{"id":19078,"date":"2011-12-18T02:30:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-18T02:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19078"},"modified":"2011-12-18T14:54:51","modified_gmt":"2011-12-18T14:54:51","slug":"the-passing-of-charles-chesnutt-mining-the-white-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19078","title":{"rendered":"The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Wasafiri<\/a>
\nVolume 13, Issue 27<\/a>
\npages 5-10
\nDOI 10.1080\/02690059808589583<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Meer<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer of English
\nUniveristy of Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n

In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt<\/a> confided to his diary\u00a0his ambition to write a book. Its object would be \u2018not so much\u00a0the elevation of the colored people\u2019\u2014the concern of most late\u00a0nineteenth century reformers, both white and black\u2014\u2018as the\u00a0elevation of the whites,\u2019; for he considered it was ‘the unjust\u00a0spirit of caste’, rather than the moral or economic or educational\u00a0conditions of blacks which lay behind racial inequities in\u00a0America. Chesnutt’s focus on white Americans as the problem\u00a0would be accompanied by a particular methodology. He did not\u00a0propose ‘a fierce indiscriminate onslaught; not an appeal to force,\u00a0… (for) the subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward\u00a0the negro, which is common to most Americans …, cannot be\u00a0taken by assault’. Instead, ‘their [garrison) must be mined, and\u00a0we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it’.\u00a0This metaphor, of the secret operation which carries the\u00a0writer silently into the enemy’s camp, is a peculiarly apt one for\u00a0Chesnutt’s writing. His first book would not be published until\u00a01899 but the two collections of stories which came out that year,\u00a0The Conjure Woman<\/em> and The Wife of His Youth<\/em>, were both as\u00a0subtle and as determined to make his point as the image suggests.\u00a0In those books too, and in a subsequent novel, The Marrow of <\/em>Tradition<\/em><\/a>, Chesnutt would often appear to be taking his stand\u00a0on enemy ground and revisiting fictions which were themselves\u00a0part of the problem. Chesnutt not only took white authors as\u00a0his models but seemed at times to seek out genres particularly\u00a0associated with that ‘feeling of repulsion toward the negro’ which\u00a0he believed so prevalent.<\/p>\n

In a sense Chesnutt’s literary tactics reflected his own\u00a0anomalous position in a society obsessive about racial boundaries.\u00a0The son of free North Carolina<\/a> blacks, Chesnutt was probably\u00a0also the grandson, on both sides, of white men. His appearance\u00a0was pale enough to ‘pass<\/a>‘ for white, though it was an option he\u00a0rejected. Physically ‘white’ to the eyes of the unacquainted, culturally ‘white’ in his education and tastes, Chesnutt was\u00a0nonetheless black historically; in the place he inherited in\u00a0America’s rigidly stratified society. Chesnutt’s writing addressed\u00a0his country’s racial inequality and its slave-owning history but\u00a0formally it continued to resemble the ‘white’ tradition of writing\u00a0on the subject…<\/p>\n

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

The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition Wasafiri Volume 13, Issue 27 pages 5-10 DOI 10.1080\/02690059808589583 Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English Univeristy of Cambridge In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt confided to his diary\u00a0his ambition to write a book. Its object would be \u2018not so much\u00a0the elevation of the colored people\u2019\u2014the concern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[333,898,897,8767,2133],"class_list":["post-19078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-charles-chesnutt","tag-charles-w-chesnutt","tag-charles-waddell-chesnutt","tag-sarah-meer","tag-wasafiri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19078","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=19078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}