‘Brother Mine’ highlights unique relationshipsPosted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2012-05-18 00:37Z by Steven |
‘Brother Mine’ highlights unique relationships
The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper
Rochester, Michigan
2011-02-08
Ryan Hegedus
Reading other peoples’ mail can land you in serious trouble with the government.
Or, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer, it can land you a book deal.
Pfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland University, is the author of “Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, a back-and-forth account of over 120 letters between the two in the 1920s.”
Toomer, a young black author, began writing to Frank, an established white writer in New York, and the book details the unique friendship between the two.
“Dr. Pfeiffer’s work provides an important tool for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank,” said associate history professor and chair of the history department, Karen Miller. “Both Toomer and Frank were participants in the conflict over the construction of racial identity. Their correspondence helps us to understand how the debates over race worked themselves into friendships.”
In the summer of 1993, Pfeiffer was deciding on the topic of her dissertation at Yale University, and ended up at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the country’s best resources for African-American literature. The opportunity gave her the chance to do research in the primary archives.
It was at Beinecke that she decided on the topic of race passing.
Race passing was a “hot topic” in American literature at the turn of the century, Pfeiffer explained, where people who were legally defined as black because of previous generations, were actually light enough to pass for a white person.
“These people would take on a new identity and pass for white,” Pfeiffer said. “They would have this better opportunity as a white person than they would have as a black person, but then there would be all of this guilt and sense of loss because they’d have to leave their families. That’s really what my dissertation was about — about stories of characters who ‘pass.’”…
Read the entire article here.