{"id":39016,"date":"2014-12-21T01:40:48","date_gmt":"2014-12-21T01:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39016"},"modified":"2014-12-21T01:48:14","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T01:48:14","slug":"making-and-unmaking-whiteness-in-early-new-south-fiction-after-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39016","title":{"rendered":"Making and Unmaking Whiteness in Early New South Fiction After the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making and Unmaking Whiteness in Early New South Fiction After the Civil War<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Smashwords<\/a>
\n2012-06-06
\n77 pages (21,670 words)
\neBook ISBN: 9781476497068<\/p>\n

Peter Schmidt<\/strong><\/a>, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature
\nSwarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This essay\u2014a work of literary criticism and critical race studies written to be accessible to non-specialists\u2014examines how popular fiction contributed to and contested new forms of white racial dominance, collectively known as Jim Crow<\/a> or the \u201ccolor-line,\u201d in the U.S. in the 1880s and after. I focus in particular on the cultural work undertaken by the \u201ccommand performance\u201d scene in these texts, in which a black person was asked to tell a story or otherwise give a performance that was supposed to affirm the affection and respect \u201cgood\u201d blacks held for whites. Yet what begins to emerge again and again in such \u201ccommand performance\u201d scenes, even sometimes against the author\u2019s efforts to downplay them, are suggestions of coercion, duplicity, and instability in power hierarchies and racial identities. White supremacy is demonstrably not a given here; it is imperfectly produced, or at least reaffirmed under stress, in a way that locally conditions any power that whiteness may claim. And if a white person\u2019s sense of entitlement was so dependent upon the performance of another, to what degree could such a sense of self be threatened or even unmade in such encounters?<\/p>\n

Making and Unmaking Whiteness<\/em> surveys a broad range of black and white authors but gives special attention to the fictions of four\u2014Joel Chandler Harris<\/a>, Paul Laurence Dunbar<\/a>, Kate Chopin<\/a>, and Pauline Hopkins<\/a>\u2014who in the early Jim Crow era both dissected the contradictions in white supremacy and imagined alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making and Unmaking Whiteness in Early New South Fiction After the Civil War Smashwords 2012-06-06 77 pages (21,670 words) eBook ISBN: 9781476497068 Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania This essay\u2014a work of literary criticism and critical race studies written to be accessible to non-specialists\u2014examines how popular fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1196,8,17,20],"tags":[18833,483,8792,18835,18834,90,4724,18832],"class_list":["post-39016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-joel-chandler-harris","tag-kate-chopin","tag-paul-laurence-dunbar","tag-pauline-e-hopkins","tag-pauline-elizabeth-hopkins","tag-pauline-hopkins","tag-peter-schmidt","tag-smashwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39016","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=39016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}