{"id":16710,"date":"2011-10-05T01:25:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T01:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16710"},"modified":"2011-10-05T01:25:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T01:25:25","slug":"the-%e2%80%9cinky-curse%e2%80%9d-miscegenation-in-the-white-american-literary-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16710","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cInky Curse\u201d: Miscegenation in the White American Literary Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cInky Curse\u201d: Miscegenation in the White American Literary Imagination<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Social Science Information<\/a>
\nVolume 22, Number 2<\/a> (March 1983)
\npages 169-190
\nDOI: 10.1177\/053901883022002002<\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Aaron<\/a><\/strong>, Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus
\nHarvard University<\/em><\/p>\n

To dramatize my lurid title, I begin by quoting from and paraphrasing a letter written in 1889 to Richard Watson Gilder<\/a>, editor of the influential Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine<\/a>. The writer was Maurice Thompson<\/a>, a Georgia<\/a>-born novelist and poet who, after serving in the Confederate Army<\/a>, had settled in Indiana<\/a>, where he had studied law and become a minor man of letters (see Wheeler, 1965). Thompson publicly applauded the abolition of slavery, but in the 1880’s he became obsessed by what he called “the first steps of negro influence in art” and “the final rush of the African to absolute domination”.<\/p>\n

The circumstance which prompted the letter was Gilder’s rejection of Thompson’s astonishing long poem, “A Voodoo Prophecy”, which the self-styled “squire of poesy” found unsuitable for his readers (Wheeler, p. 98).<\/p>\n

Gilder had good reasons for his misgivings. The speaker of Thompson’s poem, “the prophet of the dusky race”, recalls how his people had been torn from their African homeland and doomed to the lash and manacle. Now mastered by a “black and terrible memory”, a “tropic heat” still bubbling in his veins, still quintessentially savage, the prophet spurns the white oppressors’ “whine\/Of fine repentence” and warns of the day when their whiteness will darken under him…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cInky Curse\u201d: Miscegenation in the White American Literary Imagination Social Science Information Volume 22, Number 2 (March 1983) pages 169-190 DOI: 10.1177\/053901883022002002 Daniel Aaron, Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus Harvard University To dramatize my lurid title, I begin by quoting from and paraphrasing a letter written in 1889 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[7723,7724],"class_list":["post-16710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-daniel-aaron","tag-social-science-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}