Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (review) [Sheffer]

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2013-04-20 20:15Z by Steven

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (review) [Sheffer]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0061
pages 203-205

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 offers new insights on how African American and Asian American identities were defined in relation to one another during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As Lee explains, the book seeks to show how “American identity emerges from the interplay between the fantasies of the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’” (5). Lee focuses on iconic texts and court cases, as well as lesser-known novels, memoirs, and films in order to show how widely the trope of interracial encounter traveled, and how varied were its permutations.

Interracial Encounters follows from a recent wave of works committed to comparative and interethnic analysis, such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001), Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s edited collection AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (2006), Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2009), and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (2011). These books continue the ground-breaking work of Werner Sollors and Elizabeth Ammons to see patterns across ethnic literary traditions while carefully attending to the particular ways American ethnic and racial identities have been negotiated in relationship to other minority groups. Lee maintains the specificity of each group’s experiences in the United States and offers an important contribution to the study of American racial formation.

Lee makes coherent sense out of the complex and contradictory laws, court cases, and racial ideologies of the period she analyzes. Her re-reading of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is particularly impressive, providing a powerful contribution to the scholarship of this pivotal court case while also shedding new light on its influence on literature and culture. Interracial Encounters does not oversimplify or selectively celebrate scenes of inter-racial solidarity; instead, Lee shows the “multiple logics of exclusion”  that were deployed in the period (5). While she provides ample evidence of cross-racial identification, she also illustrates the pattern of one group demanding inclusion at the expense of the other. Interracial Encounters reveals the tensions and alliances between Asian Americans and African Americans, as well as these groups’ shifting relationship to normative whiteness. For example, her readings of the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Cheat (1915) illustrate the contradictory ways African American and Asian American racialization appeared in popular cultural texts.

Lee is attuned to the complexity in how racial ideologies affect minority populations whose rights were (and still are) unevenly recognized and enforced. As she notes, “an American national identity was natural, desirable, universal—and utterly impossible for African Americans and Asians to attain” (10). While underscoring the US historical context for African American and Asian American literary production, Lee also traces the transnational and at times post-national implications of Afro-Asian encounters. Racial ideologies travel beyond the nation’s borders, particularly in this period when the US became a global superpower.

The introduction lays out Lee’s major claims and the theoretical concepts undergirding her work. Chapter Two contextualizes Asian American and African American racialization in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly through the spatialization of the segregated train car, a site central to Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three continues the discussion of segregated train travel by analyzing key scenes in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Wu Tingfang’s memoir America, through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914).

Chapter Four addresses the transnational and imperial dimensions of racialization and orientalism as illustrated by the writings of the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian-American sisters Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). By studying their fiction and nonfiction set in the US and Jamaica, Lee shows the women’s competing strategies for asserting their status as representative Americans. Edith Eaton depicts Asian Americans and African Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans)…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Racial Crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire by Damon Ieremia Salesa (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, Oceania on 2013-04-20 02:30Z by Steven

Racial Crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire by Damon Ieremia Salesa (review)

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2013
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2013.0015

Sarah Carter, Professor of History
University of Alberta

Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

With a focus on New Zealand to 1872 but with attention to other British colonies, Damon Ieremia Salesa finds that “€œthe “€žcrossing”€ of races: different races associating, liaising, reproducing, marrying or consorting,”€ (1) was everywhere. Racial crossings both fascinated and concerned the British of the Victorian era in the colonies and the metropole, yet rarely were they punished, or legislated against. One of the major insights of this study is that racial crossing (properly managed and administered) was seen as a strategy of colonialism, not a challenge to it, and was a “€œcornerstone of the colonial management of races”€ (13), although there were dissenting voices and intense debates. But while the book deals with intermarriage and more informal crossings, there is greater focus on the concept and pervasiveness of “€œracial amalgamation,”€ as opposed to separation or segregation, as a strategy for dealing with and solution to the “€œproblem”€ of different races. Racial amalgamation was a method of erasure, of obliterating difference peacefully. A central argument of this book is that race was constitutive and elemental, that New Zealand was “€œa “€žracialized state,”€ one associated and with a nineteenth-century British Empire increasingly organized and ruled through discourses and practices of race”€ (17).

