What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-12-01 23:05Z by Steven

“What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 39, Number 1 (Fall, 2006)
pages 33-53

Erica Abrams Locklear, Assistant Professor of Literature & Language
University of North Carolina, Asheville

In his introduction to the 1985 collection of essays entitled Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates rightfully asserts: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Even so, contemporary disputes centered on race remain one of American most glaring problems. Although laws supporting atrocities such as the Jim Crow South rest in the past, the systems of classification that inspired them still operate on many different levels of present-day American society, ranging from the way people describe themselves, to the labels people place on difference, to the way the American government decides what fraction of “blood” constitutes race. Fiction writer Josephine Humphreys explores the complexities, falsifications, and implications of racial classification for the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina in her historically based novel Nowhere Else on Earth. First published in 2000, the work’s 2001 Penguin edition includes a readers guide following the text in which Humphreys explains her impetus for writing about the Lumbee people. She admits that when she first encountered a Lumbee aboard a train, upon discovering ihat the woman was not white, Humphreys asked, “What are you?”, She goes on to remember that the young woman explained the story of the Lumbee people, as well as the infamous tale…

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