Black Female Rage in Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • The Slave Girl and the Sexual Predator
  • The Female Slave’s Alternative Retribution
  • Lasting Blow: The Lingering Influences of Slavery
• Chapter 4: The Phenomenon of Biracial Rage in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)
  • The Biracial Identity
  • The White Mask in The House Behind Cedars Chesnutt’s Biracial Female
  • Black Female Rage in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand A Place to Belong: Location and Helga’s Biracial Identity
  • The Biracial Female in Passing Differed Rage
• Chapter 5: Exploring the Explosive Urban Rage in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946)
  • Brutal Clarity
  • “Like a Red-Hot Iron”: Bigger Thomas’s Burning Rage
  • The White Cat and the Black Rat
  • Native Son’s Perpetuating Rage
  • The Furious Hell of Ann Petry’s The Street
  • The White Heaven: Petry’s Contrasting Spaces
  • The White Ideal and the Black Other
  • Blackness and Claustrophobic Spaces
  • Explosive Black Female Rage
• Bibliography
• Index

Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self

Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
February 2004 (Originally Published in 1903)
224 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0743467698; ISBN-13: 9780743467698
eBook ISBN-10: 1451604351; ISBN-13: 9781451604351

Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930)

Introduction by:

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Of One Blood is the last of four novels written by Pauline Hopkins. She is considered by some to be “the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, though she is one of the lesser known literary figures of the much lauded Harlem Renaissance. Of One Blood first appeared in serial form in Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period that Hopkins served as its editor.

Hopkins tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn’t care less about being black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures—which he does find in the ancient land. However, he discovers much more than he bargained for: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told. Hopkins wrote the novel intending, in her own words, to “raise the stigma of degradation from [the Black] race.” The title, Of One Blood, refers to the biological kinship of all human beings.

Quicksand and Passing

Rutgers University Press
1986
246 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-1170-4

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edited by

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels’ greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor’s comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Texts
• Quicksand
• Passing
• Explanatory Notes

Passing

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
584 pages
5.2 × 8.4 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9

Nella Larsen

Edited by

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University

Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature.

Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston’s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan’s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich “Background and Contexts” section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935—by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others—provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen’s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on “The Tragic Mulatto(a)” in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. “Criticism” provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Text of Passing
Backgrounds and Contexts
REVIEWS

1. Mary Rennels – “Passing” Is Novel of Longings (April 27, 1929)
2. Beyond the Color Line (April 28, 1929)
3. Margaret Cheney Dawson – The Color Line (April 28, 1929)
4. The Dilemma of Mixed Race: Another Study of Color-line in New York (May 1, 1929)
5. Alice Dunbar-Nelson – As In a Looking Glass (May 3, 1929)
6. W. B. Seabrook – Touch of the Tar-brush (May 18, 1929)
7. Esther Hyman – Passing by Nella Larsen (June 1929)
8. Aubrey Bowser – The Cat Came Back (June 5, 1929)
9. Mary Griffin – Novel of Race Consciousness (June 23, 1929)
10. W. E. B. Du Bois – Passing (July 1929)
11. Mary Fleming Larabee – Passing (August 1929)
12. Do They Always Return? (September 28, 1929)
13. “M. L. H.” – Passing (December 1929)
14. Passing (December 12, 1929)

CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF PASSING AND RACE

1. When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian? (March 2, 1911)
2. [Publisher’s Preface to the 1912 Edition of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man]
3. Writer Says Brazil Has No Color Line (October 1925)
4. Blood Will Tell (July 24, 1926)
5. Don Pierson – Does It Pay to “Pass?” (August 20, 1927)
6. Juanita Ellsworth – White Negroes (May-June 1928)
7. Lewis Fremont Baldwin – From From Negro to Caucasian, Or How the Ethiopian Is Changing His Skin (1929)
8. Emilie Hahn – Crossing the Color Line (July 28, 1929)
9. Caleb Johnson – Crossing the Color Line (August 26, 1931)
10. Langston Hughes – Passing for White, Passing for Colored, Passing for Negroes Plus (1931)
11. 75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day (December 19, 1931)
12. Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother (January 21, 1932)
13. Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing‘ (January 23, 1932)
14. Swedish Negro Baby! (April 28, 1932)
15. Virginia Is Still Hounding ‘White’ Negroes Who ‘Pass’ (June 29, 1935)