Advocates of the “€œsystematic”€ colonization of New Zealand including Edward Gibbon Wakefield proposed policies that included variants of racial amalgamation, which was a foundation of the land policy of the New Zealand Company, the focus of the first chapter. There were to be no vast tracts of land set aside as reserves in New Zealand, no separation of the races. Instead the Tangata Whenua would be interspersed and sprinkled among the colonizers. This would permit an expansive, intensive colonization and at the same time speed the “€œcivilization”€ of the Tangata Whenua who, it was assumed, would naturally desire to acquire the habits and comforts of their new neighbours. The second chapter traces the development of “€œtender ties”€ between Tangata Whenua and foreigners, the emergence of the term “€œhalf caste“€ by the 1820s and the growing perception of New Zealand as a place of disorder and pandemonium in need of intervention. Yet no steps were taken to obstruct or abolish intermarriage by colonial government; it was actively supported by authorities as long as it was “€œlegitimate”€ according to British law. At the Colonial Office at mid-century, Herman Merivale was the “€œphilosopher”€ of the amalgamation of colonists with Indigenous people, which he saw a “€œsensible, humane and practical course”€ (95), compared to the other two alternatives: extermination, or segregation on reservations. Merivale imagined a peaceful “€œeuthanasia of savage races”€ (157). The goal of peaceful disappearance of Indigenous people through amalgamation, however, had the effect of sharpening racial categories and hierarchies. A racialized colonial regime based on strategies of amalgamation was etched onto the land in New Zealand and entrenched in related legislation and policy.

An important chapter is devoted to debates about racial crossing in science and scholarship. Those who saw race crossing in a positive light drew on views of the Britons as a mixed race people who had grown in strength and superiority as a result. Organizations such as the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Ethnological Society of London, promoted the benefits of race crossing, while others, most notably the Anthropological Society of London, sharply disagreed. Influential authors in the colonies, such as A.S. Thomson, writing about New Zealand, saw amalgamation as the hope for the future, arguing that by the third generation “€œthe features of the Maori race will disappear from among the half-castes”€ (157). While Salesa notes that Indigenous voices and actors were absent from science and scholarly circles, throughout the book there is an important thread of Tangata Whenua discourses of racial crossings. A major point of the book is that Indigenous understandings contrasted fundamentally with colonial taxonomic practices. “€œHalf castes”€ found an accepted place; they were born members of a hapū or clan through their mothers and were not fractionalized into “€œhalves.”€…

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Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial [Gaither Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2013-04-15 04:38Z by Steven

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial [Gaither Review]

MXDWELL
2013-02-17

Renoir Gaither

MXDWELL is a versatile online news source that celebrates and redefines the mixed experience by presenting a variety of cultural and artistic news, while promoting diversity as a vital aspect of our community.

Behind her behemoth title, “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulattato the Exceptional Multiracial,” author Ralina L. Joseph carries on the business of dissecting multiracial representation in American popular culture with acuity and zeal.

The result is a study that cedes little to those who decry that race no longer matters in American society. Over the past few decades a groundswell of scholarly attention has sprouted on the subject of multiraciality. And hybridity and critical mixed-race theorists continue to stake claims on the theoretical landscape. Professor Joseph acquires her piece of theoretical real estate through interdisciplinary analysis of mixed-race characters in contemporary film, fiction and television, in particular, representations of mixed-race African Americans. Joseph tackles a multitude of cavernous issues surrounding such representations, ever delving into the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class, and the many codes in which the latter are inscribed on mixed-race representation…

Read the entire review here.

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Masters and Slaves: ‘Sugar in the Blood,’ by Andrea Stuart

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery on 2013-04-03 02:33Z by Steven

Masters and Slaves: ‘Sugar in the Blood,’ by Andrea Stuart

The New York Times
2013-03-29

Amy Wilentz

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire By Andrea Stuart, Illustrated. 353 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.

On a trip to Paris, I recently had the same shocked realization that Andrea Stuart describes in her astounding new book, “Sugar in the Blood.”

Slaves built this, I thought as I wandered from one grand 18th-century monument to the next. How rarely we acknowledge that Europe’s great cities were built on profits from the labor and blood of slaves cutting sugarcane half a world away.

Stuart, a London-based author of Barbadian ancestry, writes of contemporary England: “Sugar surrounds me here.” The majestic Harewood House in Leeds was built with money from Caribbean sugar plantations, she points out, as was the Codrington Library of All Souls College in Oxford and Bristol’s mansions. The slaves of the West Indies built this wealth while unaware of its existence, or of their own connection to it. Without them, the vast empire that gave the world Victoria and Dickens might never have existed.

In this multigenerational, minutely researched history, Stuart teases out these connections. She sets out to understand her family’s genealogy, hoping to explain the mysteries that often surround Caribbean family histories and to elucidate more important cultural and historic themes and events: the psychological after­effects of slavery and the long relationship between sugar — “white gold” — and forced labor…

…There is not a single boring page in this book, which — as a longtime reader of nonfiction and skipper of boring pages — I can attest is an achievement in itself. In every chapter of “Sugar in the Blood,” history, fact, analysis and personal reflection combine to move the narrative forward, both the grand story of slavery and sugar and the more mundane but always fascinating story of family and business. And beneath every banal moment of cooking or cleaning, of selling or buying, of dressing or undressing, the threat of uprising and rebellion beats loudly, as it must have done on the plantation…

Read the entire review here.

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Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World by John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive on 2013-04-02 23:52Z by Steven

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World by John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris (review)

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 4, April 2013
pages 532-533
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0017

James Sidbury, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Rice University

John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, eds., Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007)

This anthology of six essays on the complicated and sometimes surprising nature of black and white racial identities in the Atlantic region prior to the age of emancipation grew out of the 2007 Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington. The collection begins with an introductory essay in which Franklin W. Knight provides a broad and insightful overview of the meanings of race in different parts of the Americas, both historically and today. That is followed by four case studies that range from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil. The volume closes with an essay by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard that traces a family’s odyssey as they moved from colonial Saint-Domingue to Cuba, then to Louisiana, then to Europe, and then back to Louisiana, before finally returning to Europe. The other essays do not touch on as many locales, but they match Scott and Hébrard in their complex portrayals of the ways various black and white people in the Americas conceived of racial difference and the ways in which people of African descent worked within those conceptions to build their lives.

Two case studies explore Anglo-American racial thought. Rebecca Goetz, taking a fresh look at seventeenth-century Virginia, argues that the Englishmen who settled there came to believe that Africans and Indians lacked the capacity for true Christian belief, and whites used this belief to explain enslaving and dispossessing them. “By questioning the ability of Africans to become Christian, settlers defined both their own religious and cultural identity” and that of their racial others (p. 65). Trevor Burnard explores the demands of Anglo-Caribbeans to establish their standing as good and respectable Englishmen. As previous scholars have noted, they failed, but Burnard argues that their failure has less to do with the libertinage for which they were famous (there being metropolitans who openly sympathized with libertine values) than with their admitted attraction to African women. Those in the metropole “suspected that white West Indians’ constant intercourse with Africans . . . was turning them from ‘proper’ white people into black people” (p. 79), a perception exacerbated by the belief that white women in the islands behaved too much like black women. “Whiteness was endangered by the dereliction of gender rules” (p. 84).

The other case studies center on people of African descent. John Garrigus digs beneath the myths that have surrounded Vincent Ogé, the homme de couleur who was tortured and executed in Saint-Domingue for allegedly trying to foment a rebellion prior to the 1791 uprising in the northern plain. Garrigus upends the received narrative of this famous incident, showing that Ogé probably did not want to lead a prolonged uprising, but that he sought instead to rally the free colored militia to take advantage of the ties between militia service and citizenship that were emerging in the metropole. Sidney Chalhoub shows how Brazilian planters used the 1831 law that putatively prohibited the Atlantic slave trade to their own advantage, creating a system in which they could easily seize and enslave free black Brazilians. But black Brazilians also used the law and assumptions of “natural” black slavery that emerged out of it to avoid military service, seek less brutal masters, and finally, after 1851, to contest slavery. Neither the law itself nor the legal regime that arose out of its evasion operated in a simple or straightforward manner. Scott and Hébrard provide an overview of the complicated transatlantic genealogy that they have reconstructed for the children of “Rosalie of the Poulard Nation,” an enslaved African who achieved freedom in southern Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Her grandson became a Reconstruction-era Louisiana legislator and fought for racial and gender equality. That battle was rooted in his family’s history.

These essays, as Franklin Knight points out, underscore that the development of racial identities in the Americas was “a complicated process that varied according to time, place, and circumstances,” an understanding that helps to explain…

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Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2013-04-01 00:26Z by Steven

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

William and Mary Quarterly
Third Series, Volume 69, Number 3, July 2012
pages 665-667
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0665

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America. By Gwenn A. Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 242 pages.

Patricia Cleary, Professor of History
California State University, Long Beach

In a period of imperial expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia founded only one overseas colony, in several sites off the Alaskan coast. On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s study, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire.

Drawing on slim and occasionally challenging sources, Miller traces Russian colonial expansion, examining how conquest and the exaction of tribute from subjugated peoples in Siberia facilitated the Kodiak venture. Teasing out how Russians differentiated themselves from locals, Miller focuses narrowly on the inhabitants of one island outpost, whose interactions, both peaceful and violent, led to the creation of a “new world” that was “never wholly Russian or Alutiiq” (xi). Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the “crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact” (xi)…

At the heart of Miller’s analysis is how mixed-race children came to be important both culturally and economically. Russian American children drew the interest of company leaders and government officials, who “singled out these children to be groomed for middling and at times high-level work within the colonial apparatus” (138). Demographic changes prompted such attention. With the overwhelming majority of native men forced to engage in the increasingly dangerous and difficult otter hunt, overhunting led to ever longer voyages, and growing numbers of men perished at sea. European diseases further contributed to the decline of the indigenous population. Company officials began to recognize two related needs: for young indigenous boys to remain in their communities “to train in the art of the sea otter hunt” (114) as their elders died at accelerated rates and for a population of future company workers to be educated appropriately. The hardships of life in the colonial outpost, the “difficulty of transporting substantial numbers of settlers from mainland Russia” (127), the skewed sex ratio among those who did emigrate, the declining Alutiiq population, and an expanding Kreol one turned the Kreol into “an important constituent of the subject population on Kodiak” (127), a few of whom were sent to study at the company’s expense in Saint Petersburg. State encouragement of mixed-race unions elsewhere, Miller states, typically took place in the earlier rather than later phases of colonial enterprises, with families rather than the state or firms responsible for making decisions about children’s educations. In stark contrast, Russian imperial officials “took increasing interest in this Kreol group of colonial residents as a loyal local population, and their expectations for the behavior of these people as European Russians was expressed in more concrete terms over time” (138), with the 1820s a high point. The church, state, and company all became more interested in these children; the company paid for their education in exchange for years of service, an arrangement that would turn “the local Kreol population into a literate managerial force that would be loyal to the Russian crown” (112)…

Read the entire review here.

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Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical [Review by Alan Gomberg]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-28 21:35Z by Steven

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical [Review by Alan Gomberg]

Talkin’ Broadway
2013-03-27

Alan Gomberg

Much of Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical should prove fascinating to readers who have a deep interest in the creation and performance history of this classic, much-revived and -revised musical. Many of those Show Boat devotees probably already have Miles Kreuger’s superb 1977 book, Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical, but Decker goes into more detail on many matters (while going into less detail on some others) so his book is far from being a rehash of Kreuger’s.

Also, the performance history of Show Boat since 1977 has been (to put it mildly) extensive and complex, giving Decker much new history to relate. Still, the most rewarding parts of the book are those that cover earlier productions and the 1936 film version. There is much information here on the major productions from 1927 through the late 1940s that is likely to be new even to those who already know a good deal about Show Boat.

One thing that separates Decker’s book from Kreuger’s is his focus on a sociological theme, as suggested by the book’s subtitle: Performing Race in an American Musical. He writes in his introduction, “My emphasis on race rests equally on definitions of whiteness and blackness. Magnolia and Ravenal perform their whiteness every bit as much as Joe performs his blackness and any actress playing Julie must perform that character’s mixed-race identity, whatever that has meant in particular times and places.” Part of the way in which Decker examines these matters is by discussing in detail the unique contributions of some of the performers in each major production. This extends beyond those who played the characters mentioned above…

Read the entire article here.

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Book Review: Race in a Bottle

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2013-03-24 02:04Z by Steven

Book Review: Race in a Bottle

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African Americans. Ironically, race-based drug treatment emerged in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, a project that theoretically promised both to scientifically refute the notion of genetically distinct racial groups and to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Though hyped by researchers, the FDA, and the press as an important first step toward personalized medicine, BiDil is a drug administered to patients based on their membership in a group…

…Critical to Kahn’s argument regarding evidence is the fact that the clinical trials on which the company based its patent application for BiDil were never designed to compare racial difference in response to the drug. Using “care of the data” as an organizing theme, Kahn highlights one of the many troubling aspects of this controversy: the extraordinarily loose, if not sloppy, construction of what passed as evidence in the patent application and FDA hearings. From the use of misleading statistics on mortality from heart failure in African Americans, to the failure to define the central variable of race, to the design of a clinical trial (A-HeFT) that included only African Americans (and therefore could not determine differential efficacy) to the lack of any mechanistic understanding for a differential effect, Kahn shows that attention to the data was consistently problematic when it came to matters of race. The chapter on the FDA hearings is particularly illuminating…

Read the entire review here.

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The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Identity Development/Psychology, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2013-03-23 02:47Z by Steven

The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop

Mother Jones
2007-11-09

Debra J. Dickerson

Suddenly, white people are fascinated by race. Good for them. Good for all of us?

If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it. A complex book on a complex issue, it’s hard to know where to begin (good reviews here, here and here).

Here’s the easy part: One Drop is about having a semi-famous father who gave you all the insulated, WASPy pampering any white girl could want but who turns out, on his deathbed, to have in fact been black, then backtracking to figure out why and how he did so. And where that leaves you in a nation where boxes must be checked and sides must be taken. Only in America could a strained conversation in your dying father’s sickroom change your race. This just in: you’re black.

Pere Broyard, Anatole, was a New Orleans Creole, as it turned out, who helped create a post-war, bohemian-intellectual Manhattan where he and his friends “didn’t know where books stopped and they began.” But the world did. The only way for the cerebral, wavy-haired Negro to claim a place in that rarified atmosphere, seduce numberless white girls, or even get a decent job, was to stop being black. The price of doing so for two generations left Broyard a twisted soul, self-eliminated from family and culture, adrift in a world which existed mostly in the minds of the trendy Communist sympathizers and slumming trust-funders who fed on each other until it was time to marry and move to Connecticut. “Our tribe of four made us seem alternately special and forsaken,” Bliss writes, “the last survivors of a dying colony or the founding members of an exclusive club.”She and her brother had almost no interaction with either side of the family, so deeply ‘incognegro’ was Anatole. So were they black now? If they’re not, is it because it’s too late or because it’s too easy?…

…Still, these works do what America never will; participate in all the truth and reconciliation we’re ever going to have—piecemeal, caveated, hazy, statute of limitations-expired but more than blacks knew before. More than whites could bear to admit to before. Leave it to white narcissism to do for us what the urgings of conscience never will: put white perpetrators center stage. Now that it’s safe. Given that America won’t hold its breath until a black person goes digging for the ancestor who narc’d on Denmark Vesey, maybe blacks should cut whites some slack on their long overdue introspection. There’s no denying that blacks desperately want to know what the hell happened and how and only whites can tell us that…

Read the entire article here.

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Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2013-03-18 05:08Z by Steven

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013
pages 113-121
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp.(paper).

In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of “passing” for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. “He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.” Gates then added, “I feel sorry for him.”

This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the “bi-racial” and “mixed-race” movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories—and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph.

“Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women,” wrote Sharon Toomer, the author’s great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, “but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—€”not interpretation.” She continued: “In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white.” But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.

Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren’t entirely certain what to make of it.

Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinchback—€”the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—€”Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the publication of Cane, a questing soul in search of a racial identity outside of contemporary realities, hoping…

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