THE RHINELANDER/JONES CASE

1. Mark J. Madigan – Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1990)
2. Selected newspaper articles on the case (list pending)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

1. About Nella Larsen
2. Miss Nella Larsen Bids for Literary Laurels (May 12, 1928)
3. Thelma E. Berlack – New Author Unearthed Right Here in Harlem (May 23, 1928)
4. Mary Rennels – Behind the Backs of Books and Authors (April 13, 1929)
5. [Letter about Nella Larsen] Jean Blackwell Hutson to Louise Fox (August 1, 1969)
6. Thadious M. Davis – Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic (1989)
7. George Hutchinson – Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race (1997)
8. Larson on birth, Passing, and death
9. Davis on birth, Passing, and death
10. Hutchinson on birth, Passing, and death

Author’s Statements

1. Nella Larsen Imes, “Author Statement,” 1926
2. Nella Larsen Imes, Guggenheim Application
3. [In Defense of Sanctuary]

Letters

1. To Carl Van Vechten [1925]
2. To Charles S. Johnson [August 1926]
3. To Eddie Wasserman
4. To Eddie Wasserman
5. To Dorothy Peterson
6. To Dorothy Peterson
7. To Dorothy Peterson
8. To Dorothy Peterson
9. To Langston Hughes
10. To Gertrude Stein
11. To Carl Van Vechten
12. To Carl Van Vechten

THE TRAGIC MULATTO(A)

1. Lydia Maria Child – The Quadroons (1842)
2. Williams Wells Brown– From Clotel (1853)
3. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
4. William Dean Howells – From An Imperative Duty (1892 or 83?)
5. Kate Chopin – The Father of Désirée’s Baby (1893)
6. Mark Twain – From Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
7. Charles Chesnutt – From The House behind the Cedars (1900)
8. Georgia Douglass Johnson – The Octoroon (1922)
9. Countee Cullen – Near White (1925)
10. Langston Hughes – Mulatto (1927)
11. Fannie Hurst – From Imitation of Life (1933)

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT PASSING

1. Frank Webb – From The Gairies and Their Friends (1852)
2. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
3. Charles Chesnutt – From House behind the Cedars (1900)
4. James Weldon Johnson – From Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
5. Jessie Redmon Fauset – The Sleeper Wakes (1920)
6. Countee Cullen – Two Who Crossed a Line (1925)
7. Walter White – From Flight (1926)
8. Jessie Redmon Fauset – From Plum Bun (1928)
9. Rudolph Fisher – From The Walls of Jericho (1928)
10. George S. Schuyler – From Black No More (1931)
11. Langston Hughes – Passing (1934)

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

1. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. – The Mulatto to His Critics (1918)
2. Countee Cullen – Heritage (1925)
3. W. E. B. Du Bois – Criteria of Negro Art (1926)
4. Nella Larsen [Pseud. Allen Semi] – Freedom (1926)
5. George S. Schuyler – The Negro-Art Hokum (1926)
6. Carl Van Vechten – From Nigger Heaven (1926)
7. From Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs: A Symposium (1927)

Criticism

1. Nathan Irvin Huggins – [Schizophrenia from Racial Dualism]
2. Mary Mabel Youman – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony
3. Claudia Tate – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation
4. Mary Helen Washington – Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance
5. Cheryl A. Wall – Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels
6. Deborah E. McDowell – [Black Female Sexuality in Passing]
7. David L. Blackmore – “That Unreasonable Restless Feeling”: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing
8. Jennifer DeVere Brody – Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing
9. Helena Michie – [Differences among Black Women]
10. Judith Butler – Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
11. Ann duCille – Passing Fancies
12. Kate Baldwin – The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing
13. Gayle Wald – Passing and Domestic Tragedy
14. Catherine Rottenberg – Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire
15. Miriam Thaggert – Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Nella Larsen: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography