Minority Reports: Identity and Social Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (The Future of Minority Studies)

Minority Reports

The Future of Minority Studies A timely series that represents the most innovative work being done in the broad field defined as “minority studies.” Drawing on the intellectual and political vision of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project, this book series will publish studies of the lives, experiences, and cultures of “minority” groups—broadly defined to include all those whose access to social and cultural institutions is limited primarily because of their social identities. For more information about the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) International Research Project, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu

Series Editors: Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College, CUNY Michael Hames-García, University of Oregon Satya P. Mohanty, Cornell University Paula M. L. Moya, Stanford University Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan Identity Politics Reconsidered edited by Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya Ambiguity and Sexuality: A Theory of Sexual Identity by William S. Wilkerson Identity in Education edited by Susan Sánchez-Casal and Amie A. Macdonald Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture by Daniel Enrique Pérez The Future of Diversity: Academic Leaders Reflect on American Higher Education edited by Daniel Little and Satya P. Mohanty Minority Reports: Identity and Social Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Michael Borgstrom

M i nor i t y R e p orts I de n t i t y a n d S o c i a l K now l e d ge i n Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry A m e r ic a n L i t e r at u r e

Mic h a el B o rg s t ro m

MINORITY REPORTS

Copyright © Michael Borgstrom, 2010. All rights reserved. A significantly different version of chapter 3 appeared in PMLA 118.5 (October 2003) and is reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. An earlier version of chapter 5 is reprinted, with permission, from African American Review 40.4 (Winter 2006). First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62263–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Mom and Dad and Christopher

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C on t e n t s

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Identity, History, Narrative 1

What Do We Want from Harriet Wilson?

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2 Frank J. Webb and the Fate of the Sentimental Race Man

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3 Setting the Record Straight in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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4 Frederick Douglass and the Limits of Knowledge

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5 Face Value: Ambivalent Citizenship in Iola Leroy

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Conclusion: Return from the Beyond

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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P r e fac e

Many years ago, when my brother and I were small, our dad would

regularly remind us of the limits on originality. “Whatever you can think up,” he would tell us, “has already been thought of by someone else. The best you can hope for is to realize that how you think about things may be different from other people.” This statement fascinated my brother and me. We would rack our brains trying to think of something (anything) that had not been thought of before. All books had already been written; all inventions already dreamed up. We were awed not just by our father’s apparent wisdom about such matters, but also by the sense of its overarching applicability to every aspect of our lives. It was our first introduction, I think, to abstract concepts like innovation, history, and epistemology. When I share my dad’s assertion with friends today, they’re often appalled at his parenting. After all, they say, good parents encourage their children to be creative, to stretch themselves, to dream large. As a kid, however, I found my father’s statements ironically quite comforting, and as years went by, relieved of the burden of originality, I could focus on learning things I didn’t know, secure in the realization that in doing so I was implicitly joining a community that would, in time, reveal itself. Besides, my dad encouraged us in other ways. He was the only father I knew, for example, who urged his kids to draw on their bedroom walls, and the only one, later, who insisted that his oldest son (me) switch from a major in business to one in English. As a jock who didn’t go to college himself, he was often baffled by the fact that I was so intensely different from him (roller skating, not woodworking; Solid Gold, not Monday Night Football). But much to my dad’s credit, he let me know even as a small boy that these differences did not disappoint him; instead, he found them fascinating. Difference, in his view, was a good thing. In time, I came to understand that my dad’s argument against originality was, in fact, an argument about identity. He showed me that the experiences I had had, and the ways that those experiences informed who I understood myself to be, directly influenced how I

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saw and interpreted the social world. And that realization, he often pointed out, likely would affect future events in my life. Who one is, he would say, may be just as important as what one does. The point wasn’t to be original but to be aware—to see that who I was determined how I saw the world, and to recognize that that dynamic held true for everyone else as well. My dad’s commentary on the ways that what we know are linked to how we know (and thus to who we are) forms the basis of this study. It argues that reading, writing, and interpretation is neither disinterested in nor inseparable from social identity; indeed, it takes as axiomatic the fact that identity (and the experiences connected to identity) is fundamental to the process of acquiring social knowledge. This is not a popular position. Because Minority Reports claims that identity categories such as race, sexuality, and gender can function as significant avenues for cultural analysis, it implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) argues against pervasive theoretical paradigms that tend to see identity as merely incidental to literary and cultural analysis. Instead, it builds on critical work that sees identity as a salient, even vital, theoretical tool. In this way, Minority Reports centers on a number of analytical issues: How do the social identities of authors determine how we read their works? What sorts of critical assumptions do readers bring to the literature they study? How might such expectations limit analyses of authors and their texts? How might they expand them? Such questions highlight one of the primary theoretical incongruities in contemporary literary and cultural analysis: notwithstanding the recent (and nearly ubiquitous) scholarly suspicion of identity categories, critics continue to rely heavily on identity-based paradigms, particularly in studies of American literature and culture. Indeed, much of the analytical focus on texts by early African American writers, for example, reminds us that books, like bodies, have specific identities routinely attached to them. Studies of authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Elizabeth Keckley tend to concentrate almost exclusively (and understandably) on the ways that their works inform readers’ appreciation and understanding of African American identity in the nineteenth century. Such a dynamic thus notes how the critical reception of minority writers and their texts are often linked to the expectations readers continue to have for identity categories in general, and for minority identity in particular—“minority” broadly defined here in terms of cultural power rather than numbers, referring to such social factors as gender, race, and sexuality.

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In calling attention to the enduring social and political salience of this dynamic, Minority Reports provides a textual and theoretical defense of the use of identity categories in American studies. It does this by explaining how early minority authors offer compelling ways to talk about identity without resorting to the narrow determinism of essentialist paradigms. In taking seriously the experiences of those who feel the lived effects of social identity, these authors, I argue, demonstrate the multiple ways that identities generate crucial knowledge about the structure and function of the social world, both in terms of their specific historical contexts and their texts’ ongoing relevance to contemporary culture. By thus exploring the connections between subjective experience and socially grounded knowledge, the works I examine demonstrate how texts not traditionally understood as theoretical can profoundly transform conventional (and often limited) understandings of the relationship between minority identity and critical social analysis. This body of literature, in other words, highlights the ways that what we write and how we read are inextricably linked to who we are—what we privilege, ignore, celebrate, or disregard. In this way, these texts make clear that social identity matters a great deal to interpretive activity. Indeed, in contrast to recent calls to dismantle identity categories that appear to oversimplify complex selves, these works suggest that to do away with such categories may be to do away with crucial epistemological and cultural tools. Minority Reports opens with an introductory discussion of the three key components that inform the project as a whole: identity, history, and narrative. Here, I provide an overview of the book’s definition of identity as a concept, an examination of identity’s specific role within nineteenth-century Americanist literary scholarship, and a commentary on the ways that textual representations of minority identity offer specific social insights that are indispensable to contemporary cultural and theoretical analysis. As the introduction explains, a concentrated focus on minority identity categories in nineteenthcentury texts helps to highlight the epistemological significance of these early works as well as to reveal many of the implicit values and ideologies held by modern readers. The chapters that follow elaborate on this dynamic through diverse examinations of the ways that critical theories of social identity can arise from close readings of these early texts, rather than from anachronistic applications of contemporary theoretical paradigms to nineteenth-century works. By emphasizing the epistemic contributions of early minority authors, my analysis underscores the multiple ways that what we write and how we read is often linked to who we

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are. Rather than attempt to move “beyond” the categories that shape cultural difference, my analysis suggests that critical theory should both acknowledge the durability of these differences and marshal them to serve alternative theoretical (and political) goals. I argue, in other words, for deconstructive paradigms that nevertheless respect real manifestations of social difference by exploring the connections between subjective experience and socially grounded knowledge. In this respect, Minority Reports not only calls for a broader rethinking of the theoretical paradigms frequently used to examine minority identity within literary and cultural analysis, but also illustrates through its individual (and collective) analyses how specific epistemic perspectives inevitably inform our interpretive abilities and decisions.

Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

A colleague (who is also a friend) once told me that the acknowledgments section of any book is invariably more important than the book itself. Given the sheer number of people who provided support and encouragement while I worked on this project, I have new appreciation for the significance of that statement—and I feel an especially keen pleasure in recording my gratitude to so many colleagues, friends, and loved ones. This book’s origins stretch back to graduate school, where the guidance and generosity of David Van Leer, Linda Morris, and Joanne Feit Diehl helped shape my thinking in crucial ways; to all three, I offer my sincere and affectionate thanks. I am grateful as well to illuminating conversations with Liz Constable, Mardena Creek-Michelson, Beth Freeman, Bishnu Ghosh, Michael Hoffman, Clarence Major, Riché Richardson, and Catherine Robson. At San Diego State, I am lucky to be part of a supportive intellectual community that also manages to sustain a much-appreciated sense of humor. Alida Allison, Laurel Amtower, Quentin Bailey, Joanna Brooks, June Cummins-Lewis, William Nericcio, Phillip Serrato, and Joseph Thomas make coming to work a pleasure. I am appreciative too of the conviviality of Sandra Alcosser, Martha-E. Casselman, Clare Colquitt, Laurie Edson, Jerry Farber, Annie Foral, Mary Garcia, Ron Gervais, Sinda Gregory, Jerry Griswold, Mozelle Harding, Peter Herman, Ilya Kaminsky, David Kamper, Lynda Koolish, Sherry Little, Larry McCaffery, Lila Nericcio, Harry Polkinhorn, Carole Scott, and Carey Wall. Several students have been instrumental in helping me think through the ideas in this book, and in that regard I would especially like to thank Kacie Flowers, Dana Jackson, Katie Ness, Andy O’Clancy, Ranmali Rodrigo, Melissa Soltman, Lindsay Steinman, Eric Stottlemyer, and Emily Thomas. For important support of this project, I am grateful to Dean Paul Wong and the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University. I am likewise grateful to the editorial staff at

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Palgrave Macmillan; it has been a pleasure to work with Julia Cohen, Burke Gerstenschlager, and especially Samantha Hasey. I cannot praise highly enough the intellectual, professional, and personal camaraderie that characterizes the Future of Minority Studies Research Project. In no other community have I experienced such intense scholarly engagement combined with such a strong esprit de corps, and working with this group has been one of the highlights of my academic life. Plus, they are all really good dancers. I am very much indebted to Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya Mohanty, who codirected the Future of Minority Studies 2007 summer seminar at Cornell University, and to the many colleagues and friends with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work under the auspices of FMS: Alice Cho, Tracy Fisher, Roxana Galusca, Zenzele Isoke, Michelle Jarman, Sharmila Lodhia, Gaile Pohlhaus, H. L. T. Quan, Grant Silva, Michelle Tellez, Brian Thomas, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. My work benefited significantly from audiences at Cornell University and Spelman College, and particularly from Johnnella Butler, Sandy Darity, Michele Elam, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kenneth McClane, Carol Moeller, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Paula Moya, Mark Anthony Neal, John Riofrio, Ramón Saldívar, Tyrone Simpson, and John Su. For crucial encouragement and friendship, I am grateful to Michael Hames-García, Ernesto Martínez, Daniel Enrique Pérez, and especially Michelle Tellez. I am very fortunate to have an extended group of wonderful, devoted friends, many of whom I have known for several decades: Kevin Cornelius, Ben Durbin, Philip Ellsworth, Scott Godfrey, Jan Goggans, Andrew Gross, Judi Henderson, Laura Konigsberg, Erika Kreger, Tiffany Aldrich MacBain, Robert Marcos, Christina Muraco, Rebecca Newsom, Andrew Ragone, Rod Romesburg, Jodi Schorb, Connie Stamas, Jennifer Trainor, Stephanie Wells, Anjali Williams, and Annelise Zamula. I am also keenly aware that who I am, how I write, and what I have to say has been inexorably shaped by the love and encouragement of my parents, Barbara and Kenneth Borgstrom, my brother, Steven Borgstrom, as well as many other members of my family: Nancy Borgstrom, Ruth Borgstrom, David Duke, Dennis Duke, Lara Skondovich Duke, Shirley Duke, Kim Gelfand, Carole Gideon, and Ruby Low. My mom, in particular, has always been my greatest source of support, and I am extremely fortunate (and very grateful) to be her son. Although some I hold dear did not live to see

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the completion of this project, their passing does not diminish their importance to my work or their profound significance to my life. I am thankful, finally, to three people in particular. Satya Mohanty took an interest in my work at a critical moment, and it is not an overstatement to say that his invitation to be part of the FMS Research Project as a Mellon fellow significantly altered my academic life in the best possible ways. I am deeply grateful for his ongoing encouragement and advice. As I have noted elsewhere, it is the luckiest sort of coincidence that one of the smartest people I know also happens to be my best friend. For nearly thirty years my constant cohort in work and play has been Anna Muraco, a woman whose generosity, compassion, and strength of character have no equal. Without a moment’s hesitation, she willingly put aside her own work to read or listen to every word in the following pages, and the fact that as a sociologist she can talk with extraordinary erudition about nineteenth-century American literature is a testament to her unwavering devotion and great patience. I benefit daily from her sound advice, sharp intellect, and fantastic sense of humor. Her importance in my life, as she well knows, is inestimable. And then there’s Christopher. For over a decade, he has kept me laughing, endured my quirks, provided personal and professional feedback, and offered his unfailing, unwavering love. He has never not known me as an academic, and yet, amazingly, he still hangs in there—despite the fact that he believes most academics take themselves much, much too seriously. He continues to remind me of this particular conviction on a daily basis, for which I am (almost daily) grateful. Nobody advises me more wisely, supports me more fiercely, or makes me laugh harder than he does. I am the luckiest guy in the world.

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I n t roduc t ion

I de n t i t y, H is t ory, Na r r at i v e

It is time to return to identity. To many, such an assertion may sound

paradoxical, even naive, since it could be argued that analytical work over the past several decades has never really abandoned considerations of identity. Studies of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, class, and disability (and the intersections among them) continue to be produced by scholars in a number of fields, and this sustained interest in identity appears to be mirrored in the popular consciousness as well. It clearly matters a great deal to a great many people, for example, that the United States elected its first president of (known) African American descent; that President Obama, in turn, nominated the first Latina woman to the nation’s Supreme Court; that the economic challenges during this presidency’s infancy have highlighted profound disparities in class; and that one of the primary political (and social) issues confronting the new administration is whether gay and lesbian citizens should, or should not, have the right to marry. Identity, it seems, is as pertinent a topic as it ever has been. Yet to critics of identity, an interest that might have been seen at one time as necessary to both public awareness and social legitimacy now borders on a seemingly unhealthy cultural obsession. Indeed, exhortations to minimize (and even eliminate) social difference have become increasingly common both in and outside the academy and from a wide range of critical perspectives. For some, the concept of identity threatens the potential for a truly communal United States; to focus on social distinctions amounts, in this view, to an unnecessary balkanization of society at the expense of appreciating a shared national culture. To others, identity fosters an unwelcome suspicion and mistrust of those who exist outside of coalitions organized specifically around race, gender, or sexual difference, thus undermining the promise of a genuinely multicultural world. And to many academic critics, in particular, studies of identity pose not just social but also intellectual risks; because identities are generally understood today

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to be cultural constructions rather than biological essences, analyses that emphasize the ongoing significance of identity categories are often accused of being both politically reactionary and theoretically obtuse.1 Although such varied perspectives clearly have diverse origins and trajectories, they share a common conviction: namely, that identity is something we would be better off without. Indeed, in what is perhaps one of the staunchest, most unequivocal assertions of this position, critic Walter Benn Michaels argues that “the concept of identity is incoherent” and that “its continuing success is a function of its utility to neoliberalism.”2 To critics like Michaels, studies of identity that focus on the cultural significance of race, sexuality, and gender commit both a social and an epistemological error: if race (and sexuality and gender) is culturally constructed, and if one of the primary goals of progressive social critique is to eradicate racism (and homophobia and sexism), then it would appear that to reify identity categories ironically risks perpetuating the social conditions that such critique ultimately aims to resist. Thus in this view, Michaels notes, “treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake. Maybe instead we ought to stop making the mistake.”3 The solution to this problem, Michaels claims, is twofold: first, scholars need to discontinue their focus on identity; and second, they need to loosen what he claims is their “near obsession” with history, for as Michaels contends, “like the idea of diversity itself, history functions at best as a distraction from present injustices and at worst as a way of perpetuating them.”4 Minority Reports resists both of these assertions; indeed, it takes as axiomatic the fact that identity and history, and the intersections between them, are indispensable to a fuller understanding of the social world’s organization, ideologies, and value systems. While some critics maintain that identity categories are no longer relevant in contemporary culture (and while others, like Michaels, acknowledge such categories’ saliency but nevertheless urge us to move “beyond” them), Minority Reports examines the ongoing social and theoretical significance of identity by highlighting the specific epistemic insights that are offered through identity’s historical manifestations. Put simply, there is still much to be learned both from identities and from critical reactions to them. As the chapters that follow thus maintain, categories such as race, sexuality, and gender are not merely quaint, outdated modes of group affiliation; rather, they are essential tools for interpreting the structure and function of the contemporary social world itself.5

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Identity My analysis of identity’s potential to facilitate social knowledge (and ultimately to enact social change) relies on an agential, rather than merely passive, understanding of identity as a concept. In this respect, Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of identity as “the Self that identifies itself” offers what is perhaps the most straightforward suggestion of identity’s dynamic possibilities, particularly insofar as Nancy’s definition implicitly characterizes identity as deliberate action and purposeful self-construction.6 While it is certainly true, as diverse critics have pointed out, that “identities are often not embraced voluntarily but rather forced upon individuals and communities by homophobic, sexist, and racist power structures,” the specific experiences, both positive and negative, that are connected to identity nevertheless offer crucial insight into the social world (and indeed into the self) that might otherwise be unavailable.7 In this respect, identity is indispensable to social knowledge, for as critics Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty note, “our identities are not just imposed on us by society. Often we create positive and meaningful identities that enable us to better understand and negotiate the social world. They enable us to engage with the social world and in the process discover how it really works.”8 Identity in this view is not merely incidental to progressive social understanding; rather, it actively facilitates cultural knowledge through attentiveness to one’s specific social location. Thus with Alcoff and Mohanty’s observation in mind, I emphasize throughout this study both the active properties of identity (“the Self that identifies itself”) and the potential such self-awareness offers for significant cultural analysis. One of the most recent and intensely sobering manifestations of this dynamic emerged in the July 2009 arrest of the prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the foremost critics of both the ongoing relevance of racial identity and its status as a cultural construction. Gates’ arrest for disorderly conduct while within his own home sparked outrage on multiple fronts: at the individual who alerted the police to the perceived break-in at Gates’ house; at the Cambridge police force (and specifically at Sgt. James Crowley, the white officer who arrested Gates); at Gates himself, for accusing the Cambridge police of racial profiling; and, finally, at President Obama, who upon being questioned about the case remarked that the police had “acted stupidly.” While there is clearly no official, agreedupon interpretation of these events, the very fact that the case generated such widespread (and persistent) public interest testifies even on

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the most basic level to the ongoing social significance of racial identity. One is hard-pressed to imagine a comparable situation in which President Obama would schedule, almost immediately, a “beer summit” among Gates, Crowley, the vice president, and himself in order to quell public furor over the incident and its subsequent cultural repercussions.9 In important respects, cases such as Gates’ arrest complicate theoretical claims advanced in recent scholarship (in a variety of intellectual fields) that urge critics to dismantle social categories that appear to limit multifaceted understandings of personal identity. To effect this shift in focus, such criticism often recommends a reconfiguration of the analytical terms typically used to define social relations, exhorting us to move beyond categories of race, gender, and sexuality and instead to embrace paradigms such as hybridity and heterogeneity.10 The theoretical attraction of such analysis, however, seems unavoidably compromised by its personal and social repercussions, especially since the desire to recognize identity as hybrid and heterogeneous (or even nonexistent) is often frustrated by an ongoing—and perhaps unavoidable—cultural tendency to organize identity categories in quite distinct ways. It is surely true that the numerous variations among sexual, gender, and racial identities make it difficult to assume that there exist inherent, biological bases for cultural difference. But simply noting, intellectually, that identities are constructed entities does not mean that they do not exist with often very real social consequences. As critic Wahneema Lubiano explains this predicament: “Whether or not I am a card-carrying believer in distinctions of racial biology, I am nonetheless attacked by the hegemonic social formation’s notions of racial being and the way those notions position me in the world.”11 The public reaction to Gates’ case emphasizes the dynamic Lubiano describes. Despite the prominence of analytical paradigms that position minority identities as social constructions, Gates’ arrest (and the sustained attention it received) suggests, at least in this instance, that theoretical analyses of racial identity still cannot supersede their social implications, even among groups of individuals who would seemingly embrace contemporary post-structuralist conceptions of racial identity itself. Indeed, as legal scholar Lani Guinier points out in her observations on this case, “To understand what happened on that Cambridge porch, we must free ourselves of the stereotype that racism is always overt. . . . if we take the time to lift the curtain that postracialists insist on pulling over our eyes, we might begin to realize that a porch encounter ostensibly about racial profiling is

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nevertheless a sign of larger and more systemwide injustices.” It is high time, Guinier asserts, for U.S. culture to become “racially literate, not postracially blind.”12 In light of several years of debate on the issue of social constructionism and its relationship to understandings of the self, Guinier’s comments may strike some as intellectually (and even politically) reactionary. Many would reject the idea that U.S. culture still wrestles with “systemwide injustices,” and few progressive critics today rest easy with the idea that identity categories share anything approximating common essences; in other words, it is disheartening (to some, even insulting) to think of Gates’ race as the primary determinant of his unique self. Yet as Alcoff and Mohanty observe, “[I]t is a false dilemma to suppose that we should either accept pernicious uses of identity or pretend they do not exist.” Identities, in this view, “are not our mysterious inner essences but rather social embodied facts about ourselves in our world; moreover they are not mere descriptions of who we are but, rather, causal explanations of our social locations in a world that is shaped by such locations, by the way they are distributed and hierarchically organized.”13 By thus emphasizing identities as constructions that nevertheless allow (and perhaps even require) us to interpret the world in specific ways, we broaden our understanding of enduring patterns of social stratification. In this respect, as Alcoff and Mohanty note, “The theoretical issue concerning identities is not whether they are constructed (they always are, since they are social kinds) but what difference different kinds of construction make.”14 These concerns hold a particular significance for contemporary analyses of U.S. culture. Over the past several decades, critical work in the academy has exerted tremendous effort to make legible a culturally and critically viable minority presence. In reaction against entrenched understandings of what counted as “good” literature, scholars operating under the aegis of African American, feminist, gay and lesbian, and postcolonial studies, among others, worked diligently not only to recover “lost” work by minority authors but also to develop methodologies to interpret these texts within the terms offered by their respective communities.15 In so doing, such critics often situated their studies in opposition to hegemonic value systems, constructing in the process a set of analytical paradigms that analyzed social stratification within a series of binary frameworks: black/white, female/male, homosexual/heterosexual. The importance of this initial phase of cultural deconstruction cannot be overestimated, particularly since one of the primary benefits gained from these efforts to reevaluate the social and aesthetic

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contributions of minority authors was to highlight the subjective nature of canon formation itself.16 But if the binary paradigms erected during this process helped to open up the canon (and the academy) to those previously excluded from it, they also appeared paradoxically to replicate some of the problems of hegemonic representation. The analytical concentration on minoritized authorship, necessarily performed through a monocultural focus on specific racial, gender, and sexual identities, ushered in a subsequent critical phase of what came to be called, often derisively, “identity politics.” The process of delineating the artistic and intellectual traditions of minority groups resulted, at times, in a rank-pulling policing of cultural authenticity. Issues concerning who could speak—as well as how and when— tended to eclipse these groups’ internal differences in favor of what were sometimes overly reductive notions of collective membership. As a result, some members of socially marginalized groups found themselves excluded not only from hegemonic society but also from the minority communities of which they were ostensibly a part. Embedded within such divisions, and central to their later critique, were ongoing theoretical deliberations concerning essentialist and constructionist understandings of identity. The arguments in these debates centered on issues of difference: while strict essentialists claimed that personal identity is inborn and, therefore, inescapable, constructionists emphasized identity’s contingencies—noting that differences in cultures over time, and not universal truths, create variations among and between individuals.17 Around this epistemological schism, rough battle lines were drawn. Advocates of essentialism characterized constructionist agendas as complicit in minority erasure, leveling accusations that ranged from charges of cultural insensitivity to allegations of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Constructionists, on the other hand, called attention to the ahistoric and deterministic tendencies of essentialist viewpoints and frequently dismissed such positions as intellectually bankrupt. The polarization of these disparate views, and the frequently divisive rhetoric they employed, engendered a type of critical exhaustion—a sense that studies of minority identity were trapped within a debilitating theoretical deadlock. The legacy of these debates continues to inform contemporary criticism. Frustrated by what is often perceived as an unhelpful ideological sectionalism—and interested, instead, in emphasizing the multiple, inherently diverse facets of American society—many scholars call today for work that moves beyond the binaries originally erected in the interests of social identity. “The time has come,” one scholarly collection asserts, “to initiate a new critical epoch, a period

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of cultural reconstruction in which ‘identity’ is reconfigured in the midst of a multiplicity of cultural influences . . . in a theoretical matrix where there are no centers and no margins—a critical paradigm that will allow scholars to study the polyvalent nature of lived cultural identity.”18 By turning to analytical frameworks such as heterogeneity and hybridity, such critics suggest that the impasse facing cultural studies might be bridged through a move away from a monocultural focus on identity to one more syncretic in practice.19 The work produced within these theoretical structures has been impressive in its quality and scope. At the same time, however, other scholars have questioned such critical moves, suggesting that calls to move “beyond” identity may be not only politically hasty but also epistemologically impossible. Often, post-structuralist theories of hybridity cast “identity politics” as error, as a retrograde notion of belongingness that is hopelessly out of touch with the realities of multicultural society. But while privileging heterogeneity may indeed move criticism beyond an often limiting essentialism, that theoretical promise offers little comfort to those who regularly experience the lived effects of social disempowerment. Indeed, if identity categories really do not matter, one wonders why instances of social subjugation that rest precisely on discrete understandings of identity continue to exist in culture—such as gay bashing, or racial profiling, or the fact that women must still frequently contend with entrenched presumptions that they are inferior to men. For reasons such as these, scholars wary of calls to move “beyond” identity categories have reminded us that specific identities (and their effects) retain a remarkable resiliency and legibility in contemporary culture.20 As a result, the theoretical attempt to study identities as hybrid forms seems unavoidably compromised by the lived experiences of everyday life. Despite the understandable desire to have heterogeneous, multifaceted identities recognized and affirmed in culture, American social structures still organize identities in quite distinct ways.21

History This dilemma carries specific resonance for historical studies of U.S. culture. Scholars of nineteenth-century America, for example— especially those committed to post-structuralist theories that urge critics to move “beyond” identity—must confront the significant analytical challenges posed by this era’s aggressive interest in demarcating social divisions. While recent scholarship rightly takes contemporary criticism to task for its retrospective (and often artificial)

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application of binary ideologies to nineteenth-century culture, 22 it is nevertheless crucial to note that this period generated a number of social transformations whose personal ramifications we continue to feel today: the rise of industrial culture, which enforced enduring labor divisions between women and men; the increased interest in developing a scientific language for sexual “inversion,” which aimed to identify (and thereby police) homosexual practices and persons; and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which placed all individuals of (perceived) African American heritage under suspicion, whether enslaved or free. Given the stratified nature of ante- (and post-) bellum American culture, reconciling post-structuralist notions of hybridity and heterogeneity with this period’s lived realities seems a difficult endeavor, at best. Indeed, as Lawrence Buell points out, because identity categories “have been—and continue to be—historically important in conditioning thought and social arrangements, it won’t do to pretend to evaporate them, either historically or theoretically, notwithstanding that this strategy might abstractly be more defensible than reification. The biological fact that racial differences are inconsiderable at the level of DNA doesn’t make them so historically or culturally.”23 Buell’s comments point to a significant epistemological challenge: while identities may indeed be multifaceted and hybrid, they are rarely granted that understanding in either “real” life or history. How then to talk about identity without resorting, on the one hand, to the biological determinism of essentialist paradigms, or denying, on the other, the experiences of those who felt (as well as those who continue to feel) the social effects of identity with often banal regularity? One step toward reconciling this apparent paradox may be through acknowledging history’s ongoing repercussions in American culture, a proposal that seems almost absurdly straightforward (even obvious), but one that nevertheless bears reiteration in the wake of calls to abandon historical memory entirely. Indeed, as Guinier points out in her discussion of the Gates case, “History does matter. The undisputed historical backdrop for the porch encounter includes 240 years of chattel slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and 400-plus years of intergenerational wealth transfer during most of which time black people not only owned little property—they were property.”24 In this respect, critical neglect of history (whether due to intellectual disinterest or, as Michaels advocates, to deliberate inattention) appears to lead inexorably toward a form of cultural amnesia that dovetails in striking ways with calls to eliminate studies of identity in general. By severing history from contemporary culture—and by downplaying

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(or even dismissing outright) the saliency of identity to historical and contemporary personal experience—such views, as Guinier puts it, “ignore history’s important legacy in the form of a systemic process still at work.”25 One of the primary goals of Minority Reports is to respond to this critical tendency by focusing on the specific intersections among identity, history, and epistemology. In this respect, I build on Rosaura Sánchez’s call for “a critical theory that is grounded in a fuller recognition of how particular social structures and relations condition a diversity of social and historical experiences and generate concrete social spaces that give rise to social, political, and cultural identities. In turn, these social spaces are themselves productive sites, enabling the construction of new and potentially radical/transformative political subjects.”26 Identity in this view is not merely personal or idiosyncratic; instead, it is a crucial interpretive tool for understanding the social world itself. Moreover, as Sánchez and Guinier suggest in their respective works, a full appreciation of this analytical dynamic is predicated on recognizing the role that the past plays in such understanding, since history continually demonstrates how identity operates less as a solipsistic sense of self than as recognition that the self exists within networks of cultural differences that in turn give rise to critical, necessary social knowledge.27 This dynamic might be broadly defined as a process of what I call epistemic identification, an attempt to build knowledge through recognition of the specific experiences related to diverse identities. In this respect, my analysis loosely follows the definition of identification offered by scholar Diana Fuss, who describes this dynamic as “the detour through the other that defines a self. This detour through the other follows no predetermined developmental path, nor does it travel outside history and culture. Identification names the entry of history and culture into the subject, a subject that must bear the traces of each and every encounter with the external world.”28 As Fuss suggests, the process of acquiring social and personal knowledge is directly dependent on the relationship between the self and history, between the self and culture. In this light, then, it would seem ironically self-defeating to ignore either the past or the diverse identities (the “others”) that constitute important aspects of the past itself. Indeed, to do so would appear to limit important opportunities for progressive social movement—for as Sánchez points out, identification is “a discursive process that can serve to signal a group’s isolation, uniqueness, segregation, rejection, subordination, domination, or difference vis-à-vis others; it can involve a defensive or exclusionary

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mechanism, but . . . it can also serve as a rallying call for recognition and redress of grievances.”29 The dynamic that Sánchez outlines—in calling attention both to diverse forms of historical subordination and to the ongoing need to acknowledge how such subordination reverberates in contemporary culture—informs much recent scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature. The work of critics such as Christopher Castiglia, Saidiya V. Hartman, Sharon Patricia Holland, Dana Luciano, Lora Romero, and Xiomara Santamarina, among several others, all point to the ongoing need to examine (and in some cases to recuperate) early American works in terms of their relationship to minority identity, experience, and social epistemology.30 These analyses frequently observe the ways that nineteenth-century American culture tended to facilitate social ties through processes of personal identification, forms of connection that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were most typically calibrated through feelings of compassion or, more specifically, of sympathy. As critic Glenn Hendler notes in his analysis of this dynamic, sympathy “is an emotional response to reading or seeing an expression of another’s feelings. It is thus at its core an act of identification. To feel compassion, as opposed to mere pity, one must be able to imagine oneself, at least to some extent, in another’s position.”31 By permitting oneself to feel the abjection of others, sympathy (at least in this nineteenth-century context) allows for a type of social connection that might in turn effect significant cultural change. The belief that sympathetic identification might be used to connect the self to disenfranchised others stretches back to eighteenthcentury Scottish moral philosophy and specifically to the theories of Adam Smith. In his seminal The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith proposes sympathy as a tool for creating a righteous, honorable society—but while the liberal impulse within Smith’s work would appear promising, even auspicious, there is little agreement among contemporary critics about the actual social value of such identificatory practices. Indeed, one of the most significant (and hotly disputed) debates in recent scholarship on this topic centers precisely on the status of feeling, and especially sympathy, as a means for progressive social action. One passage from Smith’s work, in particular, justifiably causes concern for a majority of contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century culture: Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They

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never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. . . . By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.32

Here, the potential to sympathize with the disenfranchised edges dangerously close to appropriating the specific experiences of powerless “others” for one’s own utility. In this way, the paradigm Smith offers for social change risks exerting imperialistic control via sympathetic identification in the name of compassion itself. As Hendler observes, “The limits of such a politics of affect become apparent when it comes up against any significant cultural or experiential difference between the subject and object of its paradigmatic act of identification: if I have to be like you and feel like you in order for you to feel for me, sympathy reaches its limits at the moment you are reminded that I am not quite like you. In other words, any culturally marked or affirmed difference can become an insurmountable obstacle to sympathetic identification. Or still worse, sentimentalism can respond to difference by attempting to negate or suppress it.”33 The recognition of otherness, in other words, does not necessarily prevent the process of othering. Because sympathetic identification runs the risk of unjustly capitalizing on the specific experiences of subjugated populations, the intrinsic ideological and political paradoxes it poses may ultimately compromise the altruism that motivates such empathy in the first place. Indeed, the problematic dimensions of this dynamic (sympathy/ appropriation, compassion/exploitation) would appear to render identification itself as a wholly undesirable method for generating social change. And yet comparatively more effectual alternatives to sympathy are difficult to identify: does one ignore the suffering of others for fear of seeming unduly self-interested? Does one withhold compassion to safeguard against conflating social differences? Must one merely accept the fact that discrepancies in cultural power are both predictable and unavoidable? The upshot of rejecting identification as a means to social reform, it seems, may be as troubling as the dynamic itself—for to disregard the experiences of others and our reactions to them (as well as how they might or might not mesh with our own experiences) ironically risks reifying the social disempowerment and cultural abjection that liberatory paradigms mean to resist.

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This paradox, as Christopher Castiglia points out, “is central to the double bind of nineteenth-century reform.” Castiglia notes: “Perhaps progressive politics are never possible without some appeal to the compassionate, imaginative identity crossings that we call sympathy, and certainly the politics of sympathy practiced by white abolitionists in antebellum America helped produce seismic social transformations, especially the end of slavery. Yet sympathy became the predominant political discourse in the course of the nineteenth century, obscuring the social construction and structural distribution of power in a rhetoric of individual interiority.”34 Such a double bind may not be entirely irresolvable, however, if sympathy itself is displaced as the primary objective of the process of identification. That is, identificatory practices may still be of value when such relationships are calibrated not merely through sympathy and sympathetic response but rather through a deliberate expansion of social knowledge. To be clear, however, the paradigm I am proposing does not aim to “know” people as a substitute for “feeling for” them, especially since such a dynamic would risk replicating the imperialistic tendencies to which critics of sympathy rightly direct our attention. Instead, the primary goal of what I am calling epistemic identification is to learn about ongoing discrepancies in social ideologies, mores, and values in order to determine one’s relationship to them; in effect, it is to register the epistemic potential of cultural difference itself. Identification thus becomes here a critical tool for social knowledge—one that makes compassion not its ultimate goal but rather employs empathy as a means to larger epistemic ends. In this respect, as Castiglia suggests, identification might be more readily accepted as a potential avenue to progressive, liberatory politics, since within this paradigm experience (including the experiences of diverse populations) becomes fundamental to the process of both acquiring social knowledge and fostering social change. While it is impossible to feel another person’s pain (or to know how people feel more generally) epistemic identification highlights the ways that one might learn from the experiences of others when they are juxtaposed to (and measured against) one’s own circumstances and emotions. In other words, identification in this context does not obviate, ignore, or flatten out social differences and differential experiences; instead, it recognizes and relies on difference and differential experience in order to cultivate cultural knowledge. It demonstrates, as Paula M. L. Moya points out, the multiple ways that “knowledge is not disembodied, or somewhere ‘out there’ to be had, but rather that it comes into being in and through embodied selves. . . humans generate knowledge and our ability to do so is causally dependent on both our cognitive

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capacities and our historical and social locations.”35 To learn from experience, in this view, thus requires that attention be paid not only to identity but also to history itself.

Narrative As the preceding pages suggest, American culture’s commitment to analyzing and affirming social difference might require a critical recalibration that focuses on the robust durability of the specific distinctions routinely made among identities. That is, rather than attempt to move beyond the binaries that structure cultural difference, critics might interrogate these binaries on their terms but to different strategic ends. In this light, as critic Samira Kawash observes, “where the boundary has served as the mark of exclusion, of an irreconcilable and absolute difference across which position and privilege are determined, then its effects are not challenged by effacing the boundary (‘beyond race, beyond racism’—on the further side of, outside the limits of).” Instead, “they are challenged from the zone of the boundary itself, as the eruptive possibility of its own (nontranscending) beyond, a beyond that recognizes the boundary as both its own limit condition and its own condition of possibility.”36 In scrutinizing these boundaries, in other words, space is opened up for deconstructive analyses that nevertheless respect the very real ways that individuals experience social difference. Minority Reports argues that one place to locate this theoretical potential is in the works of early minority authors themselves. Indeed, this body of literature offers important lessons on ongoing critical investments in social identity (its limitations and possibilities) by emphasizing the ways that particular epistemic perspectives invariably inform scholars’ interpretive abilities and decisions, as well as the various forms of historical understanding that continue to influence contemporary culture. By thus considering the ways that social identity can be both constructed and authentic, particularly in terms of the lived experiences that arise from inhabiting specific cultural groups, we broaden our knowledge of the world and our place within it. Indeed such an understanding, as Satya Mohanty notes, explains how “certain social arrangements and conditions—social struggles of dominated groups, for instance—can help produce more objective knowledge about a world that is constitutively defined by relations of domination. . . . For granting that the oppressed have this privilege opens up the possibility that our own epistemic perspective is partial, shaped by our social location, and needs to be understood and revised hermeneutically.”37

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The works I examine throughout Minority Reports underscore Mohanty’s observations in two specific ways: first, they emphasize how identity categories do not always neatly correspond to “knowledge” of others; and second, they reveal how identity itself is fundamental to social analysis. As the examples of these early authors make clear, identity categories—and their attendant political commitments—continue to matter deeply in (and to) American culture. Indeed, in their ability to call attention to alternative methods of evaluating social structures and cultural value systems, these texts demonstrate the multiple ways that identity categories in fact help to explain the social world by virtue of the epistemological perspectives they provide. In this respect, the analytic impulse of Minority Reports follows scholar Valerie Smith’s lead when she notes how discursive forms not typically associated with theoretical critique (such as oratory, autobiography, and the novel) might in fact function as critical theory. “Too frequently,” Smith observes, “the adjective ‘theoretical’ is bestowed upon specific texts by the corporate culture of the academy and becomes a manifestation of the uneven distribution of power that conceals its own contingencies.”38 The chapters that follow bear out Smith’s assertion by focusing on the social knowledge that arises within the intersections among identity, history, and narrative. Significantly, such intersections also reveal an ongoing critical investment in minority identity (and history) itself, despite protestations from those who argue that scholarly analysis should move beyond them. Take for example the changing critical reputation of the American postbellum author Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins. Until very recently, Kelley-Hawkins was included within the celebrated Schomburg collection of nineteenth-century black female authors. With the discovery in 2005 that Kelley-Hawkins was in fact white, the collection (edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the same scholar arrested in Cambridge) announced that her works would no longer be issued under the Schomburg imprint.39 Such a decision speaks in important ways to contemporary analytical (and political) concerns about minority identity, particularly insofar as it highlights the ongoing critical expectation that the identities of authors and their texts should match with what readers believe they should be. Ironically, the specific case of Kelley-Hawkins would appear in fact to support critical perspectives that see race as wholly socially constructed, and thus it would seem, given current theoretical sensibilities, that readers might especially appreciate the deconstructive possibilities inherent in the disjunction between who Kelley-Hawkins was and what she produced as an author. The decision to remove her from the Schomburg series, however, suggests that

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critical interest lies, still, in privileging specific authors and texts as “authentic” representations of African American culture and identity. In other words, scholars continue to want (and perhaps even to need) authors and texts to “be” black in quite specific ways. I do not believe, however, that this is a negative or harmful phenomenon. On the contrary, given the likelihood that such expectations will continue to inform critical practice (as the case of Kelley-Hawkins demonstrates) I would suggest that ignoring or dismissing the cultural salience of social identity may not only prove epistemologically disingenuous but also actively obstructionist to the progressive politics with which academic study is frequently aligned. The works I consider throughout Minority Reports center on this assertion. I analyze this dynamic, first, by examining how Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859)—and the critical reaction to her book— highlights the enduring theoretical and social relevance of historical texts. By implicitly underscoring the epistemological difficulties of “knowing” an author by virtue of the generic forms in which she writes, Wilson alerts her readers to the problems of flawed analysis that can result from comparable instances of critical misrecognition, especially those that are based on broad assumptions about authorial identity. Simultaneously, however, I note the ways that Wilson does not lament this tendency so much as she calls attention to its inevitability. In outlining this dynamic, this chapter thus considers how discursive forms not typically associated with theoretical critique might in fact function as critical theory, positing an argument that explicitly rejects reading Wilson’s text as merely a cultural or historical relic. The remaining chapters take up the theoretical challenges posed by Wilson’s text by examining, specifically, the historical intersections among race, gender, sexuality, and sentimentality. Chapter 2 begins this inquiry by considering one of the most underexamined texts of the antebellum era: Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). Webb’s novel is routinely dismissed as mediocre and overly melodramatic, even though his work prefigures many of the prominent social issues that writers such as Frances E. W. Harper would engage some thirty years later (e.g., racism and segregation in the North; the plight of mixed-race persons who cross the color line; the specific challenges facing the black middle class). Because Webb writes at a time when such issues might be construed as less pressing than the more immediate cultural debates over slavery, I argue that scholarly disregard of his novel is due, at least in part, to his text’s disengagement from the realities of slave life in the antebellum South. Related to the problem of Webb’s subject matter, however, is his novel’s sentimental style, a

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form most directly associated with white female authors of the era. Because he is neither white nor female, Webb troubles the relationship between social identity and narrative form. Critical neglect of his text, I argue, is thus related to ongoing assumptions about “authentic” African American literature, particularly insofar as such authenticity for black male authors is often implicitly defined as stylistically brusque and markedly unsentimental. I then extend these arguments about the scholarly neglect of nonnormative (and hence “inauthentic”) black male identity by considering in chapter 3 one of the least studied characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): the effeminate slave, Adolph. I evaluate Adolph’s critical elision to illustrate how the success of analyses centered on race and gender might unintentionally permit other minority identities within the book to remain unrecognized. Centrally, I am concerned with the implicit commentary Adolph’s character provides on the erasure of figures that do not adhere to standardized models for minority identity; that is, one reason Adolph has been ignored is because he does not conform to the racial or gendered criteria that the book (and the subsequent criticism) establishes for legitimate black masculinity. Consequently, Adolph’s character makes no “sense” in either Stowe’s novel or the scholarship devoted to it. This chapter thus considers how attention to intersections among identity categories can reveal important representations of social difference, including those differences not always acknowledged in contemporary American culture. Chapter 4 builds on these cultural and theoretical concerns by examining Frederick Douglass’ early autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and its subsequent revision, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). I consider how Douglass’ texts (and readers’ reactions to them) emphasize the ways that identity and experience influence both how and what readers see, as well as what they value. Specifically, I suggest that his works might be understood as meditations on the epistemological limitations of “knowing” both slavery and slaves themselves. I argue that embedded within these texts’ exposé of southern slaveholding is Douglass’ own critical analysis of hegemony’s prurient interest in both him and his work; through such critique, his narratives implicitly subject white readers to a scrutiny analogous to that facing the narrating ex-slave. In so doing, Douglass’ works not only make visible some of the unobserved frameworks that buttress white culture but also reveal how whiteness, as a racial category, carries its own unacknowledged specificities and epistemic values. It is in this respect, I argue, that Douglass’ works have as much to teach us about modern critical investments as they do

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about the compositional challenges facing minority authors writing within the antebellum period. The final chapter of Minority Reports considers how these arguments translate into the postbellum period by examining how same-sex eroticism overlaps with other forms of minority identity undergoing redefinition in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Here, I examine the social status of African American men in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), and focus, in particular, on the little-studied character of Robert Johnson. I analyze Robert’s refusal of what the book positions as the principal expression of postbellum black civil liberty— marriage—and suggest that Robert’s bachelorhood functions as an implicit commentary on the intersection between postbellum political ideologies and protohomosexual identities. While Robert espouses the need for black cultural solidarity more consistently than any other character in the book, his voice fades as the text marches past the Civil War and into Reconstruction. I argue that his silence appears connected in significant ways to his marital status, and I link this observation to the fact that Robert’s character rarely appears as an object of scholarly interest. Be refocusing attention on characters like him, however, I suggest that readers can begin to critique entrenched epistemological assumptions that render historical intersections among sexual and racial identities illegible. As these synopses indicate, Minority Reports takes as its focus the saliency of social identities as they emerge in early historical contexts, and it argues that far from limiting progressive politics such identities in fact reveal encouraging new paradigms for contemporary civil rights by broadening our collective social knowledge. In this respect, acknowledging and learning from difference does not automatically translate into social oppression or appropriation, nor does it threaten the ideological (and political) promise of a shared, common culture. Instead, the dynamic I call epistemic identification actively facilitates an intrinsic respect for cultural uniqueness by noting, ironically, that what diverse populations hold in common is difference itself. Indeed, as legal scholar Kenji Yoshino points out, “it may be the explosion of diversity in this country that will finally make us realize what we have in common. Multiculturalism has forced us to vary and vary the human being in the imagination until we discover what is invariable about her.” Consequently, Yoshino notes, new paradigms for civil rights “must harness this universal impulse toward authenticity,” one that underscores the ways that difference itself is fundamental to collective liberty.40 Guinier makes a similar point in her discussion of the specific case of Gates’ arrest: “The point of an effort to gain greater racial literacy

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is not simply to figure out what each man should or could have done differently to de-escalate the porch summit. The point is to explore their encounter as a potent learning moment for the entire country. If we learn to ‘read race’ in context and become more racially literate, we might finally start deliberating about the underlying structural problems and historical challenges raised to consciousness by this porch scene. And rather than assign blame or settle for a photo opportunity, we might just come together to address an American legacy that affects us all.”41 Guinier’s emphasis on “reading race” as a means to securing social awareness and cultural knowledge speaks in important ways to many of the primary goals of Minority Reports itself. I emphasize throughout this study how an analysis and interpretation of identity categories within early literary contexts offers significant insight not only into the ideologies, values, and mores of the nineteenth century but also into those of contemporary culture. In this respect, I argue that literature—and the literary imagination—might be among the most effective tools for envisioning new paradigms for social and political action. Indeed, as Yoshino points out, “To fulfill that aspiration, this generation of civil rights must move far beyond the law. While law can help us be more human in crucial ways, it will never fully apprehend us. We should not mourn this fact: it would be worrisome if law could capture us so handily. Law’s inability to apprehend our full human complexity, however, means our culture must do that work.” That cultural work, Yoshino notes, is perhaps best performed by literary narrative, since literature “has a power to get inside us, to transform our hearts and minds, in a way law cannot.”42 The texts in this study demonstrate the perspicacity of Yoshino’s observation, for even though the works by Wilson, Webb, Stowe, Douglass, and Harper are separated from contemporary culture by both time and social context, these early texts nevertheless demonstrate the multiple, diverse ways that identity and history are fundamental to cultural analysis.43 To risk ignoring or dismissing their ongoing salience, therefore, may be to risk compromising the potential for progressive social action itself—a condition that surely should not figure with any degree of prominence in the current (or future) political landscape. In this respect, as Minority Reports asserts, social difference is not only epistemically valuable; it is also indispensable to ongoing cultural vitality.

1

Wh at Do We Wa n t f rom H a r r i e t Wi l son?

The challenge (and promise) of epistemic identification within

nineteenth-century American literature might be summed up in a single question about a single author: what do critics want from Harriet Wilson? If the voluminous scholarship produced over the past quarter-century on Wilson’s 1859 novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is any indication, the answer, in short, is everything. Celebrated variously, and often simultaneously, as a “missing link” in the development of the African American literary tradition, as an early declaration of black feminist thought, as a polemic against racism, and as an ideological critique of American democracy, Wilson’s book faces enormous literary and cultural demands.1 Yet such expectations are understandable. Because Our Nig is one of the most powerful early texts by a black female author, scholars committed to antiracist and feminist inquiry have justifiably claimed the book as a crucial representation of its era’s ideological and social concerns. Indeed, Wilson’s text appears to possess precisely what critics would most desire from a seminal archetype of minority discourse in the antebellum United States: it is smart, it is subversive, and it is very angry. The problem, of course, is that it is impossible for Our Nig to satisfy all the various (and occasionally competing) claims made upon it. And because the text does not always perform in the ways scholars might expect, one of the primary challenges facing critics of the book is to elucidate its sometimes perplexing narrative choices. For example, Wilson’s earliest champion, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains the text’s apparent incongruities—such as its implicit critique of northern abolitionists—by calling attention both to the generic limitations facing African American authors in the antebellum era and to the specific challenges that arise in crafting a narrative based on autobiographical experiences. Gates wonders whether “the lapses [in

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the text] are the signs of an inexperienced authorship, struggling with or against the received conventions of her form, or whether we can attribute these to the intrusion of the rendering of a life upon the desires of a text to achieve the status of a fiction.”2 Under this model of critical assessment, readers such as Gates acknowledge the work’s historical and cultural importance, even while they question whether the text itself is actually any good. The significant body of feminist scholarship that followed the 1983 rediscovery of Our Nig, however, has challenged such reservations about the book’s artistic and literary merit. By noting the ways that aesthetic evaluation cannot be separated from social positionality, critics such as Hazel Carby, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Carla Peterson, and Claudia Tate remind us that personal identity often influences both how and what we see, as well as what we value.3 While this understanding of critical practice is regularly—and I will argue, wrongly—disparaged as theoretically naive in contemporary criticism, Wilson’s text (as well as the scholarship on Our Nig) offers a compelling defense of the enduring value of personal identity to analyses of American culture.4 Indeed, in contrast to post-structuralist theories of social indeterminacy that aim to minimize, or even to dismantle, the saliency of identity categories, Wilson’s book implicitly notes that attempts to move “beyond” identity may be not only politically undesirable but also perhaps epistemologically impossible. This chapter builds on foundational, as well as more recent, studies of Our Nig to examine how the theoretical impulse embedded within the text’s aesthetic and political choices offers vital cultural insights that extend well beyond the antebellum era by delivering a sharp rebuke to contemporary calls to eradicate identity-based critical paradigms. Indeed, as an example of the dynamic I describe in the preface and introduction to Minority Reports, Wilson’s book reminds its readers that books (like bodies) have specific identities routinely attached to them. And it reminds its audience, further, that the critical reception of minority writers and their works often highlights the expectations readers continue to have for identities categories in general, and for minority identity in particular. Because this critical inclination will likely continue to structure literary and cultural analysis, I suggest in this chapter that it may be more epistemically advantageous to examine the inherent theoretical potential of this dynamic rather than attempt to move beyond it. Indeed, as Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty have argued, “[I]t is a false dilemma to suppose that we should either accept pernicious uses of identity or pretend they do not exist.” Identities, in this view, “are not

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our mysterious inner essences but rather social embodied facts about ourselves in our world; moreover, they are not mere descriptions of who we are but, rather, causal explanations of our social locations in a world that is shaped by such locations, by the way they are distributed and hierarchically organized.”5 Wilson’s text bears out Alcoff and Mohanty’s assertions. By noting how identities allow (and perhaps even require) us to interpret the world in specific ways, Our Nig broadens our understanding of enduring patterns of social stratification. Indeed, through its exploration of the connections between personal experience and socially grounded knowledge, Wilson’s novel offers crucial lessons on representation and interpretation that are particularly relevant to contemporary literary and cultural analysis.6 Indeed, such texts highlight critic Frances Smith Foster’s sobering observation that early African American texts are still often positioned in criticism as cultural or historical relics rather than as complex theoretical works: “While it is customary now for survey courses to include one or two early works, they are generally given as evidence of a few extraordinary individuals’ ability to read and write or as an examples of abolitionist protest literature. The common interpretation is that in either case, they wrote primarily for white folks and that, as in the idea of the dog who walks on two legs, the wonder is not what or how well they wrote but that they wrote at all. Early African American, we continue to believe, is more valuable as artifact than artistry.”7 This chapter both elucidates and attempts to respond to Foster’s assertion. In so doing, it takes as axiomatic the fact that early examples of African American literature, like Our Nig, not only challenge recent scholarship that risks eliding the individual realities of those who experience social difference but also require their readers to rethink many of the theoretical paradigms frequently used to examine identity categories themselves within literary and cultural analysis.

I. Our Nig recounts the story of Frado, a mixed-race girl abandoned by her mother and indentured to the aristocratic Bellmont family. The book chronicles the hardships Frado faces within this household and details, in particular, the mental and physical abuse she suffers at the hands of her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont. Despite her attempts to please the family, and despite her own entrepreneurial efforts, Frado repeatedly is frustrated in her endeavors to remedy her impoverished situation. By thus describing Frado’s misery within the cultural

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context of New England, Wilson notes the multiple ways that African Americans living in the free North are still subject to both racism and racial abuse. Many critics justifiably read Our Nig as Wilson’s own thinly veiled autobiographical account, since as the historical record has shown, there is little reason to doubt that the book was significantly influenced by its author’s need to provide for her own and her son’s failing health.8 But to emphasize the text as primarily autobiographical (and thus as a historical relic of the antebellum period) does not do adequate justice to the book’s theoretical acuity. As P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts note, “The census records, newspaper citings, city directory listings, and marriage and death certificates that confirm the ‘facts’ described in Our Nig and that legitimize the book’s autobiographical claims are not meant to bind the narrative to the historical record, to become yet another authenticating apparatus. Literary forms and generic lines are fluid.” 9 Indeed, in Our Nig the literal economics of corporeal survival are inextricably bound up in the metaphoric economics of narrative expression. Because Wilson needs desperately to make money in the literary marketplace, her narrative is structured both by the urgency of her situation (she has nothing) and by the promise of her project (sales of her book might improve her economic condition). Thus Wilson’s primary task, one critic contends, was “to transform herself from an object of charity to a laboring subject in an economy apparently designed to exclude or delegitimize her labor.”10 Accordingly, Our Nig exposes a dialectical relationship between currency (economic and social) and what might be identified as public relations: the poverty that forces Wilson to write requires her to adopt a specific narrative persona if she is to remedy her financial situation. Much of the scholarship on the book examines this dynamic, proceeding from Gates’ early observation that the text combines in unusual ways elements of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel, the literary genres most frequently associated with black and female authorship, respectively, in the mid-nineteenth century.11 Yet while it is certainly the case that Wilson makes deliberate use of these narrative modes, critics also note that there lies at the heart of Our Nig an unresolved resistance to these generic forms themselves. Claudia Tate, for example, identifies Our Nig as a “complex variation on the intersection of the conventions of sentimental fiction and the slave narrative,” and Harryette Mullen notes that these narrative forms would have been insufficiently representative of the multidimensional social experiences of black women.12 Consequently, readers

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might profitably consider whether Wilson’s use of the conventions of the sentimental novel and the slave narrative are choices she herself actively embraces, or whether the text’s use of genre is a calculated decision on Wilson’s part to appeal to the various narrative expectations of her readers.13 Such questions arise even in the first pages of Wilson’s text as she lays out the obligatory apologia characteristic of the slave narrative. The personal deprecation required by the genre assumes here a decidedly inappropriate tone. Wilson admits, for example, her “inability to minister to the refined and cultivated,” but her concession seems more a calculated exhibition than a “frank confession of errors.” She immediately undercuts the presumed sophistication of her readers by noting that the flaws in her text “are so apparent it requires no skilful hand to expose them.” While she thus acknowledges her audience’s erudition, her deference is only half-hearted. Wilson notes that defects may exist in her text, but these are lapses the author herself has already identified and has apparently chosen to retain for her own reasons. Grammar, her comment implies, is not her primary concern; the narrative’s content is more important than its typographical errors. Indeed, Wilson’s overt acknowledgment, and disavowal, of such errors may signal an implicit commentary on the expectation that hegemonic readers will likely perceive black-authored texts as necessarily, and inescapably, rudimentary and unrefined. Wilson records, as well, her hopes that Our Nig will grant her patronage from a specifically African American readership. Yet her highly deferential phrasing suggests she is writing not for the “colored brethren” she claims as her readers but rather for a presumably white audience unfamiliar with her plight.14 Moreover, she declares that she will reveal some personal information—but not all—about her Northern existence: “I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life,” she states. “I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.” This is a text, then, that crafts its narrative selectively. By claiming to be written for a black readership, the book hopes its white purchasers will not be offended by the story it relates; and by refusing to include what it hints is damning information about life in the free North, Wilson makes explicit the fact that racism in the North is narrativizable but economically unadvisable. Such literary decisions, she tells her readers, are motivated by her overwhelming financial need: “Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health,” she states, “I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this

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feeble life.” This sentence summarizes the key elements of Wilson’s critique. By carefully contextualizing her personal situation, she notes that her indigence is not a chosen condition. She describes, instead, how outside influences conspire to prevent her from realizing her full potential. Alone and ailing, Wilson is “forced” to appeal to others for help, the rhetorical passive voice underscoring the extent to which the circumstances confronting her are beyond her control. As her prefatory statement thus makes clear, Wilson faces significant authorial pressure to produce a certain kind of book. Because Our Nig is her final effort to remedy her poverty, and because her potential readers expect her to write within particular narrative forms, she must articulate her story within those paradigms in order to be heard at all. In this way, Wilson notes how the generic limitations she faces as an author complement the social limitations she faces as a black woman. It is in light of this understanding, I argue, that critics might read Our Nig as a specifically theoretical text—one that prefigures much of the modern feminist scholarship on Wilson’s book, and that speaks in significant ways, as well, to contemporary critical concerns. By implicitly highlighting the narrative expectations that are attached to her personal identity, Wilson notes the social significance of categories of race and gender. In so doing, she offers an important challenge to much recent scholarship (in a variety of intellectual fields) that seeks to minimize the cultural salience of identity categories by calling attention to their ostensible epistemological unreliability. For critics who urge modern-day readers to move “beyond” race and gender, “race” and “gender” can exist only in quotation marks, since the respective terms to which they refer contain no coherent, definable essences.15 Indeed, as Alcoff and Mohanty point out in their critique of such paradigms, social identities “are often seen today as nonobjective in the sense that individuals are believed to have a completely free choice about how much to emphasize or even acknowledge their own race and ethnicity. Those asserting the salience of identity are seen as opportunists, choosing to emphasize an outdated classification, or stuck in dysfunctional patterns of resentment.”16 The feminist and African American scholarship on Our Nig—as well as the book itself—reminds its readers, however, that specific identities (and their effects) retain a remarkable resiliency and legibility in contemporary culture, and thus scholarly efforts to emphasize the significance of identity within cultural analysis, as Alcoff and Mohanty observe, should be understood not as opportunistic but rather as politically conscientious. Indeed, post-structuralist theories of social indeterminacy appear themselves to be ironically (and

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unavoidably) compromised by the lived experiences of everyday life— for while it is surely true that the numerous variations among sexual, gender, and racial identities make it difficult to assume that there exist inherent, biological bases for cultural difference, simply noting, intellectually, that identities are constructed entities does not mean that they do not exist with often very real social consequences.17 Critic Sharon P. Holland, for example, puts the issue this way: Saying that there is not a unified subject of feminism, or any other discursive field, will not stop the police from singling out black subjects at the corner of University Avenue and Bay Road in East Palo Alto, California; nor will it prevent a university advisory committee from dismissing the importance of black feminist scholarship. . . . I am not advocating the discontinuance of stimulating intellectual discourses on the subject of the body and fluctuating identities, but what I would like to see is a suspension of the pretense of “politics” in the course of this discussion.18

Holland notes here that the desire to affirm post-structuralist understandings of selfhood that move “beyond” race and gender is often complicated by an ongoing social tendency to organize personal identity into distinct categories. Consequently, despite the putative analytical desirability of these paradigms, such theories cannot adequately address the specific lived effects of social disempowerment. Indeed, it would appear that identities, particularly those “read” in specific ways by the outside world, continue to exist in very tangible ways. I would suggest that the dynamic Holland describes within contemporary culture has its narrative equivalent in the literary example of Our Nig. Despite post-structuralist claims that identity (racial, gender, and otherwise) does not exist in any “real” form, Wilson’s book makes clear that such categories do remain salient (even vital) within literary and cultural analysis, particularly in relation to issues such as literary genre. As Foreman, Tate, and Carby, among others, have noted, the genre of the sentimental novel in the antebellum era ostensibly should represent Wilson “as” a woman, just as the slave narrative should represent her “as” a black person. Each literary form implies that gender and racial identities can be narrated and, therefore, can be known. Since Our Nig never participates fully in either of these generic traditions, it both challenges dogmatic understandings of identity and recognizes the inevitable social presence of such categorizing. In this way, Wilson not only notes that readers will likely continue to equate who she is with what she appears to be, she also

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suggests that such expectations may ironically offer opportunities for cultural analysis that would otherwise be unavailable. This dynamic can be seen, for instance, in the book’s framing narrative structure. Henry Louis Gates identifies the apparent irregularities between the text’s first-person chapter headings and its third-person narration as the marks of “an inexperienced authorship, struggling with or against the received conventions of her form” or “the intrusion of the rendering of a life upon the desires of a text to achieve the status of a fiction.” Such interpretations are guided by Gates’s assumption that Our Nig is, fundamentally, an autobiographical text, and that “these first-person traces point to the complexities and tensions of basing fictional events on the lived experiences of an author.”19 Yet as Wilson’s prefatory comments suggest, these narrative lapses might also be understood as intentional choices she makes in crafting her novel, as fully a part of the text as the autobiographical material upon which Gates contends Wilson bases her story. In this view, as critic Priscilla Wald observes, the inconsistencies between the novel’s chapter headings and its narration signal not an inexperienced authorship but rather “the representation of a self as an other—or the recognition of the alterity of the self.”20 This interpretation emphasizes Our Nig’s highly self-conscious construction, one that deliberately exploits the assumption that a text authored by a black person in the antebellum era necessarily represents an authentically autobiographic “black” account. Indeed, the book’s underlying incompatibility with the structures of both the slave narrative and the sentimental novel suggests a similarly ironic stance toward autobiographical frameworks as well. Since Frado is literally neither a slave nor a sentimental heroine, readers might suppose that Our Nig is not an autobiography in the strictest sense of the world. It is instead, as Wald puts it, “a narrative about autobiography, about what writing for a particular market does to this African-American woman in pre-Civil War New England—and, more generally, about cultural identity.”21 The text’s supposed flaws emphasize this dynamic by tracing a process of narrative subjection that complements its ironic commentary on genre. For example, the titles of the book’s first two chapters (which describe Frado’s early life in her mother’s hovel and her eventual transition to life with the Bellmonts) use possessives to indicate Frado’s sense of (and desire for) belongingness—“Mag Smith, My Mother” and “My Father’s Death” articulate a sense of self through possession of a family and, by extension, a home. Such relations to others shift, however, with the book’s third chapter, “A New Home

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for Me.” This heading, absent the possessive, suggests Frado’s turn in on herself when Mag does not return for her daughter. More significantly, the title displays an alternative form of otherness, or doubling, in its ironic use of “home”; the level of abuse Frado suffers within this household robs it of any of the comfort and support usually associated with home as a concept. This chapter heading illustrates, then, an uneasy juxtaposition between self-realization and homelessness, a metaphoric representation of the absence of self and home Frado encounters within the Bellmont household. As Frado’s life continues within this house, so too does her dispossession, a state the text chronicles through the titles of its remaining chapters. As if internalizing the subjugation Frado experiences, the text’s chapters begin to be titled in the distant third-person: “A Friend for Nig” and “Spiritual Condition of Nig,” for example, reflect this shift. Moreover, the very structure of these headings suggests Frado’s increasing passivity as their prepositional phrasing removes the possessive from her self-description and renders her more object than subject. This steady process of abasement continues in titular abstractions completely devoid of self-reference. “Departures” and “Varieties” reflect not only the narrator’s loss of self but also a sense of debilitating exhaustion—their one-word titles suggestive of the author’s inability to rouse herself even to name these final chapters in any descriptive terms. The subjection described through the text’s narrative and its chapter headings culminates in Frado’s refusal to submit to Mrs. Bellmont’s tyranny any longer, an event wholly characteristic of the slave narrative. But this triumph—ostensibly the single most defining moment in the slave’s journey from bondage to freedom—is undercut in significant ways in Wilson’s text. With the implicit permission of Mr. Bellmont, who urges her to avoid punishment “if she was sure she did not deserve a whipping,” Frado responds with uncharacteristic insolence when Mrs. Bellmont threatens to beat her for not returning quickly enough from gathering wood: “ ‘Stop!’ shouted Frado, ‘strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you;’ and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.”22 The significance of this passage cuts in several ways, all of which point to the likelihood that Frado’s mutiny is more representation than actual rebellion. First, unlike comparable instances in traditional slave narratives (Frederick Douglass’, for example) Frado does not physically menace her tormentor.23 She threatens, instead, to withhold her labor. In this way, her rebellion amounts to an absence of

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action rather than a promise of it; she will not strike her mistress but instead go on strike. Her revolt, moreover, is compromised by the word “like.” Because Frado stands only “like” one who feels “the stirrings of free and independent thoughts,” she is, implicitly, not one who does feel such stirrings. In this way, she passes as a free and independent person to the same degree that the episode passes as a constitutive element of the slave narrative. This expression of freedom—typically the most crucial in the slave’s life—is ironically redundant for Frado because, technically, she is not a slave. While Mrs. Bellmont, in reaction to Frado’s pronouncement, does “[drop] her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement” (105), this stay is only temporary. Despite her rebellion, Frado’s drudgery (and her punishments) continues: “Thus passed a year. The usual amount of scolding, but fewer whippings” (105–06). As such, what would appear to be a decisive passage in the heroine’s path to independence rests less on actual self-determination and much more on the narrative representation of such autonomy. Frado’s declaration is thus not a straightforward expression of her burgeoning sense of self. Rather, it is a statement that more closely reflects the narrative needs of Wilson’s readers themselves, who keenly want Frado to triumph. In this way, the text replicates at the level of form the ongoing problem of corporeal representation that Holland describes in terms of racial profiling. Just as the generic structures of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel are ostensibly “known” quantities, so too are the lives they presumably represent. Given the expectations (social and aesthetic) attached to her identity as an African American woman, then, Wilson cannot write outside of these narrative modes and still hope to find an audience for her text. While Our Nig thus conforms to the literary requirements needed for public visibility and sales, its desultory attempts to meet these expectations implicitly reveal the epistemic limitations of what it means to know both specific kinds of people and the specific kinds of texts such people “naturally” produce.

II. Our Nig’s tacit commentary on these closed circuits of meaning should alert readers to their own investments in texts that appear to represent particular historical and cultural voices at particular historical and cultural moments. By this I mean, on a very basic level, that it is important to acknowledge what Harriet Wilson means to us—why we teach her book, how we read it, and what we expect from her as

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an author. As I have noted, Wilson demonstrates throughout Our Nig a keen awareness that readers will likely approach her work based on their necessarily limited understanding of her identity as a black person and as a woman. Significantly, however, she does not lament this tendency so much as she calls attention to its inevitability. Wilson understands that readers expect her to “be” black and female in specific ways, and thus in attempting to produce a saleable book, she simply gives her readers (then and now) what they want. It is in light of this dynamic, I argue, that critics should appreciate the relevance of Our Nig’s narrative choices to contemporary theories of personal and social identity. Through its use of genre, the text highlights the ongoing significance of race and gender by emphasizing how identity categories themselves are not merely social constructions devoid of any substantive meaning. On the contrary, racial and gender identities here shape both the paradigms through which readers come to acknowledge and appreciate Wilson’s book, as well as the parameters by which Wilson herself can structure (and sell) her story. In this way, Our Nig requires its audience to consider seriously both how personal identity can inform the ways that individuals view the social world, as well as how critical interpretations of that world are inevitably influenced by critics’ own epistemic perspectives. Given the prominence of post-structuralist theories in contemporary critical discourse, this view may strike some as intellectually (and politically) reactionary; to many critics, it is decidedly old-fashioned, even quaint, to assert the epistemological significance of personal identity.24 But the terms of this discussion, as Satya Mohanty has noted, have yet to be fully explored in terms of their applicability to both lived experience and social knowledge: “[T]o say that experiences and identities are constructed is not to prejudge the question of their epistemic status,” Mohanty observes. “Radical skepticism about the cognitive implications of cultural identity is not the only alternative to an ahistorical essentialism.”25 Identity categories, in this view, are understood as social constructions that nevertheless allow (and perhaps even require) us to interpret the world in specific ways. It is in this respect, according to Mohanty, “that [identities] are valuable, and their epistemic status should be taken very seriously. In them, and through them, we learn to define and reshape our values and commitments, we give texture and form to our collective futures.”26 Post-structuralist theories that highlight the constructed nature of identity often do so for socially progressive ends. By emphasizing the ways that identity categories are too varied to contain common essences, such paradigms aim to eradicate social oppression, political

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poverty, and economic segregation. But as Wilson’s case suggests, these theories also have the ironic potential to eradicate some of the ways by which we come to understand both others and the self. What is needed instead, as scholars such as Mohanty have argued, are analytical models that highlight the contingencies of identity categories while simultaneously acknowledging their potential as valuable sites of social knowledge. By considering the ways that personal identity can be both constructed and authentic, particularly in terms of the lived experiences that arise from inhabiting specific social groups, critics broaden their knowledge of the world and their place within it. Indeed, as Linda Martín Alcoff puts the issue, “To say that we have an identity is just to say that we have a location in social space, a hermeneutic horizon that is both grounded in a location and an opening or site from which we attempt to know the world. Understood in this way, it is incoherent to view identities as something we would be better off without.”27 Throughout Our Nig, Wilson underscores this understanding by noting the ways that personal identity can serve as an analytical tool for interpreting the social world. The novel’s opening description of the fate of Frado’s white mother, Mag, for example, illustrates this possibility as it contextualizes the reasons for Mag’s social descent. Because Mag was “early deprived of parental guardianship, far removed from relatives, she was left to guide her tiny boat over life’s surges alone and inexperienced.” Mag grew up, the narrator explains, “unprotected, uncherished, uncared for” (5). While Wilson will go on to present the predictable elements of the seduction plot (endangered virtue, unwanted pregnancy, social expulsion), this introduction to Mag’s life prepares readers to understand her fate as the specific effect of a lack of social privilege. Her seduction and betrayal are less the result of some inherent moral flaw than they are the unfortunate confluence of missed opportunities for social instruction and advancement. Indeed, Wilson’s first exclamatory description of Mag (“Lonely Mag Smith!” [5]) points to the acute isolation that drives this sentimental figure into the arms of her unnamed seducer, a man whose professed love “whisper[s] of an elevation before unaspired to; of ease and plenty her simple heart had never dreamed of as hers” (5–6). Alone and poor, Mag’s actions are motivated not by a misplaced infatuation but by a longing for self-improvement: “She knew the voice of her charmer, so ravishing, sounded far above her. It seemed like an angel’s, alluring her upward and onward. She thought she could ascend to him and become an equal” (6). Wilson casts Mag’s fall here as ascendancy; she succumbs to her tempter not as an act of

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unchecked passion, but because she believes he will rescue her from poverty—an understanding the novel’s prose underscores by describing her affair not through the language of sexual fervor but rather through the idiom of economic transaction: “She surrendered to him a priceless gem, which he proudly garnered as a trophy, with those of other victims, and left her to her fate” (6).28 It is significant that Mag’s entire temptation and betrayal occurs within the space of one extended paragraph. Wilson seems less interested in the individual elements of the seduction plot than in the ramifications of Mag being made a public spectacle as a result of this liaison. Indeed, these first chapters trace the consequences of Mag’s fall not through the psychological agony we would expect her to endure within the sentimental genre but rather through a measured analysis of society’s reaction to her plight. “Alas, how fearful we are to be first in extending a helping hand to those who stagger in the mires of infamy,” the book exclaims, “to speak the first words of hope and warning to those emerging into the sunlight of morality!” (7). The book indicts here not Mag but antebellum moral strictures, condemning a society that valorizes rectitude over recovery, self-righteousness over self-worth: “Who can tell what numbers, advancing just far enough to hear a cold welcome and join in the reserved converse of professed reformers, disappointed, disheartened, have chosen to dwell in unclean places, rather than encounter these ‘holier-than-thou’ of the great brotherhood of man!” (7). While Mag’s story thus retains elements of the narrative of seduction, it operates less as a cautionary tale for imperiled virtue than as an exposé of societal negligence of the less fortunate. In this way, the book serves up sentiment as irony: although one of the cardinal tenets of sentimental fiction is a commitment to assist those in need, Mag’s story reveals that such support is extended only to those deemed worthy of such attention. That Mag’s salvation should arrive in the form of a “kind-hearted African,” Jim, underscores Wilson’s critique of antebellum social hierarchies. For while the conventions of the sentimental novel would typically render Mag and Jim’s marriage objectionable, because it crosses racial lines, Wilson explains the social necessity of such an alliance. Jim’s words draw a direct parallel between their respective situations: “Well, Mag . . . you’s down low enough. I don’t see but I’ve got to take care of ye. ‘Sposin’ we marry! . . You’s had trial of white folks, anyhow. They run off and left ye, and now none of ‘em come near ye to see if you’s dead or alive. I’s black outside, I know, but I’s got a white heart

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The implied essentialism of this statement’s color imagery is troubling but perhaps not surprising. Jim understands that his race and Mag’s fallen state place them in comparable positions in the social world, that in the eyes of antebellum society they are similarly dispossessed. His words indicate, moreover, the extent to which external appearance belies internal character. Fallen women and black men may seem morally suspect in nineteenth-century culture, but the book would have us understand that common social perceptions about such persons are only a series of half-truths. The narrative explicitly comments on this understanding. While retaining a tone reminiscent of the sentimental genre, the narrator interrupts Mag’s tale to articulate a moral distinctly at odds with the form’s typical precepts: “You can philosophize, gentle reader, upon the impropriety of such unions, and preach dozens of sermons on the evils of amalgamation. Want is a more powerful philosopher and preacher” (13). While Wilson ultimately retains some elements of the sentimental paradigm (Mag’s decision to marry Jim, she tells us, forces her “another step down the ladder of infamy” [13]), her narrative adheres to these conventions only halfheartedly. As such, Mag’s story is not strictly a sentimental tale of imperiled virtue; its final lesson is not “don’t sin” but rather “don’t judge.” This narrative aside highlights the theoretical impulse embedded within Our Nig, one that complements analyses of the novel that note the generic limitations of the sentimental novel and the slave narrative in representing Wilson’s experiences as an African American woman. The problem the text identifies here, however, is not only one of representation but also of interpretation. As discrete entities, these genres cannot adequately represent the unique intersectional identities of either Wilson or her heroine, a fact underscored by the text’s uneasy juxtaposition of the narrative frameworks of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel.29 Yet as this opening analysis of Mag’s dispossession illustrates, it is Wilson’s specific experiences in terms of race and gender that also allow her, paradoxically, to alter the typical structures and precepts of these generic forms. That is, it is precisely because Wilson experiences the world as a black woman that she is able to comprehend and interpret that world in a way unavailable to those who do not similarly inhabit these identity categories. The limitations of form that thus appear to stifle Wilson’s voice also ironically signal her ability to analyze the social world with an acuity

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that highlights the cultural blind spots of those who do not share her unique social position. In this respect, Our Nig demonstrates how personal identity can serve as a significant analytical tool. Race and gender here do not limit or thwart Wilson’s interpretive abilities; on the contrary, they help give meaning and structure to her trenchant cultural insights. As such, her text exemplifies philosopher Alison Wylie’s observation that “those who are economically dispossessed, politically oppressed, and socially marginalized and are therefore likely to be discredited as epistemic agents—for example, as uneducated, uninformed, unreliable—may actually have a capacity, by virtue of their [social] standpoint, to know things that those occupying privileged positions typically do not know, or are invested in not knowing (or, indeed, are invested in systematically ignoring and denying).”30 Our Nig bears out this understanding through the implicit commentary it offers on the difficult social position in which Frado (and, by extension, Wilson) finds herself. By virtue of the epistemic resources gained from her specific experiences as a black woman, Wilson analyzes (and critiques) antebellum social hierarchies by presenting Our Nig as a public act made under duress—as an act, as critic Lauren Berlant puts it, that both “represent[s] and perform[s] unfreedom in America.”31 Wilson’s need for Our Nig to sell, however, requires that her account of “unfreedom” be told covertly. Because Frado has control over her body (she is not literally a slave), and because she lives in the free North (she is not literally constrained by geography), the promise of U.S. culture technically should be open to her. Consequently, Frado’s dispossession is constituted as entirely of her own making, and she is thus likely to be understood by antebellum culture as a kind of anticitizen: because American culture would have us believe that personal identity has little bearing on public success, Frado’s “decision” not to act on the wealth of opportunities ostensibly available to all seems decidedly un-American. The book’s exposé of the dynamics that inform Frado’s situation thus reflects antebellum culture’s own social (and analytical) limitations, since the destitution Our Nig describes does not inspire communal responsibility to assist those in need so much as it figures neediness itself as a public disgrace to the promise of citizenship. The domination Wilson experiences as a result of cultural hierarchies is not, of course, made any less severe because it is not spoken of explicitly; indeed, the text suggests that the inequities she faces are most likely made worse for not being recognized publicly as such.

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The book’s concluding plea for financial assistance directly addresses this point. Here, the narrator carefully highlights Frado’s ongoing attempts at self-reliance by noting that “nothing turns her from her steadfast purpose of elevating herself” (130). In this way, Wilson gestures to the national expectation that free and able bodies will work for (and value) their own autonomy. In the next breath, however, she merges this nationalistic rhetoric with the diction of the sentimental novel and the autobiographic promise of the slave narrative: “Still an invalid, she asks your symyathy [sic], gentle reader. Refuse not, because some part of her history is unknown, save by the Omniscient God. Enough has been unrolled to demand your sympathy and aid” (130). In this respectful, even deferential request for assistance, the word “demand” stands out in stark relief, signaling an overt moment of the implicit political pressure Wilson has applied throughout her text. This is an appeal that works on two levels: first, it asks readers to recognize the intersecting levels of subjugation that characterize minority existence within the antebellum nation; and second, it asks readers to acknowledge the more subtle forms of oppression that inhere in the particular demands she faces as an African American female author. Both requests call attention to the narrative expectations attached to Wilson’s personal identity, as well as to the specific social experiences that are linked to identity categories of gender and race. In this way, Our Nig’s critique of antebellum cultural instantiates Paula Moya’s observation that “the key to claiming epistemic authority for people who have been oppressed in a particular way stems from an acknowledgment that they have experiences—experiences that people who are not oppressed in the same way usually lack—that can provide them with information we all need to understand how hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality operate to uphold existing regimes of power in our society.”32 Through such examples of social analysis, Wilson’s text highlights the ways that identity categories broaden our understanding of the social world, and our place within it, even when such knowledge rests primarily on lessons that arise from pain. Through the book’s deliberate response to the social expectations that inform its production, Our Nig thus not only registers the enduring salience of categories of identity in the social world; it also implicitly asks its readers to note the various ways that they too have felt misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misjudged, despite the communal level playing field ostensibly guaranteed through the promise of U.S. culture.33 Who we are, the text reminds us, may not always match up neatly with

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what others expect us to be. Yet in its very emphasis on this understanding, the book prompts its audience, paradoxically, to acknowledge the epistemic limitations (and possibilities) they universally share. Ultimately, then, it may be readers’ difference from Wilson that permits them to recognize their relationship to her. For by implicitly highlighting this dynamic, the text requires its audience to consider how they (like Wilson) might similarly reconcile how the world makes sense of each of us with how we make sense of ourselves.34

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Fr a n k J. We bb a n d t h e Fat e of t h e Se n t i m e n ta l R ac e M a n

A s the example of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig illustrates, the lit-

erary expectations attached to the works of early African American authors have not only aesthetic but also political ramifications. If such texts are implicitly expected to provide first-hand insight into the historical realities of black culture, so too are they expected to focus on what are assumed to be specifically African American concerns and to utilize what are assumed to be specifically African American narrative modes. In other words, as Frances Smith Foster points out, there exists still a significant critical expectation that the works of early black authors should feel and sound “authentically” black. Moreover, as critic Ann duCille notes, there remains a scholarly “tendency to treat black literary texts not as fictive invention but as transparent historical documents, evaluated in terms of their fidelity to ‘the black experience’ and their attention to ‘authentically black’ subject matter.” As a result, duCille argues, “this racial litmus test has misread the aesthetics and politics of much of the early work of African American authors.”1 In significant ways, duCille’s comments find their paradigmatic example in the case of Frank J. Webb. Although it is far from common for critical analyses to be written about Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), it is relatively standard, within the sparse scholarship devoted to Webb’s work, to marvel at the fact that his novel is so infrequently studied. This critical astonishment arises primarily (and justifiably) from an acknowledgment of the book’s significance as only the second novel to be published by an African American author in the antebellum era. It would seem, moreover, that many of the thematic issues explored in The Garies would be of considerable interest to contemporary criticism. In examining the plight of mixed-race persons who cross the color line, the challenges facing

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the free black middle class, and the ramifications of racism and segregation in the North, Webb’s novel prefigures many of the social issues Frances E. W. Harper would engage some thirty years later in Iola Leroy (1892). Yet while modern scholarship on Harper’s text has increased steadily over the past several decades, fewer than a dozen critical studies devoted exclusively to The Garies have appeared since the book’s reprinting in 1969 and, more recently, in 1997. Despite its cultural and historical importance, Webb’s novel still does not seem to inspire much scholarly interest. Accordingly, analyses of The Garies often attempt to make sense of this critical anomaly. Because Webb writes at a time when the issues he examines might be construed as less pressing than the more immediate debates over slavery, several contemporary studies argue that scholarly disregard of his novel is due, at least in part, to his text’s apparent disengagement from the realities of slave life in the antebellum South. In his introduction to the 1969 edition of the novel, for instance, Arthur P. Davis notes that “nowhere in the novel is there a frontal attack on slavery” and that, consequently, The Garies “is not the kind of protest novel that one would expect from a free Negro in 1857.” “Perhaps its mildness,” Davis conjectures, accounts in some measure for its lack of popularity.”2 Other critics are even more blunt in their assessment of the text’s ostensible ideological and political limitations. Addison Gayle, Jr. notes that the book is “nothing so much as the Poor Richard’s Almanack of the black middle class,” since its sympathies lie “not with the slave . . . but with those who, through hard work and initiative, seek to travel light-years from their brothers,” and Bernard W. Bell similarly dismisses the novel for its emphasis on what he calls “green power”: “Blind faith in the American Dream and puritan ethic is the salvation, the prerequisite for social mobility but not equality, for most of the black characters in the novel.”3 More recent scholarship on The Garies is kinder in its assessment of Webb’s text. In his approving introduction to the 1997 edition of the novel, for example, Robert Reid-Pharr notes that the book “continues to be not so much forgotten as ignored,” and he suggests that its implicit treatment of black solidarity and racial pride is easily overlooked by those readers who would desire (and expect) a more hostile, antagonistic work from an African American author in the antebellum era.4 Likewise, Henry Golemba acknowledges The Garies’ uneasy relationship to the aesthetic standards expected from early African American texts: “The market tended to reify black writing to fit generalized and marketable images. Publications which did not

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fit this pattern were simply ignored, and novels like Our Nig and The Garies and Their Friends were met with silence.” Indeed, Golemba claims, the book appears actively to resist neat categorization, since “Webb seems to create developments in defiance of what critics want and expect. His plots and characters do not do what they are supposed to do.”5 This chapter takes up the implications of Golemba’s observations by examining how the scholarly fate of The Garies not only reveals significant insight into the book’s immediate cultural moment, but also signals some of the social and aesthetic realities of contemporary literary study. I consider the ways that Webb’s text frustrates readers’ expectations both through its implicit emphasis on the intersections among identity categories (rather than focusing exclusively on race) and through its sentimental style, a form most directly associated with white female authors of the antebellum era. These two issues are linked. Because Webb is neither white nor female, his book troubles the relationship between social identity and narrative form. Critical neglect of The Garies thus appears related to ongoing assumptions about “authentic” African American literature, particularly insofar as such authenticity for black male authors is often implicitly defined as stylistically brusque and markedly unsentimental. Indeed, as critic Samuel Otter notes in his analysis of the novel, “The Garies and Their Friends refuses the opposition between ‘form and manner’ and ‘substance,’ made then (in debates about conduct in Philadelphia) and now (in theoretical disparagements of ‘form’). Webb shows that form, his characters’ and his own, is vital rather than ephemeral, symptomatic, or evasive. In his novel, details of gesture, tone, and ornament are not only expressions of personal and group identity, but also part of a struggle for status, authority, and even survival. In The Garies, to obey the rules is to violate norms.”6 Although, as Otter observes, Webb’s novel may indeed implicitly calibrate African American political concerns through its seemingly conservative, sentimental style, the paucity of critical attention to The Garies serves as an important example of the ways that aesthetic and thematic expectations attached to the specific personal identities of authors likely will continue to structure critical inquiry. This chapter’s examination of Webb’s text thus highlights some of the limitations of contemporary critical theories that seek to move beyond identity altogether; as such, my analysis positions identity not as an ideological nuisance to be overcome but instead highlights its epistemic potential as a critical tool for examining the social world.

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I. The plot of The Garies and Their Friends, while somewhat unwieldy, is relatively straightforward. The book centers on the experiences of the Garies, an aristocratic southern family who move North in order to escape legal discrimination against miscegenation, and the Ellises, a middle-class African American family who help to smooth the Garies’ transition into their new life in Philadelphia. The Garies soon discover, however, that even in the free North they are not exempt from social oppression and racial bigotry. Mr. Garie, for example, finds it difficult to locate a minister who will permit him legally to marry his wife (since she is also his ex-slave). Garie contacts one reverend who flatly refuses to perform the ceremony when he meets Mrs. Garie in the flesh: “I do not believe in the propriety of amalgamation,” he states, “and on no consideration could I be induced to assist in the union of a white man or woman with a person who has the slightest infusion of African blood in their veins.”7 While a sympathetic minister eventually marries the Garies, their union does not protect them from further instances of discrimination: when their white neighbors, the Stevens family, discover the racial identity of the Garies’ daughter, Emily, they ban her from their home; and Mrs. Stevens’ racist machinations eventually force the expulsion of both of the Garie children from the school that her own children attend. Alongside its detailing of the Garies’ specific experiences with racism and discrimination, the book notes the multiple ways that such prejudice routinely affects all African Americans living in the North. The Ellis family’s son, Charlie, for instance, finds that his intelligence and intrinsic moral integrity cannot supersede hegemonic society’s assumption that he is “naturally” inferior because of his racial identity; for instance, Mrs. Ellis’s former employer, a white woman, urges the family to take Charlie out of school to enter service in her household, wondering what use education can be to a “coloured boy” who will inevitably “have to be a common mechanic, or, perhaps, a servant, or barber, or something of that kind” (25). While the novel repeatedly points out that racial identity cannot serve as an index to intellectual aptitude or social aspiration, it simultaneously notes the difficulty of challenging such assumptions in any meaningful, tangible way. Mr. Ellis must explain to a family friend, for example, that northern white “negro-haters” deliberately misinform Southerners as to the condition of free black people, noting that instead of being “very badly off”—as such comments would have southerners believe—African Americans in the North in fact “not only support

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[their] own poor, but assist the whites to support theirs” (49). Even the African American character seemingly most representative of black self-sufficiency, the successful entrepreneur Mr. Walters, encounters the racism of a train conductor who orders him out of a first-class car, claiming “that he [the conductor] did not care how much stock he owned, he was a nigger, and that no nigger should ride in those cars” (50). The Garies’ most striking example of racial prejudice and abuse, however, emerges in a race riot devised by whites in an attempt to drive Philadelphia’s black population out of the city and thereby capitalize on the resulting decline in property values. The instigator of this plot, the Garies’ white neighbor, Mr. Stevens, is less interested in fomenting violence against African Americans simply because of racial prejudice than he is in turning the white population’s inherent bigotry against racial difference to his capitalistic advantage. As he states to his coconspirators, “[W]e can render the district so unsafe, that property will be greatly lessened in value—the houses will rent poorly, and many proprietors will be happy to sell at very reduced prices. . . . [When] we have brought property down sufficiently low, we will purchase all that we can, re-establish order and quiet, and sell again at an immense advantage” (166). The subsequent assault on the black community is overwhelmingly violent and affects many of the book’s primary characters: Mr. Garie, Mrs. Garie, and their newborn infant are killed; Mr. Walters’ mansion is severely damaged; and Mr. Ellis is left physically disabled and mentally traumatized after the mob severs several of his fingers in order to loosen his hold on the edge of a rooftop as he tries to escape them, forcing him to fall to the ground below. Given the novel’s harrowing descriptions of racial abuse, and given its clear condemnation of the racism and bigotry that motivate such actions, it is striking that The Garies has not been recuperated as a critical example of African American resistance to hegemonic oppression in the antebellum era. As I have noted, such disregard is due at least in part to a pervasive critical opinion that Webb is not a strong protest writer, an assertion frequently articulated in the early scholarship on the book. Indeed, in Arthur J. Davis’s view, The Garies’ putative “tendency to be a ‘goodwill book’ ” links Webb less to the activism of Frederick Douglass and more to the accommodationist philosophies of Booker T. Washington: “Webb, like Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery, balances the good and the bad white folks so that they neutralize each other.”8 Blyden Jackson, who similarly dismisses The Garies as a “rather curious protest,” makes this critique even more

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directly: “Whatever Webb deliberately designed, the workings of his plot cannot be gainsaid,” Jackson claims. “His plot declares that Negroes need, above all, in America to get rich.”9 Such rejections of Webb’s novel are not altogether surprising. Because the book focuses on Northern racism, it appears disengaged from (and even disinterested in) the immediate social realities of slaveholding in the South. The novel thus does not fit easily within the critical frameworks associated with the antebellum African American literary tradition, since its thematic and aesthetic concerns do not match scholarly (and popular) perceptions of what Webb’s book should be. In other words, the timing of The Garies is out of joint: given the particular social realities of the antebellum era, and given the political exigencies attached to the study of African American literature in the 1960s and 1970s (when the novel was first reprinted), it stands to reason that Webb’s book would be overlooked or ignored. Consequently, it seems that negative assessments of Webb’s text are not so much indicators of the ostensible narrowness of scholarship that links literary merit with social activism that they are acknowledgments of some of the pragmatic expectations of scholarly analysis itself. And in this respect, the text is valuable precisely because it reveals the socioliterary consequences that befall books (and authors) that do not adhere to established paradigms for identity, textual and otherwise. Critiques that castigate The Garies for its apparent overinvestment in black class mobility are representative in this regard. As the comments by Bell, Davis, Gayle, Jackson, and other scholars suggest, any emphasis on money-making among free black populations in this era would appear to detract from the more pressing political and social realities of slavery. Predictably, then, critics of Webb’s book often tend to equate its perceived adoption of (white) American middleclass values with a seeming indifference to African American identity and culture. It may be unwise, however, to presume that the novel’s apparent endorsement of black bourgeois achievement necessarily signals a concomitant rejection of African American racial solidarity. Indeed, throughout The Garies Webb suggests that the upward mobility of black culture may in fact complement more overt expressions of African American racial activism. In this respect, as Robert Levine observes, “Webb challenges hierarchical and racialist models of exclusion by depicting blacks pragmatically making use of the master’s tools in order to assert their claims to equal rights and opportunities in America.” Consequently, Levine notes, “Webb most likely regards the fortunes of Philadelphia’s blacks as very much linked to the fates of the Southern slaves.”10

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Even if readers do not wholly accept the assertion that the book’s engagement with middle-class values functions simultaneously as a critique of Southern slaveholding, the fact remains that The Garies deliberately positions racial solidarity as a primary concern for all segments of the African American population. Webb repeatedly notes that African Americans share in common an overriding responsibility to support black culture as a whole, despite (and indeed even because of) the specific promise of economic opportunity for African Americans in the North. As such, The Garies’ thematic concerns complicate analyses that view Webb’s work as overly invested in conservative, conformist ideologies and implicitly rebut interpretations that see the text as insufficiently activist. The novel calibrates this understanding specifically through its critique of racial passing, repeatedly highlighting the negative consequences that befall black characters that opt to pass as white. After Mr. and Mrs. Garie are killed in the mob attack, for instance, Mr. Balch, a sympathetic white man, and Mr. Walters, the black self-made millionaire, meet to discuss the future of the Garie children, Clarence and Emily. Mr. Balch urges Mr. Walters to support his proposal to send Clarence to a boarding school where, because he is so fair-skinned, he might conceal his racial heritage and benefit from the “incalculable advantage to be white” (275). While Mr. Walters acknowledges the apparent wisdom of this plan, he also notes, more strongly, his anxiety over the social (and personal) ramifications of racial passing: [I]t is everything to be white; one feels that at every turn in our boasted free country, where all men are upon an equality. When I look around me, and see what I have made myself in spite of circumstances, and think what I might have been with the same heart and brain beneath a fairer skin, I am almost tempted to curse the destiny that made me what I am. . . . Yet, with all I have endured, and yet endure from day to day, I esteem myself happy in comparison with that man, who, mingling in the society of whites, is at the same time aware that he has African blood in his veins, and is liable at any moment to be ignominiously hurled from his position by the discovery of his origin. He is never safe. (275, 276)

Although Clarence himself declares that he “should much rather be white” in order to obtain the personal advantages granted through inclusion in hegemonic society, he notes that he “can’t help [himself]” because he understands his racial identity to be black (279). Mr. Balch convinces Clarence that no one need know of his “true” race, however, and the boy thus agrees to pass as white in order to ensure his

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future prosperity.11 Despite Mr. Walters’ concern that “concealments of this kind are productive of more misery than comfort” (276), he too ultimately consents to Mr. Balch’s proposal and the pair sends Clarence away. The misery that Mr. Walters predicts for African Americans who choose to pass as white is instantiated in Clarence’s fate. After falling in love with a white woman who hails from a bigoted, racist family, Clarence worries incessantly that his future in-laws will discover his secret. Moreover, his decision to pass estranges him from his sister, Emily, who despite her own comparably light skin, has chosen to remain part of Philadelphia’s African American community. Clarence laments to a trusted friend that he cannot often visit his sister; because Emily self-identifies as black, any association with her would threaten Clarence’s heretofore successful attempts to pass as white. Consequently, he notes that he deliberately “[avoids] many of her dearest friends when I have encountered them in public places, because of their complexion. I feel mean and cowardly whilst I’m doing it,” he states, “but it is necessary—I can’t be white and coloured at the same time; the two don’t mingle, and I must consequently be one or the other. My education, habits, and ideas, all unfit me for associating with the latter; and I live in constant dread that something may occur to bring me out with the former” (323). Through Clarence’s character, Webb notes the personal and social difficulties in opting to emphasize one racial identity at the expense of another, yet he also makes clear that those who encounter such options ultimately should decide to identify with minority identity as a matter of both racial solidarity and individual well-being. Because Clarence cannot sustain his social masquerade, his physical body ultimately suffers. When he learns that his secret has been revealed to his fiancée, for example, Clarence “grew faint, dizzy, ill,—and rising, declared hurriedly he must go, staggered towards the door, and fell upon the carpet, with a slight stream of blood spirting from his mouth” (347). Here, Webb links Clarence’s illness (and eventual death) to his decision to pass as white. At the same time, however, the book refuses to hold Clarence wholly responsible for his fate. Because the “choice” to pass was thrust upon him as a young boy, Clarence’s death appears to serve less as fated retribution for one who has betrayed the black community than as a cautionary tale for poor decision making. Clarence’s fate is inevitable, Webb seems to say, but it merits readers’ sympathy; rather than castigate Clarence as a sell-out to his race, the book suggests that readers should learn from the example his character offers on the vital importance of racial solidarity.12

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The lesson embedded in Clarence’s death, which closes the book, thus complicates critical assessments of the novel that see Webb as too invested in the value systems of the hegemonic middle class. Indeed, in important ways this final scene complements the book’s earlier manifestations of a black solidarity that crosses class lines in order to resist racial discrimination and abuse. During the race riot, for example, Mr. Walters offers his mansion as a bastion against the aggression directed at all segments of Philadelphia’s black population. Mrs. Ellis and her children, Esther, Caddy, and Charlie (as well as a friend of the family, the spirited Kinch) all join Mr. Walters in fighting back the white mob, while Mr. Ellis runs to warn the Garies of the violence rapidly spreading across the city. When the Ellises are left homeless and the Garie children orphaned as a result of the attack, Mr. Walters insists that the group remain with him in his home: “I’m going to be dreadfully obstinate, and have my own way completely about the matter,” he declares. “Here I’ve a large house, furnished from top to bottom with every comfort. Often I’ve wandered through it, and thought myself a selfish old fellow to be surrounded with so much luxury, and keep it entirely to myself. God has blessed me with abundance, and to what better use can it be appropriated than the relief of my friends?” (239). Here, racial solidarity supersedes intracultural class difference. Indeed, Webb suggests that it is Mr. Walters’ success at attaining wealth that ultimately saves his friends from sure destitution. In this respect, as critic Anna Engle notes, Webb “acknowledge[s] that class mobility is often obstructed for African Americans and can also carry a high price. While he holds out hope that African Americans can rise to the upper class, he recognizes the physical and psychological violence they often face in doing so.”13 Experiences based on a shared social reality, Webb tacitly observes, help to reconcile the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between racial and class identities. In other words, Mr. Walters does not seek wealth solely for his own personal gain; rather, he recognizes the crucial opportunities his prosperity affords him through his ability to help those members of his community in need.14 In emphasizing the ways that African Americans must band together to resist challenges both communal (such as the white mob) and personal (such as racial passing), the book illustrates a fundamentally pragmatic approach to racial uplift. In so doing, as Robert Levine notes, Webb’s novel “asserts to the white community, as Frederick Douglass was asserting during the 1850s, that blacks continue to lay claim to America’s material resources and

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political ideals.”15 The Garies’ seemingly conservative relationship to ideologies of racial activism thus merits careful reconsideration in light of the social realties facing free black populations during the antebellum era. Webb’s novel, it seems, does not “work within the system” so much as it exposes the inner workings (and inherent inequities) of the system itself—an understanding that has significant implications for both the book’s critical reception in the nineteenth century and its current treatment in contemporary scholarship.

II. The Garies’ apparent incommensurability with both the aesthetic expectations attached to early African American literature and the analytical frameworks currently used to study texts of this era highlight some of the provocative arguments recently made by critic Gene Andrew Jarrett, who notes in his critique of what he calls “racial realism” that “the cost of defying the essentialist paradigms of ethnic authenticity and realism, or the belief that these qualities are essential or required, is marginality or exclusion in the academic and cultural marketplaces.”16 Jarrett registers his frustration at the ways that “African American literature must feature African American protagonists alongside certain historical themes, cultural geographies, political discourses or subjectivities defined by race,” and he argues that critics should instead “interrogate the notions of ‘blackness’ and ‘tradition,’ not concretize them as one monolithic uncontestable piece.”17 Through his discussion of what he calls “anomalous texts” (i.e., works by African American authors that do not feature African American protagonists or explore themes specific to African American culture), Jarrett points to the critical desire for an analytical space that moves beyond racial identity.18 Although Webb’s novel does not fit precisely within the framework of anomalous texts that Jarrett proposes (since The Garies does in fact focus on African American characters and themes), it would appear that the book’s continued critical neglect nevertheless reflects how some works are indeed “unclassifiable or ill-classified, unappreciated or underappreciated, nonexistent or misrepresented, precisely because taxonomic rules often fail to account for them and because we tend to privilege these rules in establishing norms.”19 To correct this problem, Jarrett recommends that scholars resist what he sees as an intraracial segregation within the field of African American literature itself; scholarship should move beyond race, in Jarrett’s view,

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in order to dismantle troubling paradigms that privilege subjective definitions of racial authenticity. To support this argument, Jarrett links the work of Toni Morrison with that of the conservative African American politician Ward Connerly. He records Connerly’s frustration at the way that books by African American authors are often “racially profiled” in bookstores, noting that Connerly believes such practices are “nothing more than a modern-day, superficial demonstration of liberal political correctness.” By contrast, Jarrett notes, Morrison would likely forgive this categorization as part of the “historical, political, and sophisticated obligation to preserve and appreciate black culture.”20 Jarrett rightly observes that Morrison’s and Connerly’s political investments diverge in two distinct directions: whereas Morrison’s work has been dedicated to making legible a distinctly African American cultural heritage and tradition, Connerly’s focus has been on instituting political and legal color-blind policies. Ultimately, however, Jarrett is interested in the pair’s commonalities, claiming that they share a mutual “desire for a cultural world in which race no longer matters.”21 Jarrett’s own work aims to fulfill this desire analytically. While he notes that race continues to have clear social repercussions—and that consequently his “theoretical criticism against the categories of African American literature and ethnic literature in general does not intend to erase them”—his arguments against racial essentialism ultimately point to a deconstruction of the social category of race itself.22 That is, if scholars accept Jarrett’s critique of the category of African American literature, and if they accept this critique despite its acknowledgment of race’s ongoing social ramifications, critics might ask, then, precisely what characterizes the literary designation Jarrett still calls “African American literature.” Ironically, the very nature of Jarrett’s project relies for its utility on the ongoing significance of identity categories themselves, since the designation “African American literature beyond race” (the title of Jarrett’s collection of noncanonical, anomalous authors) can make sense only through a recognition that a field called “African American literature” continues to exist as a salient social and cultural entity. Thus while Jarrett’s effort to expand the canon of African American literature is clearly valuable, his primary argument—that critical practice should move beyond race as a determining factor in the designation of African American literature—rests on a paradoxical acknowledgment that race and racial identity continue to matter deeply in contemporary culture. It would seem illogical, in other words, to move beyond something that does not matter.

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The scholarly reaction to The Garies supports this conclusion. While Jarrett’s critique of essentialist valuations of African American literature is persuasive, to propose a critical model in which “race does not matter” as an alternative paradigm to studies of racial identity does not seem fully plausible. For if authors like Webb have been overlooked within the canon of African American literature because they do not adhere to “authentic” definitions of African American literary identity, neither have such authors been recuperated through recent theories that emphasize a “postracial” perspective. Consequently, there appears to be no comfortable place for Webb’s novel to exist within contemporary scholarship. As I have argued, readers of books like The Garies may indeed misinterpret Webb’s relationship to racial activism because his text does not overtly subscribe to the political expectations attached to antebellum African American literature. At the same time, however, there has been little scholarly impulse to recuperate Webb’s novel within contemporary post-structuralist paradigms, despite the fact that many of the book’s meditations on racial identity themselves might be understood as theoretically constructionist. In The Garies’ descriptions of the riot scene, for example, Webb implicitly suggests that gender roles might be socially constructed rather than fundamentally innate. The youngest Ellis daughter, Caddy, is instrumental to the success of the group that assembles to fight the mob at Mr. Walters’ house, concocting a potion of boiling water and cayenne pepper and pouring it on the crowd below. Her sister, Esther, similarly demonstrates great courage as the only fighter with the presence of mind to pluck a stray ember from a stockpile of gunpowder in the mansion, thus preventing the home’s destruction. Through such examples, the book suggests that women’s traditional gender roles do not necessarily hold in the face of racial violence; in fact, Esther’s intense rage at the mob’s actions cause her to renounce her gender entirely: “I saw so many inoffensive creatures, who, like ourselves, have never done these white wretches the least injury,—to see them and us driven from our homes by a mob of wretches, who can accuse us of nothing but being darker than themselves,—it takes all the woman out of my bosom” (205). Just as the book tacitly refuses essentialist conceptions of gender, The Garies notes how racial identity itself might be understood as socially constructed. The character of Mr. Walters, for instance, illustrates how blackness does not serve as an indicator of intelligence, moral integrity, or economic success; by describing the self-made millionaire as a figure “above six feet in height, and exceedingly

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well-proportioned; of jet-black complexion, and smooth glossy skin” (121–22), Webb aims to disabuse his readers of prejudicial assumptions that would naively link skin color to achievement. Indeed, the novel’s implicit argument that such beliefs about racial identity are based on flawed forms of social knowledge emerges in perhaps its most striking (and ironic) form in the person of Mr. Stevens, the instigator of the riot, whose race appears to shift from white to black, and then back to white, in the course of one chapter. Through a series of misunderstandings that Webb links directly to Mr. Stevens’ racist machinations, Stevens is tarred by a gang of (white) ruffians and then ridiculed for being black by another, separate group of white men who, in turn, attempt to “turn” him white by streaking his face with chips of lime. Through the treatment of Mr. Stevens’ character in this scene, Webb tacitly comments on the apparent arbitrariness of racial definition by noting how cultural assumptions about such definitions often do not match with individual understandings of personal identity. Despite the absurdity of Mr. Stevens’ rapid transformations, however, this scene does not function merely as a humorous interlude within the novel so much as it acknowledges the very real repercussions of identity’s social perceptions; readers might laugh at the abuse Mr. Stevens suffers throughout this episode, but such humor is informed by the ironic (and bitter) realization that it is society’s very real bigotry that allows the scene to appear amusing in the first place. In this respect, as critic Robert Nowatzki notes, The Garies “adds to the current constructionist discussions of race in the study of American history and literature while also dramatizing the violent racist backlash against such understandings of race that even today reduces the identities of African-Americans to a stable, inferior blackness. It also provides us with a humbling reminder that some of our more recent understandings of race may not be so new after all.”23 By thus highlighting the ways that social perceptions can compromise individual agency and personal well-being, Webb’s novel underscores the limitations of theoretical paradigms that seek to dismantle identity categories or minimize their cultural saliency. For even if readers accept the fact that categories of race, sexuality, and gender are social constructions, such awareness cannot supersede (or mitigate) the social consequences of those constructions themselves—an understanding that also extends, as I have argued, to scholarly reception and analysis. That is, if post-structuralist theories were in fact able to recuperate authors and works that appear to be overlooked due to a seeming overdetermination of cultural identity, works like The Garies

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would likely appear much more frequently in contemporary scholarship. Yet the basic fact that so little continues to be written on the novel, despite its historical significance, suggests a persistent scholarly investment in specific categories of identity. As I have noted, however, the central question embedded within this issue is not whether one critical perspective is “wrong” and another is “right”—since such conclusions are theoretical dead-ends—but rather what these paradigms mean in terms of the relationship between identity and social experience.24 The critical reaction to Webb’s text is representative in this regard: just as readers appear to have little interest in analyzing Webb’s unconventional approach to racial solidarity, so too is there little interest in championing him as a proto–post-structuralist thinker. In other words, Webb is appreciated neither as an advocate for African American cultural identity nor as a theoretical forerunner to analytic deconstructions of race itself. The challenge Webb’s situation presents to critical theory, then, is how readers might simultaneously recognize the analytical sophistication of his work and acknowledge how Webb’s identity as an antebellum black author might inform the specific cultural insights his work provides. In this respect, Webb’s authorial position is analogous to that of his contemporary Harriet Wilson and to the later postbellum author Frances E. W. Harper, both of whose works at times have had a similarly strained relationship to the African American literary tradition. Perhaps even more telling, the lack of interest in Webb’s work might also be related to the fate of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s Adolph (the subject of the next chapter), whose character, I will argue, is rendered unintelligible within the scholarship devoted to Stowe’s novel because he does not conform to established definitions of black masculinity. In Webb’s case, however, this essentialist dynamic is linked not just to theme but also to aesthetic style, since the thematic concerns that would appear to alienate Webb’s novel from the black activist tradition extend also to an overtly sentimental style associated more with Harriet Beecher Stowe than with Frederick Douglass. That is, because Webb does not think or write “like” a black man, he and his novel make no aesthetic or political sense within customary African American literary conventions. Ironically, though, Webb’s exclusion does not rest on a repudiation of identity categories; his novel does not reject race, gender, or class in an attempt to forge a space for identity that exists at the intersection of these categories. Instead, The Garies highlights the cultural salience of identity categories (both in the antebellum period and today) by emphasizing what appear to be faulty manifestations of such investments. In other words, given

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Webb’s particular authorial identity at a particular historical moment, it seems he does not “do” identity correctly. Clarence Garie’s death at the end of the novel highlights this understanding. After his fiancée and her family discover Clarence’s African American ancestry, which causes a precipitous decline in his health, Clarence returns to his family to convalesce. Before he can begin his journey to his former home in Philadelphia, however, the narrative warns its readers that this attempt at recovery will likely be in vain: “Poor torn heart! pity it was thy beatings were not stilled then for ever. It was not thy fate; long, long months of grief and despair were yet to come before the end approached and day again broke upon thee” (347). While it appears that Clarence is dying from the trauma of his broken engagement, the book makes clear that this tragedy is inextricably linked to his decision to pass as white in the first place. Just as Mr. Walters had earlier predicted, only catastrophic consequences can possibly attend racial crossings and their subsequent cover-ups, whatever the initial reasons that motivate such decisions. Thus even though Clarence’s fiancée eventually renounces her own family and rushes to his bedside, not even her love can prevent his death. At her arrival, Clarence’s sister, Emily, attempts to revive him to meet with his bride-to-be, but it is clear that the reunion has come too late: “ ‘Clarence!’ cried she, louder. No answer. She touched his face—it was warm. ‘He’s fainted!’ exclaimed she; and, ringing the bell violently, she screamed for help. . . . They bathed his temples, held strong salts to his nostrils—still he did not revive. Finally, the nurse opened his bosom and placed her hand upon his heart. It was still—quite still: CLARENCE WAS DEAD! (390–91; emphasis in original). Significantly, the trauma of Clarence’s death also affects the health of his fiancée, who cannot recover from her loss. The book notes that she “walked about mournfully for a few years, pressing her hand upon her heart” and then “passed away to join her lover, where distinctions in race or colour are unknown, and where the prejudices of earth cannot mar their happiness” (391). Webb’s emphasis on the lessons these deaths offer on the personal suffering caused by racial prejudice extends, finally, to Clarence’s funeral and burial itself, where only two white people (among the many he presumably knew during his years of passing) are in attendance; instead, several “coloured people followed him to his last home, and wept over his grave” (391). The narrative then diverts from its description of Clarence’s burial to offer its own eulogy on his death: “We, too, Clarence, cast a tear upon thy tomb—poor victim of prejudice to thy colour! and deem thee better

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off resting upon thy cold pillow of earth, than battling with that malignant sentiment that persecuted thee, and has crushed energy, hope, and life from many stronger hearts” (391). The moral the text offers here on the prejudice that causes and attends Clarence’s death functions also as a cautionary tale to readers by implicitly suggesting that this tragedy might have been avoided if Clarence had decided years ago to end his racial masquerade. This lesson, however, is undercut (or at least rendered less effective than it otherwise might be) by Webb’s sentimental, dramatic prose. Unlike the angry declamations found, for instance, in Douglass’ Narrative, Webb’s condemnation of racism and discrimination here registers more as distress than as indignation, more as dismay than as fury. As such, Clarence’s death does not appear a righteous sacrifice in the tradition of Nat Turner; instead, it seems more fully connected to the sentimental demise of Stowe’s Little Eva. Indeed, Webb’s emotional style (one that characterizes the book as a whole) might be interpreted by some readers as a literary equivalent of racial passing vis-à-vis its apparent embrace of the narrative conventions of white female writing in the antebellum era. Readers might snicker at this final scene, in other words, not just for its admittedly dramatic qualities, but also because it seems to position Webb himself in literary female whiteface. In this way, ironically, The Garies exemplifies the ongoing cultural salience of racial identity. Despite the fact that Webb’s book occupies a crucial place in the African American literary tradition, it seems critics cannot adequately appreciate its historical significance because its style does not reflect the textual identity readers would expect from a black male author. Thus even though Webb explores many of the themes and issues central to African American activism, and even though he clearly advocates racial solidarity in the face of devastating prejudice and bigotry, his text remains underanalyzed and perhaps even deliberately ignored.25 The corrective to this analytical dilemma, however, does not rest in carving out a theoretical and cultural space in which race does not matter. To do so, in fact, would be to renounce the very arguments in favor of racial solidarity (and racial distinctiveness) that Webb himself advocates within his text. I would argue, instead, that Webb’s book—and the criticism and controversies attached to it—offers a crucial opportunity to explore readers’ own specific investments in categories of minority identity, both in the antebellum era and today. The path to resuscitating Webb’s vexed reputation, in other words, may in fact lie in the critical ironies that inform that reputation itself.

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In this respect, as critic Stephen Knadler points out, analyzing texts like The Garies helps to expose how some contemporary critical theory “disallows and silences a dissociation and incompleteness in racial performance that would complicate the ‘passing’ or ‘passing away’ of racial identities into a utopian world of neoliberal colorblind aesthetics.” In Knadler’s view, such theories compromise the efficacy of their intended political goals, since “for those not afforded the white privilege of racial transparency . . . discussions of race center more on the effects—psychological, economic, political— consequent on the fictions of identities, and therefore, simply exposing or denaturalizing the constructedness of these race fictions does not end the effects of racism.”26 Arguments that aim to end identity politics, in other words, may themselves thwart ongoing efforts to combat social dispossession, since they both disallow the ongoing social significance of identity categories and minimize the ways that such categories inform the lived experiences of cultural difference. To erase (or move beyond) identity categories, then, may be to threaten the very impulse toward group solidarity that Webb positions as vital for cultural survival. Difference, in this view, is not only desirable but also necessary—offering, in all its diversity, a sense of belongingness that might otherwise be unavailable.

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The nonnormative intersections among racial, gender, and textual

identities that inform the vexed reputation of Frank J. Webb extend also to one of the most widely celebrated (and studied) texts of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.1 That scholarship on Stowe’s book similarly appears unable to support such intersections is striking, particularly since one of the primary goals of recent scholarship on Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been to reassess the novel’s depictions of minority identity and thereby recuperate several of its minoritized characters. Dinah, Eva, Topsy, George, Eliza, and Uncle Tom (among others) figure prominently in discussions of racial and gender identity.2 Ironically, however, the success of critiques centered on race and gender may unintentionally cut off other avenues for analysis, foreclosing the possibility of distinguishing additional minority identities within the book—particularly those that intertwine race and gender in ways different from normative standards. Adolph, Augustine St. Clare’s manservant, is a case in point: his character is almost entirely overlooked in the criticism devoted to the book, and this chapter takes up the theoretical challenge posed by his scholarly fate as well as its critical implications. While a vast amount of scholarship has critiqued Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s tendency to subdivide African American identity into readily recognizable character types like the mammy, the pickaninny, the tragic mulatto, and the figure now known as the Uncle Tom, such analysis considers Adolph’s role only tangentially.3 Given Adolph’s singular characterization (and given that contemporary scholarship recuperates nearly every minority character in Stowe’s text, including those that function as minstrel figures), the critical silence surrounding his character is arresting in its indifference.4 In considering why Adolph has never registered significantly in the criticism, this chapter sketches out some of the repercussions of the book’s racial and gendered schemas. My approach is twofold. I first

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examine Adolph’s character within the book’s abolitionist context, offering an interpretation that reads his ostensibly comedic role as an important commentary on the novel’s gender and racial politics. I then consider some of the historical continuities that mark Adolph’s absence from the scholarship dedicated to Stowe’s work. His continued critical elision, I argue, signals the hermeneutical difficulty of recognizing nonnormative intersections among racial and gendered identities. Because he does not conform to established definitions of minority identity, his character makes no sense in the novel or the criticism. His body—metaphorically and literally—is rendered unintelligible. Hence, Adolph’s character (like Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends) highlights some of the analytical challenges inherent in contemporary theories of minority identity and post-structuralist thought. Indeed, Adolph’s treatment in the scholarship illustrates Lindon Barrett’s claim that “the predominant epistemes of cultural studies, in the very gesture of attempting to foster counterknowledges, display wide-spread respect for the assumed stability and independence of rubrics of identity.”5 As a result, individuals who do not (or will not) adhere to such definitions may be overlooked, dismissed, erased. The critical inability to recognize Adolph’s character thus highlights both the durability of specific identity categories as well as the need for analytic models that acknowledge identities existing outside traditional classifications. Feminists of color have long been the vanguard in such theorizing. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, for example, analyzes the various ways identity is constructed and experienced in the world by directly addressing how the axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality might profitably be examined in relation to one another. Such thinking, she notes, presents an opportunity “to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations” and “to call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few.”6 Following Crenshaw, critic Valerie Smith notes that intersectional analysis asks that bodies be seen as representing a multitude of subject positions, forcing an understanding that all identities are “discursively produced and never fixed, always involving negotiations of gender, sexuality, race, and class.” Intersectional studies, Smith maintains, challenge “prevailing narrative conventions and constructions of cultural and literary histories and traditions. Moreover, they question the ability of master narratives to explain discourses and identities marked with the historically constructed meanings of subordinated race, sexual, gender, and class positions.”7

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Adolph’s situation calls for the frameworks Crenshaw and Smith outline, since critical inattention to his character exposes a persistent failure to recognize the intersection of the nonnormative racial and gendered concerns that mark his place in the novel. Though such oversights may be innocent, they serve as reminders of the curious durability of discrete classifications of identity.8 The need remains, therefore, for critical paradigms that recognize the ways in which identity categories may overlap but that nevertheless acknowledge American culture’s ongoing investment in distinct taxonomies. As Adolph’s case demonstrates, unless critics carefully (and deliberately) employ such intersectional practice in their analyses, they risk ignoring these figures altogether.

I. When Augustine St. Clare returns with Little Eva and Uncle Tom to his New Orleans estate, Adolph is the first inhabitant of the manor we meet. Amid the household’s rush to greet the returning travelers is this “highly-dressed young mulatto man, evidently a very distingué personage,” who is “attired in the ultra extreme of the mode.” As the crowd presses to the front of the galleries surrounding the mansion’s courtyard, Adolph, “gracefully waving a scented cambric handkerchief in his hand,” commands the group to keep their distance and not overwhelm their master: “ ‘Back! all of you. I am ashamed of you,’ he said, in a tone of authority. ‘Would you intrude on Master’s domestic relations, in the first hour of his return?’ ” Adolph’s words apparently carry some weight with the other servants in the house, since “all looked abashed at this elegant speech, delivered with quite an air, and stood huddled together at a respectful distance.” Adolph’s “systematic arrangements” to make his master’s return a pleasant one appear to hide a more personal motive, though, for when St. Clare finally turns his attention to the crowd he expects to see on his balcony, “there was nobody in view but Mr. Adolph himself, conspicuous in satin vest, gold guard-chain, and white pants, and bowing with inexpressible grace and suavity.” 9 Even in this brief introduction, Adolph is a personality difficult to ignore. Indeed, he virtually demands attention. The significance of his dandyism should not be underestimated, particularly in relation to the book’s other black characters and their attendant stereotypes. Numerous critics have pointed out how the litany of characterizations culled from Stowe’s discourse presents a kind of historical economy of racist stereotypes that first found expression on the minstrel stage

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and that have endured in countless stage productions, songs, books, and films.10 Adolph thus stands in a continuum of caricatures offered as comic relief in a novel inundated with tears. But though Adolph is meant to provide humor, his comedy differs considerably from the minstrel humor of the book’s other black figures. His comedy instead rests on a series of boundary crossings along the axes of class, race, and gender: he acts as St. Clare’s equal and not as his slave; he mimics the attitudes of his white masters instead of conforming to his “true” black identity; and perhaps most compelling—because so often unremarked—he adopts strikingly effeminate postures. The humor his character provides (for both antebellum and modern readers) is thus fundamentally different from the rough-and-tumble antics of, say, Sambo, Andy, Sam, and Topsy. We laugh at him, that is, not for his physical pratfalls but for his ideological missteps. His humor rests not in what his body does literally but in what it says metaphorically about minority identity. To illuminate how Adolph functions in the novel, it is necessary to situate his character within the book’s representations of minority identity. The primary spokesperson for this discourse is Dinah, St. Clare’s chief cook. “[A] character in her own way,” who “perfectly scorn[s] logic and reason in every shape and always [takes] refuge in intuitive certainty” (310), Dinah is one of Stowe’s most complex characters.11 While serving primarily as a comic foil for Miss Ophelia, Dinah also demonstrates a keen intelligence and philosophical disposition. Indeed, although many of the book’s black characters lament their race (because it links them to their status as slaves), Dinah is one of the few figures who actively consider what it means, epistemologically, to be black. Her kitchen, for example, is the site of heated disagreements concerning hierarchies of race. One such discussion centers on Prue, a neighboring slave who has been severely abused. Adolph and Jane (one of the household’s mulatto maids) excoriate Prue mercilessly. Jane declares that “such low creates ought not to be allowed to go round to genteel families,” while Adolph asserts that if he were master of such a “disgusting old beast,” he would “cut her up worse than she is” (321). Dinah’s atypically cool response to these remarks is telling: “Ye couldn’t do that ar, now ways . . . Her back’s a far sight now,—she can’t never get a dress together over it” (321). For a woman who “perfectly scorn[s] logic and reason in every shape,” this response seems oddly cogent, unusually sensible. Indeed, her perceptive argument (that Prue’s book is too scarred to feel the sting of any further lashings) underscores Dinah’s fundamentally rational character.

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Dinah’s pragmatism is further evident as the dialogue slides into a discussion of a ball to be held the following night for light-skinned mulattos. This conversation pointedly excludes darker-skinned blacks, who will not be allowed to attend the festivities, and as the banter continues among Adolph, Jane, and Rosa (another light-skinned maid), Dinah delivers what she intends as a stinging rebuke to the trio’s air of self-importance: “Don’t want none o’ your light-colored balls . . . cuttin’ round, makin’ b’lieve you’s white folks. Arter all, you’s niggers, much as I am” (322). Dinah’s statement is particularly revealing given the fact that during the preceding conversation readers have learned that Adolph “was in the habit of adopting [St. Clare’s] name and address; and that the style under which he moved, among the colored circles of New Orleans, was that of Mr. St. Clare” (321; emphasis in original). Dinah’s comments (and Stowe’s description of Adolph) thus reveal a desire among the novel’s light-skinned blacks to emulate white society—a desire Dinah sharply and explicitly condemns. In this way, Dinah serves as a spokesperson for, if not essentialism, at least racial solidarity. She notes that differences within black populations (in color, in conduct) matter little within antebellum hierarchies of race. While Adolph’s, Jane’s, and Rosa’s bodies and behavior appear to demonstrate that blackness should not be essentialized, that understanding is ultimately superseded by the social reality of a considerably elastic prejudice—one that encompasses even those who do not appear or act “authentically” black. Dinah’s commentary thus notes the extent to which hegemony fundamentally disregards variances within minority populations. She is not offended by the light skin that allows the trio to attend a ball that will, presumably, exclude her. Rather, she resents their presumption that there exist no social repercussions to their too easy emulation (and celebration) of white bourgeois culture. Light skin is no guarantee of preferential treatment, Dinah suggests; antebellum social mores do not recognize (and will not admit) the hybrid as a viable racial category. Because the dominant culture collapses intracultural differences into discrete categories, no black person (regardless of skin shade or personal aspiration) can ever participate fully in hegemonic society. Accordingly, Dinah’s comments might also serve as a coded warning to blacks, voicing the dominant culture’s displeasure about “uppity” slaves who attempt to emulate white society. From this perspective, racial crossing directly menaces the social order by threatening the purity of a white culture that defines itself by distancing itself from what it is not.12 Successful racial crossing demonstrates to the dominant culture that identities and bodies are not always capable of

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being read as indistinguishable from one another. More empowered social positions are thus open to contamination from those who may pass into them unseen. The possibility of such boundary trespassing generates profound anxiety in the hypothetically menaced white subject, since it exposes the instability of racial categories, the capriciousness of racial identification, and the near ineffectiveness of racial self-description as a claim to cultural power. In this view, racial crossing challenges the notion of a stable and discernible white identity. Traversing racial boundaries thus menaces two related perspectives: to Dinah, it ignores the social realities of antebellum culture that necessitate a corresponding loyalty to black cultural unity; to the dominant culture, racial crossing menaces through category disruption, igniting anxiety with the threat of economic and social competition from undetected border crossers. Both perspectives indicate the ways in which antebellum culture organizes social hierarchies within specific taxonomies of identity. The consequences of crossing identity boundaries vary widely throughout the text, however, and the rewards or punishments for these transgressions seem wholly dependent on such discrete classifications, particularly in relation to categories of difference such as race and gender. In spite of Dinah’s comments, boundary crossing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not, in itself, much of a problem. Indeed, the text generally tolerates boundary crossing along the axes of both race and gender, even endorsing such acts if they lead slaves to freedom. For example, the book praises the resourcefulness George Harris shows when he passes for white to elude his pursuers, even comparing his quest for freedom with the founding fathers’ mission for the new nation: “I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!” (187).13 Here, the book supports George’s belief that the means to achieve freedom are necessarily subordinate to the end, since the white man to whom he addresses these lines immediately converts to the abolitionist cause. In a similar way, the text also sanctions gender passing. Eliza avoids recapture, for instance, by dressing as a boy (and dresses her son, Harry, as a girl for the same purpose). All those involved in her escape support this strategy: the Quakers, George, even the slave catcher, Tom Loker. Under these circumstances, the book endorses passing as a necessary, viable tactic for survival. Dinah’s comments to Adolph, Rosa, and Jane help explain the novel’s tolerance of boundary crossing in these scenarios. In condemning their efforts to emulate white society, she points out the inherent futility of that endeavor. The trio, she claims, will always

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be just as black as she. The text encourages its readers to believe that Dinah is correct: because antebellum culture consolidates racial identity within discrete frameworks, blackness is impossible to discard. Despite their impersonation of hegemonic culture, the trio’s emulation is thus understood as only a temporary transgression from an otherwise fixed identity. Likewise, their mimicry might not definitively menace the dominant culture since such instances of boundary crossing are not sustained. In these examples, what we today call passing is always figured as a transient experience: we “know” George is black in the same way we “know” Eliza is a woman. But if the book endorses passing in certain instances, its support of those who cross boundaries is neither reliable nor consistent. The novel’s handling of Adolph, in particular, suggests his greater challenge to Stowe’s theories of identity and to antebellum ideologies in general. Tellingly, the novel never considers his character with the seriousness it grants figures such as Tom, Chloe, Cassy, Dinah, George, and Eliza. Criticism that mentions Adolph follows the book’s lead in this regard. Most previous assessments of Adolph’s character read him only as a hyperbolic, more amusing version of St. Clare. In the rare instances when Adolph appears in the scholarship, his longing to wear St. Clare’s clothes, daub on St. Clare’s cologne, and affect St. Clare’s genteel mannerisms is understood, primarily as a child’s yearning to be an adult. As one otherwise sympathetic critic phrases it, “When we laugh at the dandified spoiled slave Adolph St. Clare as he tosses his head, fingers his perfumed hair, and waves his scented handkerchief, we are laughing at a boy mimicking adult affectations.”14 As this interpretation makes clear, Adolph is read as humorous because readers see him only as wanting to be like the white St. Clare. And this desire is laughable because we know he can never be St. Clare; we know he will never be able to transcend his “essential” black identity. Readers mock Adolph’s mimicry, moreover, on moralistic grounds. He is interested solely in St. Clare’s surface existence; he covets the luxurious trappings and languid attitudes of the wealthy, and imitates his master to sample the lush life. Adolph’s unabashed impersonation does not mesh well, however, with either the book’s conceptions of what constitutes a proper slave or with antebellum society’s understanding of what constitutes a proper free subject. Because he does not evidence a similar and more important interest in St. Clare’s internal psychology (which is Uncle Tom’s domain), we dismiss the manservant’s shallowness. Both the narrative and its subsequent critics thus render Adolph’s character insignificant partly because the slave is interested less in what St. Clare might represent

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(a sincere, though problematic, benevolence) than in what he owns (a mansion, perfume, silk clothing). In aspiring to become (or at least mimic) his master, Adolph blurs antebellum culture’s discrete borders of identity, embracing a state of in-betweenness that violates the social hierarchies Dinah observes. By refusing to act like an authentic black male slave, Adolph implies that it is possible to reject such taxonomical classifications. He points to an alternative conception of identity in which hybridity is a viable option, a position in which categories of race, gender, and class may exist not only in parallel relation but also in complex imbrication. While the text will ultimately disallow Adolph’s innovative representation of identity, his character nevertheless indicates ways in which hybrid identities may challenge hegemonic categorization. The book calls attention, for instance, to discrepancies between Adolph’s persona and Tom’s more conventional characterization. As Tom is introduced to the household, Adolph stands “negligently leaning against the banisters, examining Tom through an opera-glass, with an air that would have done credit to any dandy living” (256). Placing Tom under Adolph’s care, St. Clare warns his manservant, “[M]ind you don’t put on any of your airs to him. He’s worth two such puppies as you” (257). Later, as St. Clare relates this conversation to his wife, Marie, he notes that Adolph was “particularly huffy” about St. Clare’s instructions: I was obliged to let him understand explicitly that I preferred to keep some of my clothes for my own personal wearing; also, I put his magnificence upon an allowance of cologne-water, and actually was so cruel as to restrict him to one dozen of my cambric handkerchiefs. . . . I had to talk to him like a father, to bring him round. (270; emphasis in original)

By talking to Adolph “like” a father, St. Clare employs here a kind of management strategy. Because Adolph resists the role of compliant slave, St. Clare must take up his own imitation (of paternity) to consolidate the differences between them. His performance of fatherhood thus operates in inverse relation to Adolph’s mimicry: St. Clare attempts to create distance from his manservant, while Adolph aims to collapse such distance. St. Clare emphasizes his fatherly role, therefore, to reestablish the “natural” hierarchical bond between master and slave that is absent from their interactions. Moreover, in detailing Adolph’s affectations—his love of soft fabric and cologne—St. Clare calls attention to his manservant’s

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dandified persona. This characterization reveals that Adolph’s violation of identity categories stretches across distinct (but complementary) value systems. Not only does Adolph reject the race and class hierarchies endemic to slavery; he also rejects hegemonic definitions of conventional masculinity. Adolph’s violation of these social boundaries complicates traditional understandings of the slave system’s power inequities. Given Adolph’s habit of adopting St. Clare’s name and address, we are led by Stowe to read him primarily in relation to his master—positioning him, in effect, as St. Clare’s black double. Adolph’s insubordination thus works on two levels. First, his doubling implies a fundamental equivalence with St. Clare, a condition that breaches the parental nature of the master-slave hierarchy. Second, and perhaps more significant, the effeminate content of Adolph’s doubling (and its implicit resistance to definitions of conventional masculinity) forces a rereading of St. Clare’s own character. Adolph’s refusal to accept traditional social and gender categories reflects back on his master compellingly. If Adolph’s mimicry of St. Clare is accurate, it reveals St. Clare’s possible effeminacy. St. Clare’s (failed) attempt to discipline Adolph thus represents an effort to safeguard his own tenuous hold on masculine identity. The ironic effect of Adolph’s dandyism, therefore, is to make St. Clare the manservant’s double—a white version of the black male effeminacy he embodies. In this way, Adolph’s character again violates the hierarchical inequities that are supposed to obtain between masters and slaves. In this relationship, gender insubordination inexorably complicates the accepted wisdom of racial authority.15 By refusing to accept hegemony’s discrete categorizations of identity—and by complicating their attendant social relations—Adolph reveals that the dominant culture is perhaps not entirely impervious to the kinds of ideological challenges his character poses. St. Clare’s inability to restrain his manservant from appropriating (and performing) his identity highlights the cultural anxieties that attend this possibility, since Adolph’s indifferent reaction to St. Clare’s admonitions seems almost to acknowledge an implicit understanding that their banter constitutes a performance in which both play a part. In this light, Adolph’s scrupulous once-over of Tom seems less a matter of fey interest than it does a crucial opportunity to check out the new competition for St. Clare’s attention. Indeed, Adolph’s reaction to Tom’s arrival may signal a hitch in previous arrangements to which readers have not been privy, for while St. Clare literally owns Adolph, Adolph clearly considers St. Clare his “property.” When we take into account as well Marie’s all-but-absent

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status in her marriage, St. Clare’s attempts to dissociate himself from his servant suggest other reasons for his discomfort. Although such a reading of Adolph and St. Clare’s relationship represses the racial and class dimensions of slavery, it nevertheless reflects Adolph’s refusal to acknowledge the discrepancies in race and class that mark him as his master’s property. Despite Adolph’s attempts at self-possession, however, his defiance of social norms cannot continue indefinitely. Since his insubordination is wholly dependent on St. Clare’s lax benevolence, Adolph ultimately has little control over his character’s definition. With St. Clare’s death, the environment that has permitted the manservant some measure of autonomy vanishes. Just as Dinah had earlier predicted, differences among the household’s slaves are inevitably subordinated to their common classification as chattel available for sale. When St. Clare dies, in other words, social reality returns. Though his slaves have enjoyed some degree of insulation from antebellum social strictures, they now must confront the hierarchies that buttress hegemonic power. As Dinah implies, one of the primary ways the dominant culture safeguards its privilege is by demanding discrete classifications of identity. In its reliance on race and class disparities, therefore, the slave system will not support Adolph’s boundary transgressions. Because he is first and foremost a slave, race inevitably serves as the exclusive marker of Adolph’s minoritized identity. Such a requirement, however, has the unexpected effect of rendering visible some of slavery’s largely unspoken dynamics, since the intersection of Adolph’s slave status with his racial, gender, and class insubordination ultimately reveals the latent sexual dynamics underlying slavery’s power inequities. His final scene takes place in the slave warehouse, where Adolph is once again mocked for his effeminate affectations. His disgust at being sold at auction, for example, is figured more as hygienic horror than as moral revulsion. His request to be left alone, after another slave lays a hand on his shoulder, is met with derision and scorn: “Law, now, boys! dis yer’s one o’ yer white niggers,—kind o’ cream color, ye know, scented! . . . O Lor! he’d do for a tobaccer-shop; they could keep him to scent snuff! Lor, he’d keep a whole shope agwine,—he would!” (469). Enraged by these taunts, Adolph flies at his adversary, but his efforts to defend his character merely bring laughter from the crowd of men. The color of Adolph’s skin is conflated here with his effeminate bearing. Lightness (or whiteness) is implicitly equated with unmanly conduct. As this scene makes clear, the book’s logics of gender are inexorably imbricated in its logics of racial identity and

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vice versa. Ultimately, however, the challenge Adolph poses to normative definitions of behavior and appearance is superseded by the hierarchical realities of the slave system; despite his character’s liminal nature—his in-betweenness—he is still principally defined as “nigger.” For Adolph, this designation colludes not only to ridicule the impossible logic his body represents but also, finally, to render that body illegible. Our final, telling glimpse of Adolph comes just as he is to be sold. As the various slaves are lined up for inspection, we see a “young exquisite, slapping the shoulder of a sprucely-dressed young man, who [is] examining Adolph through an eye-glass” (475). The scene recalls Adolph’s own earlier inspection of Tom through the opera-glass, a kind of comeuppance, perhaps, for the insolence the manservant displayed in his treatment of Tom and in his assumption of parity with St. Clare. The buyer comments to his friend: “I was wanting a valet, and I heard that St. Clare’s lot was going. I thought I’d just look at his—” (476). The lacuna at the end of this sentence is heavy with possible meaning, inviting the reader to fill in the missing noun. Because the text has hinted at the nonnormative aspects of Adolph’s relationship with St. Clare, readers are tempted to fill in this explanatory gap with a word that describes the latent homoerotic dimensions of their bond. Indeed, given Adolph’s nontraditional gender representation, a word like “minion” or “concubine” is the expression perhaps most appropriate in naming his person here. The effect of this substitution, however, depends on how we define authentic gender identity. As he stands for sale before the crowd, the figure Adolph most closely resembles is that of the tragic mulatto—a dandified complement of sorts to the scene’s other primary character, Emmeline, who is also associated with sexual subservience. But while the text extends a genuine sympathy to any slave on the auction block, it appears that the term “concubine” carries different social implications based on differences in gender.16 Here, identity politics rub up against what might be called linguistic politics: although the novel explores the significant personal consequences for the slave woman forced into such an arrangement (whether actual, as with Prue, or probable, as with Emmeline), Adolph’s future remains unclear. The text never provides the dropped word that defines him. We are left only with the image of Adolph enmeshed in a highly asymmetrical relationship among the buyer, his friend (the “exquisite”—a telling noun in itself), and Adolph’s available male body. This relationship is cemented, we learn, as Adolph is “knocked off, at a good sum, to the young gentleman who had previously stated his intention of buying

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him” (478). With this transaction, Adolph passes out of the rest of the novel—the possessive noun that defines him left permanently unspoken.17 The temptation to emphasize the homoerotic overtones of Adolph’s sale (and of his character, more generally) is frustrated by the historical anachronism of such a move.18 Because Stowe’s novel is published seventeen years before “homosexuality” becomes a codified term, to analyze Adolph’s character in relation to homosexual identity may misrepresent the nature of same-sex desire in this era.19 His effeminate characterization similarly cannot serve as a reliable index to (homo)sexual activity—in part because homosexuality itself is not yet “invented” but also because there is no clear sense (historically or otherwise) why effeminacy should be linked a priori to homosexual relations. Because sex between men thus does not hold the same meaning in antebellum America as it does in contemporary culture, the possibility of Adolph’s sexual subservience ultimately seems to say less about sexuality per se than it does about the power hierarchies endemic to slavery. Consequently, the threat of (homo)sexual concubinage functions in much the same way as the order to stand for auction—as a way to define the differences in social status between masters and slaves. Adolph’s problem is that he emphatically rejects subjugation. In contrast to traditional definitions of the tragic mulatto (wherein liminality is an affliction), Adolph refuses to see his in-betweenness as tragic.20 The book repeatedly demonstrates, though, that the slave system will not tolerate such insubordination. His sale (and unknown fate) thus functions as a kind of allegory for Stowe’s readers, as an example of the cruelties perpetuated under slavery against even those who are perhaps least traditionally like slaves. Despite his resistance to degradation on the auction block, however, Adolph’s aspirations toward self-possession ultimately are no match for slavery’s social realities. Stowe combats such realities by writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rallying the nation to her abolitionist agenda and proposing an alternative social vision that significantly reconfigures antebellum power inequities. This cultural reconstruction, however, relies on a set of ideological boundaries that tend to mimic the discrete classifications of identity that buttress the slave system. Thus while abolitionism aims to remedy the nation’s social disparities, the ramifications of its ideological strategies ironically replicate some of slavery’s own rules and exclusions. Like the slave system, Stowe’s paradigm cannot tolerate Adolph’s boundary crossing, albeit for an entirely different set of reasons.

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As representative of her culture’s gender politics, Stowe praises the power of female influence insofar as it helps men “feel right” about the issue of slavery. Though men and women may indeed possess innate differences, certain aspects of masculine identity are nevertheless open to female persuasion. Within the abolitionist paradigm, then, essentialist frameworks do not extend wholly to definitions of gender. Unlike race (which is understood as a discrete category, marked on the body in spite of its varying visibility), gender is understood as at least partially constructed, as something to be performed and thus controlled. Stowe’s work represents men and women as having equally important but necessarily separate duties to perform in the cause for abolition.21 While I do not wish to perpetuate anachronistic understandings of nineteenth-century culture, what this dynamic ultimately seems to suggest is that, for Stowe, the logic of the separate spheres is absolutely indispensable to the abolitionist movement.22 Permitting men to cross these boundaries, therefore, would set back the cause for abolition. As critic Myra Jehlen puts it, “For such women as Mrs. Shelby, Ophelia, and Rachel Halliday, taking society over would seem easy. Getting men like Mr. Shelby and St. Clare not to give it up is the difficult task. . . . Stowe intends [domesticity] to be the means to an individualist integrity nurtured by mothers but embodied in independent sons.”23 Consequently, Adolph’s sustained gender insubordination illustrates a significant threat to the logic of the separate spheres and their respective duties: if men’s gendered reactions to the world were wholly immutable, then female influence would be for naught and the abolitionist project would collapse. Unlike racial versions of essentialism, though, gender is subject to influence in Stowe’s world. If that influence depends on a relatively stable division between spheres for men and women, then it is in the book’s best interest to provide some sort of bulwark against their fusion. The tolerance granted to racial crossings (since they are essentially temporary) is thus not automatically granted to gendered crossings (since we have no guarantee they will remain provisional). In its crudest formulation, then, the book seems to posit a stipulation for gender crossing specific to men: while it is acceptable to feel like a woman, it is not acceptable not to act like a man.24 In this context, Adolph’s textual problem becomes clearer. Adolph is fundamentally different from other ostensibly feminine men in the book. Unlike Simeon Halliday, Uncle Tom, or even St. Clare, Adolph does not just feel like a woman; he also does not act like a man. He cannot

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be recuperated in the text because his dandified behavior fuses spheres that should remain separate, and thereby violates the discrete gender classifications on which abolitionism relies. This is not to say, however, that because Adolph does not act like a traditional man he necessarily acts like a woman. Rather, his threat arises from his blurring of these categories—from his unwillingness to renounce the liminality his effeminacy implies. Adolph’s violation of gendered taxonomies also intersects with the book’s racial ideologies. Critic Karen Sánchez-Eppler has pointed out that abolitionist fiction gains much of its rhetorical force by invoking implicit comparisons between the status of slaves and the status of women within patriarchal society. “In feminist writings,” she states, “the metaphoric linking of women and slaves proves ubiquitous . . . this strategy serves to emphasize the restrictions of woman’s sphere, and despite luxuries and social civilities, to class the bourgeois woman among the oppressed.”25 In this paradigm, slaves merit empathy because they occupy a level of societal disempowerment comparable with that of white women. Reciprocally, limitations to woman’s sphere mimic slavery. Because patriarchal society renders both slaves and white women abject, each group deserves our compassion. This rubric ultimately suggests an essential equivalence between racial and gendered identities, an alignment in shared victimization. As a result, the abolitionist paradigm reconfigures familiar black-white and malefemale binaries to create a black-female correlation. Adolph’s character, however, frustrates the too easy logic of this equation. If being black is like being a woman (the focus of SánchezEppler’s critique), Adolph disrupts this reasoning on both counts since he is neither an “authentic” black person nor a woman. In terms of race, Adolph’s emulation of his master threatens hierarchies because he considers himself less St. Clare’s servant than his peer. And in terms of gender, Adolph threatens abolitionist ideologies both by blurring gendered categories and by refusing to feel womanly sympathy for the enslaved (e.g., he disregards Prue’s misery). Hence, Adolph commits a fundamental crime against the text’s primary abolitionist focus: he is simply uninterested in the business of slavery. Neither slavery’s personal dimensions nor its ideological ramifications register in any significant way for him. His character thus threatens the text’s rubrics of identity and their supposedly instinctive sympathies. Moreover, he reveals just how thoroughly discrete understandings of race and gender are imbricated in one another. “I’m so little the race category you give me,” his character seems to say, “that I’m not even the gender you assign.” In this

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way, Adolph’s dandyism acts as a refusal of slavery’s obliteration of gender through race and class. 26 Because he is more interested in his master’s riches than in his inherent (though problematic) benevolence, Adolph is not truly St. Clare’s double. Indeed, Adolph more closely resembles his mistress, Marie. Like Marie, Adolph relishes the material luxuries available to white society, and like Marie, he demonstrates no real sympathy for enslaved blacks. His doubling of Marie, then, exposes the black-female alliance of the abolitionist paradigm as inherently false. Not all slaves feel abject. And not all white women care. Marie and Adolph’s similarities lie primarily in their relationship to civic duty. In antebellum gender logics, the civic woman is at once a complement to the civic man and distinct from the patrician lady. The latter type, which Marie embodies, is “unfeminine” insofar as she is uninterested in femininity’s civic (and domestic) responsibilities. Indeed, the eminently capable Miss Ophelia arrives from the North precisely to counter Marie’s apathy. Because both Adolph and Marie thus abjure a commitment to civic femininity (which Tom personifies), they are not feminine in a traditionally gendered sense. They are, instead, effeminate: in embracing an aristocratic lassitude that is enervating even to proper femininity, they patently refuse Stowe’s paradigms of civic obligation. But while Marie may serve as Adolph’s truest double, no ideological parallel between them translates onto the level of everyday experience. Their fates could not be more dissimilar. While the book castigates Marie’s complicity with the slavocracy, she faces no real retribution for her antiabolitionist beliefs. Adolph does not enjoy a similar escape. When St. Clare’s death consigns his manservant to an unknown future on the auction block, the text implies that social reality is ultimately impossible to refute. Hierarchies of race will always supersede potential alliances between genders. In this way, Adolph’s character signals both a textual and an ideological confinement of black masculinity. The book, in fact, proposes only two acceptable role models for black men: one embodied in the brave and noble George, the other in the long-suffering and pious Uncle Tom. Despite clear differences between these characters, both make sense within the book’s abolitionist framework. Both “feel right” about the issue of slavery, and both act like men—with wives and children to authenticate their masculine identity. Adolph, however, rejects this paradigm. More concerned with clothing than with freedom, with gossip than with marriage, he simply does not register as an authentic black male presence in the novel.

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Adolph’s fundamental problem, therefore, is the challenge to categories he both implicitly and explicitly represents. Unlike Eliza and George (who disguise themselves for specific reasons), Adolph apparently violates social boundaries for no reason other than his own pleasure. That Adolph’s insubordination might represent for him the truest expression of identity ultimately matters little within his era’s social hierarchies. Antebellum culture will not permit Adolph to construct an identity outside the acceptable confines for a black male slave. Ironically, then, it is Adolph’s refusal to pass (as “merely” black, male, and subservient) that dooms his character. Because he will not fulfill the stereotypes the book expects from him, he reveals significant limitations to conventional understandings of minority identity. Despite obvious differences between the slave system and abolitionism, Adolph serves in both paradigms as an example of the social limits to self-possession. Because he will not resolve his liminality, the text must forsake his body and its implicit threat to discrete identity categorization.

II. The category crisis that results from Adolph’s transgression of gender boundaries has important reverberations for modern studies of the novel.27 On the most basic level, the critical disinterest in Adolph mimics the ways he is treated within the book. As I have noted, the novel would have us see Adolph’s category transgression solely on racialized terms: as a boundary crossing, racial passing is tolerated only so long as it is a temporary movement away from an essential black identity; Adolph’s threat is that he refuses to see his transformation as transitory. Well over a century later, readers tend to see Adolph in precisely the same way: as a black child emulating a white adult. As a result, interpretation of his character becomes a closed system wherein gender is completely taken out of the equation. Race becomes the exclusive determinant of his identity. Contemporary interpretations that position Adolph as primarily a humorous figure are thus both instructive and revealing. By laughing at a black boy’s emulation of a white father figure, we imply that it is actually impossible for a black boy to become a white father and thus reinforce the book’s own essentialist paradigms. Indeed, Dinah’s theory of racial essentialism might be one reason Adolph is denied serious attention in contemporary criticism. Ultimately, however, it seems simplistic to posit his critical erasure as solely the consequence

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of essentialized understandings of racial identity. As I have shown, this excuse severely limits analysis, since it renders illegible specific elements of Adolph’s character. Scholarly choices for literary investigation are especially telling in this regard. Because Stowe’s characterizations have repeatedly troubled critics’ cultural sensibilities, the majority of the novel’s characters have remained highly visible—recuperated (and even reappropriated) in contemporary culture as signs of empowered black subjectivity. That irritation, however, has never manifested on Adolph’s behalf; he simply does not inspire critical resentment. As I have suggested, we might understand Adolph’s continued absence from the scholarship as an indication of readers’ continued inability to make a spot for him on the specific identity terms he demands, and in this respect such critical blindnesses might simply reflect the novel’s own exclusion of Adolph’s character. Yet this forgetting of Adolph also loses track of the announced goals of intersectional analysis, particularly since his critical elision carries particular resonance for contemporary analyses concerning “authentic” minority identity. The text’s need to discipline boundary crossings within abolitionist agendas finds its modern-day corollary, I would argue, in movements that also attempt to empower black male subjects while simultaneously deleting members with “problematic” identities. The upshot in both paradigms, however, is the same, since black masculinity remains confined within a severely limited range of options and the effeminate black male is effectively removed from both the critical landscape and emancipationist politics. Indeed, significant historical continuities link Adolph’s brand of textual burlesque with contemporary critical neglect of his character. As critic Marlon T. Riggs points out, “[A] family tree displaying dominant types in the cultural iconography of black men would show . . . an unmistakable line of descent from Sambo to the SNAP! Queen.” In both, “sexuality is repressed, arrested. Laughter, levity, and a certain childlike disposition cement their status as comic eunuchs.”28 Like Adolph, the SNAP! Queen can be viewed only as a child mimicking adult affectations because there exists no place for him within the accepted confines of black masculinity. As Riggs states, Because of my sexuality, I cannot be black. A strong, proud, “Afrocentric” black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual. . . . Hence, I remain a sissy, punk, faggot. I cannot be a black man because, by the tenets of black macho, black gay man is a triple negation. I am consigned, by these tenets, to remain a Negro faggot.

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The social consequences detailed in Riggs’s critique find their literary corollary in Adolph’s situation. Dismissed by both his creator and her critics, the only terms on which Adolph can become visible are those that infantilize or abuse his character. Anachronism notwithstanding, we have “fixed” this Negro faggot by ignoring his nonnormative gender terms and their accompanying sexual overtones. Since Adolph does not embody the image of black masculinity that would grant him agency within contemporary critique, he is dismissed out of hand.30 We fix Adolph’s problem, then, by trivializing or ignoring his character—erasing his literal body to eradicate the apparent threat to identity politics that body contains. Adolph’s illegibility (both in the text and in the criticism) thus underscores the need for ongoing analyses of otherwise valuable critical practices like antiracism.31 Since they actively work to eradicate racism against people of color, such movements are undeniably important. But as a discourse that often privileges race over other markers of difference (including gender and sexuality), the limitations of its central paradigm become readily apparent as specific subjects get erased. Scholar Dwight A. McBride notes this problematic in his sustained critique of such discourse: “When we give ‘race,’ with its retinue of historical and discursive investments, primacy over other signifiers of difference, the result is a network of critical blindnesses that prevents us from perceiving the ways in which the conventions of race discourse get naturalized and normativized.”32 Such blindnesses have faced critique from black feminism, in particular, since the authority to speak on behalf of antiracist movements has assumed a normatively male position that has thereby excluded women’s experiences within patriarchal formulations.33 As Adolph’s situation demonstrates, part of the problem that lies behind some strains of antiracist discourse is its inability to conceive of identity beyond a set of binary oppositions; one is either black, or a woman, or gay.34 Adding to this problem, moreover, are linguistic difficulties. Since we are not able to express multiple factors of difference simultaneously, we must rely on a chain of adjectives to articulate the various markers that constitute identity (e.g., “Adolph is a black, effeminate man”). Imagining an identity that unites these separate adjectives is thus not only a theoretical impossibility but also a fundamental renunciation of the antiracist schema, since naming (and privileging) multiple signifiers of difference detracts from the

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“real” racial project at hand. Echoing Riggs’s point, McBride notes that “underlying much of race discourse . . . is always the implication that all ‘real’ black subjects are male and heterosexual.”35 If black liberationist or antiracist discourse insists on the centrality of a specific black masculinity in its formulations, we are again not far from the novel’s theories of racial essentialism. Any gendered (or sexualized) deviation from this norm thus amounts to a kind of racial disloyalty stigmatized as “passing” for an unsignifiable identity. This dilemma, of course, is not limited to antiracist agendas. It is important to note that Adolph’s character has also never made an appearance within gay and lesbian studies. His absence in this field exposes the ongoing presupposition that “authentic” gay and lesbian subjects are normatively white. If Adolph is too gay to be black, then he is also too black to be gay. In this way, his character serves as a case in point for the ironies inherent in critical paradigms that aim toward inclusion but ultimately house only certain populations. Though such models are designed to recuperate neglected figures, they often obscure others through their own unwittingly exclusionary practices. In other words, one reason Adolph has been ignored is because he does not conform to the racial or gendered criteria the book (and the criticism) establishes for legitimate minority identity. Adolph’s particular case thus exposes a disturbing (and ongoing) tendency to confine black masculinity within a severely limited range of options. Perhaps by reading characters like Adolph back into the narratives from which they have been excluded, however, we begin to critique those epistemological assumptions that render these specific identities illegible. As a result, we may also begin to bridge gaps between group-based politics and articulations of individual identity, to reconceptualize persistent myths of identity, and to correct moves toward undesirable compartmentalizations of the self. Ultimately, by rethinking the nature of intragroup difference, such analysis offers important new narratives of visibility, representation, and inclusion. The same old stories, in other words, need no longer be so.

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The process of epistemic identification (both its promises and its

challenges) finds perhaps its most poignant expression in the genre of the slave narrative. Unlike other literary forms, such as the novel, the slave narrative faces a discrete set of predetermined expectations in relation to both authorial identity and narrative intent. Readers know these texts, fundamentally, in two related ways: as black-authored accounts that trace a literal and psychological escape from slavery; and as strategically political tools to recruit sympathetic white readers to the abolitionist cause. Accordingly, the genre is structured by a series of assumptions concerning author and audience. How these texts are written is directly linked to how (and by whom) they are read. Purpose determines their composition; audience dictates their content. In few texts is this dynamic more evident than in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). The specific purpose for which Douglass writes necessarily casts the autobiographical nature of his text as a particular kind of presentation, one that is shaped, implicitly, by the expectations set by both his sponsors and readers. As scholar William Andrews notes, authors writing in the genre “could not think of their task simply as the objective reconstruction of an individual’s past or a public demonstration of the qualities of selfhood or a private meditation on the meaning of a life of struggle.” Instead, “the writing of autobiography became an attempt to open an intercourse with the white world.”1 Accordingly, Douglass’ work underscores critic Sidonie Smith’s assertion that “an audience implies a community of people for whom certain discourses of identity and truth make sense. The audience comes to expect a certain kind of performativity that conforms relatively comfortably to criteria of intelligibility.”2

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Expanding on the arguments I raise in relation to the works by Harriet E. Wilson, Frank J. Webb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, this chapter explores the ways that Frederick Douglass simultaneously abides by and critiques such criteria of intelligibility. By building on foundational, as well as more recent, analyses of Douglass’ work, I consider the ways that his Narrative might be understood as a meditation on the epistemological limitations of “knowing” both slavery and slaves themselves. Specifically, I argue that embedded within the text’s exposé of southern slaveholding is Douglass’ own critical analysis of white culture’s prurient interest in both him and his work. Through such critique, his narrative implicitly subjects white readers to a scrutiny analogous to that facing the narrating ex-slave. In so doing, Douglass’ work not only makes visible the typically unobserved frameworks that buttress hegemonic culture but also reveals how whiteness, as a racial category, carries its own unacknowledged specificities. Aware of the narrative restrictions he faces, Douglass thus constructs a text that adheres to the genre’s expected forms and tacitly critiques the cultural, social, and political expectations that establish those requirements in the first place. Ultimately, Douglass’ interrogation of hegemony has implications that extend far beyond the specific context of the antebellum era. Indeed, I argue that the Narrative (especially when juxtaposed against its 1855 revision, My Bondage and My Freedom) offers crucial theoretical lessons on literary representation and interpretation. In this way, as I explain in the introduction to Minority Reports, I follow Valerie Smith’s lead when she notes how narrative forms not typically associated with analytical critique (such as oratory and autobiography) might in fact function as critical theory. “Too frequently,” Smith says, “the adjective ‘theoretical’ is bestowed upon specific texts by the corporate culture of the academy and becomes a manifestation of the uneven distribution of power that conceals its own contingencies.”3 Douglass’ work bears out Smith’s assertion. By exploring the connections between subjective experience and socially grounded knowledge, the revisions to Douglass’ autobiographies (as well as readers’ reactions to those revisions) underscore his works’ theoretical acuity by highlighting the ways that what we write and how we read are linked to who we are. His texts, in other words, make clear that social identity (and the experiences connected to those identities) matters a great deal to literary and cultural interpretation.4 Like the works by Wilson, Stowe, and Webb, Douglass’ narratives demonstrate how social identities both shape the parameters by which authors can structure their texts and offer paradigms through which

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readers come to acknowledge and appreciate these works themselves. It is in this respect that texts like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom have as much to teach us about our contemporary analytical investments as they do about the specific compositional challenges facing minority authors writing within the antebellum period. They require readers to consider seriously how personal identity can inform the ways that individuals view the social world, as well as how our interpretations of that world are inevitably influenced by our own epistemic perspectives.

I. For Douglass, as for other authors writing within the genre of the slave narrative, the self made public through the act of writing is directly linked to the specificities of the literal body. These authors’ personal identities determine not only the kind of stories they can tell, but also the kind of subjectivity available to (and observed within) the narrators themselves. In this way, the genre mimics, at the level of form, the literal slavery from which the narrator has escaped. As critic Wilson J. Moses points out, “The slave narrative was a means to freedom, but it also represented a tactical confinement and imposed what might be called a genre slavery that deprived its author of literary and intellectual elbow room.”5 Moses’s comments suggest the extent to which the slave narrative inevitably categorizes both authorial and textual identity. Despite the fact that these writers inhabit complex discursive spaces—as they trace negotiations between freedom and enslavement, eloquence and illiteracy, self-reliance and social subjugation—the genre collapses these multifaceted identities into a singular focus on what is ostensibly understood as “authentic” African American culture. The slave narrative’s predetermined knowledge of the author thus appears to compromise the freedom of self-expression ostensibly guaranteed through autobiography itself. Indeed, as critic Eric Sundquist observes, “[T]he Narrative does not suggest the full significance of Douglass’s possession of his own story”; this early work reflects, instead, abolition’s desire for a representative account of the evils of southern slaveholding. Only in later revisions (and particularly in the 1855 version, My Bondage and My Freedom) does Douglass explicitly reveal the political pressures that structure the 1845 text. “What Douglass’s speeches of the 1850s and My Bondage and My Freedom report in greater detail,” Sundquist notes, “is that his initial quarrel with northern white abolitionists came precisely over the question of

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whether or not he was qualified to interpret the meaning of his own life. To be taken as another speaker’s ‘text’ was Douglass’s primary role in his early career.”6 Variations between the two works appear to support this view. The 1855 account, published over fifteen years after his escape, fleshes out key scenes and elaborates much more fully on Douglass’ private thoughts on slavery. We see these differences, for instance, in the recitation of his decisive battle with the slave breaker, Mr. Covey. The 1845 text describes in one extended paragraph the events leading up to and immediately following Douglass’ insurrection, from his beating at the treading yard to his assertion that Covey never beat him again. My Bondage and My Freedom, by contrast, recounts these events in much greater detail over two chapters with nearly nine times as many pages. Although Douglass claims in the later text “only to give the reader a truthful impression of my slave life, without necessarily affecting him with harrowing details,” even basic differences in length between the two works clearly mark the 1855 autobiography as a more comprehensive, detailed account.7 These distinctions are complemented by modifications in Douglass’ voice. The 1845 Narrative, while rhetorically sophisticated, aims toward a sparse, economical style; its sentences are typically short, declarative, unadorned. My Bondage and My Freedom’s diction, however, is much more ornate. The text’s language expands as Douglass relates his descriptions of the evils he suffers under Covey. Indeed, the highly crafted rhetoric he employs in the later account is reminiscent of the sentimental novel, particularly in its frequent direct address to the reader. For example, the famous preview he offers in the Narrative of his impending revolt (“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man”),8 becomes in the 1855 text an elaborate aside: “You have, dear reader, seen me humbled, degraded, broken down, enslaved, and brutalized, and you understand how it was done; now let us see the converse of all this, and how it was brought about; and this will take us through the year 1834” (My Bondage, 223). Douglass’ description of his personal feelings in this later account is strikingly at odds with the style and tone he presents in the Narrative. The 1855 text thus signals an apparent shift in Douglass’ authorial priorities; he seems less invested in merely narrating his story than in presenting his life within popular antebellum novelistic conventions. Indeed, in My Bondage and My Freedom such conventions wholly structure how he presents his climactic rebellion. Whereas the Narrative offers a straightforward report on the combat, the revised

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version depicts the battle in much more decorous language. Douglass describes here less a death match than a duel between gentlemen: “My resistance was entirely unexpected, and Covey was taken all aback by it, for he trembled in every limb. ‘Are you going to resist, you scoundrel?’ said he. To which, I returned a polite ‘yes sir[’]; steadily gazing my interrogator in the eye, to meet the first approach or dawning of the blow, which I expected my answer would call forth” (My Bondage, 243). Although in both texts Douglass notes the personal significance of this battle, the Narrative’s frank evaluation of his transformation (“This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave” [Narrative, 50]) demurs in the later account: “Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey,—undignified as it was, and as I fear my narration of it is—was the turning point in my ‘life as a slave’ ” (My Bondage, 246). The Narrative’s unadorned statement of Douglass’ conversion becomes a somewhat embarrassed disclosure in the 1855 revision. Consequently, such variations would appear to support scholar Houston A. Baker’s assertion that Douglass’ later works reflect a growing estrangement from an ostensibly more authentic black voice and an increasing deference to the proprieties of white culture.9 Significantly, these differences also highlight the ways that the two texts’ respective constructions affect Douglass’ readers, a fact, I argue, that is especially relevant to contemporary analyses of the works. In an extended evaluation of both autobiographies, for instance, critic David Leverenz candidly notes his preference for the 1845 Narrative: “Most modern readers like the Narrative’s voice much better. Certainly I do. The revision seems arch, smug, pretentious, excessively genteel and self-conscious, even phony. Douglass seems more concerned with presenting a self-image than describing a fight.”10 Although he acknowledges that the 1855 account “refashions [Douglass] as a master not only of Covey but of his white Christian audience’s cultured language,” Leverenz takes exception to the elaborate rhetoric and sentimental diction that characterize the later version.11 His objections to the constructedness of the 1855 text suggest, by comparison, that the earlier version is somehow less constructed and hence a more accurate representation of Douglass’ experiences in slavery. This preference also appears to mirror antebellum reactions to the two works, since the 1845 text outsold My Bondage and My Freedom by a considerable margin.12 There are important ramifications, however, to readers’ fondness for the 1845 account. As Sundquist notes, this partiality suggests “a problematic historiographical choice to be made between the

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Douglass closest to, and thus presumably best able to articulate, the experience of slavery and the Douglass who purposely constructed for himself a linguistically more sophisticated ‘American’ identity, with figures such as the framers of the Constitution or Benjamin Franklin as his models.”13 Such preferences, Sundquist implies, may well signal a tacit racism on the part of Douglass’ readers, since the earlier Narrative appears to offer a more unadulterated vision of slavery and black culture than the later autobiographies. Leverenz makes this point even more bluntly: “[O]ne could say that readers who prefer the first version, then and now, indulge their racism. The exotic spectacle of an angry, anxious young black boy struggling to rise out of great physical difficulties has more appeal than the mature dignity of a cultivated black man unabashedly at ease among the high bourgeoisie.”14 But this analysis, though provocative, ultimately relies on a false dichotomy. Sundquist rightly points out that in the 1845 account Douglass must sound “like” a slave to gain his audience’s confidence, and as such “there are definite limitations to [the work] as a revelation of Douglass’s identity and thought.”15 Yet to assume that the text’s later revisions construct authorial identity more selfconsciously may be to minimize both Douglass’ early authorial talent and the Narrative’s implicit interrogation of the cultural expectations that require him to adopt a specific narrative voice in the first place. To be sure, Douglass’ condemnation of the abolitionist movement’s exploitation of him as a “representative” black voice emerges more overtly in his later work. But we need not accept unreservedly Douglass’ own claim that, under William Lloyd Garrison’s direction, he merely narrated wrongs and did not simultaneously denounce them.16 Identifying Douglass’ critique of hegemonic culture, however, requires us to read through the narrative persona he adopts. Significantly, such acts of authorial self-fashioning mimic the literal acts of social performance Douglass reveals as constitutive of the slave’s existence. At several points in the Narrative he describes the necessity of slaves presenting to whites images of satisfaction that mask a more fundamental discontent. He notes, for instance, that slaves, “when inquired of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind. . . . If they have any thing to say of their masters, it is generally in their masters’ favor, especially when speaking to an untried man” (Narrative, 21–22). Even when whites seem generally sympathetic, Douglass explains, it is wiser to feign indifference to such compassion

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than to risk exposure as a malcontent. Upon meeting two Irishmen who encourage him to escape to the North, for example, Douglass “pretended not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters” (Narrative, 34). Such performances, as Douglass describes them, are survival strategies. On the most basic level, slaves must engage in acts of calculated self-presentation to guard their welfare. Indeed, the slave’s life, like the slave’s narrative, describes a contradiction in terms; such possessives are wholly ironic since the slave possesses neither a story nor a life apart from those authorized by hegemonic society.17 Consequently, Douglass’ Narrative is more his sponsors’ tale than his own, a fact revealed in the text itself. While critics thus rightfully identify Douglass’ later revisions as highly self-conscious literary performances, this first autobiography might be regarded as similarly performative. Indeed, it is the Narrative’s lack of ornate rhetoric that marks it as a specific kind of construction—as a form of what we might call literary passing—particularly when its sparse, plain language is juxtaposed against its moments of unambiguous craftsmanship.18 As he learns to read under Sophia Auld’s tutelage, for example, Douglass reports in straightforward diction his burgeoning understanding of literacy’s power: “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Narrative, 29). By contrast, Hugh Auld’s subsequent prohibition to his learning stimulates a reaction offered in beautifully balanced, chiastic prose: “What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn” (Narrative, 30). Such instances of stylistic mastery (like his celebrated apostrophe to the moving ships) occur throughout the Narrative and emphasize the competing voices that structure Douglass’ text. The relatively unsophisticated language of the just-escaped slave acts as an ironic commentary on the text’s moments of rhetorical elegance, and vice versa. Taken together, these voices reveal an author who simultaneously fulfills and rejects the expectation that he writes primarily “as” an ex-slave.19

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Significantly, however, this form of masquerade reverses the terms that are typically associated with social performance as a concept. Douglass’ narrative impersonation is not his private attempt to access cultural power through identification with hegemonic society; rather, such role-playing is a public act demanded by the dominant culture itself. It is in this respect, I argue, that Douglass’ work speaks in important ways to our contemporary critical (and political) investments, particularly insofar as it highlights the ongoing analytical expectation that Douglass’ narrative identity will match up with what readers believe it should be. Although it would seem that contemporary critical theory might especially appreciate the deconstructive possibilities inherent in the disjunction between the voices that structure Douglass’ early autobiographies (since they appear to emphasize racial identity as socially constructed), many readers’ enduring preference for the Narrative suggests that critical interest primarily lies, still, in privileging Douglass as an “authentic” early African American voice. In other words, Douglass’ readers continue to want (and perhaps even to need) him to “be” black in quite specific ways. Significantly, this dynamic complicates theoretical claims advanced in much recent scholarship (in a variety of intellectual fields) that recommends we dismantle identity categories that appear to oversimplify complex selves. To effect this shift in focus, as I note in my introduction, this criticism often recommends a reconfiguration of our analytical terms—asking us to move beyond categories of race, gender, and sexuality, and to embrace paradigms such as hybridity and heterogeneity. Readers’ reactions to the Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, however, complicate this analytical approach. Despite current understandings of race as being socially constructed, the ongoing preference for Douglass’ earliest text suggests that theoretical analyses of racial identity still cannot supersede the social implications of racial identity itself, even among groups of readers who would seemingly embrace a “poststructuralist Douglass.”20 Ultimately, though, such narrative expectations may not be wholly insidious, since they become in Douglass’ hands a uniquely pedagogical avenue for cultural analysis. Indeed, in its combination of both theoretical and practical concerns, his work offers crucial perspectives on social (and political) identity by suggesting that the insights offered by minority authors—especially those insights that are specifically connected to their experiences as members of particular cultural groups—can offer important knowledge about the structure and function of the social world.

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In light of several years of debate on the issue of social constructionism, this view may strike some as intellectually (and even politically) problematic. As I note earlier, few scholars rest easy with claims that would seem to reduce identities to common essences. But as Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty have argued, “[I]t is a false dilemma to suppose that we should either accept pernicious uses of identity or pretend they do not exist.” Identities, in this view, “are not our mysterious inner essences but rather social embodied facts about ourselves in our world; moreover, they are not mere descriptions of who we are but, rather, causal explanations of our social locations in a world that is shaped by such locations, by the way they are distributed and hierarchically organized.”21 By thus emphasizing identities as constructions that require us to interpret the world in specific ways, we broaden our understanding of enduring patterns of social stratification. In this respect, as Alcoff and Mohanty observe, “The theoretical issue concerning identities is not whether they are constructed (they always are, since they are social kinds) but what difference different kinds of construction make.”22

II. Douglass demonstrates Alcoff and Mohanty’s claims by noting the ways that personal identity can serve as an analytical tool for evaluating the social world—for in spite of the narrative limitations he faces, Douglass responds to the expectations of his readers as an ironic opportunity to interrogate hegemonic culture and its desire to know both slavery and African Americans more generally. Indeed, those who would use Douglass’ unique situation to extrapolate broadly on the evils of slavery and the necessity of abolitionism are revealed in the Narrative as a group with its own racial specificities. That is, to the degree that Douglass must relate his experiences in accordance with white culture’s expectations of him, he uses that occasion also to examine the population that defines itself as normative in opposition to his identity as an ex-slave. Hegemony, in other words, will no longer go unnoticed as such. 23 This dynamic emerges most fully in his famous description of the slave songs, those “wild” tunes that through their beauty and power paradoxically reflect the anguish and misery of the slave. “[Slaves] would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone,” Douglass tells his readers, “words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full

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of meaning to themselves” (Narrative, 18–19). Douglass describes here the ways in which these songs’ public expression belies their personal significance. Because their outward appearance does not correspond neatly with their internal meaning, the insight into slave life ostensibly gained from hearing the songs is exposed as a faulty epistemology. “The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave,” he notes. “[T]he songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion” (Narrative, 19). Interpretation of these songs, Douglass suggests, is not the straightforward endeavor we would typically expect.24 Like the instances in which slaves deliberately present contented images to whites, these tunes similarly appear to engage in acts of masquerade. Indeed, the Narrative implies that the songs function as a kind of catharsis for slaves that is acceptable precisely because it presents a seemingly joyful public image. Douglass’ tacit comparison between the slave songs and literal acts of social performance, however, does not hold, since his description of these songs omits the clear self-consciousness he attaches to other acts of impersonation. Unlike his calculated presentation to the sympathetic Irishmen, for example, Douglass does not identify the songs as a specific strategy to contend with potential bigotry or racial violence. He portrays these tunes, instead, simply as acts of expression that happen to be misunderstood by some who hear them. The songs do not mislead listeners in any deliberate way; they are merely misinterpreted. He supports this understanding by calling attention to his own former inability to comprehend their significance: “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear” (Narrative, 19). Here, aesthetic distance seemingly trumps identity politics. Only with a move outside the circle of slavery, Douglass tells us, was he able to grasp these songs’ importance. Such comprehension, he implies, is accessible only through inhabiting a specific social position, one that in this case is ostensibly defined less by racial identity than by a psychological and geographic remove from slavery. According to Douglass, it is not his race that allows him to understand the songs; it is his status as an ex-slave. The analytic space outside the circle of slavery thus indicates a broad constituency. It encompasses not only the literal ex-slave but also apparently any individual not enslaved, including whites.

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Indeed, Douglass’ rhetoric throughout his description of the songs suggests that he is tacitly (but deliberately) asking white readers to identify with the position he occupies outside the circle of slavery. He notes, for instance, that he has “sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do” (Narrative, 19). Because, presumably, neither slaves nor free blacks would need to read whole volumes of philosophy to be convinced of slavery’s horrors, Douglass’ statements are implicitly directed at white readers. He thus engages here a strategy to persuade whites to acknowledge the evils of slavery and, consequently, to mobilize for change. By sharing his personal reaction to the songs, Douglass invites his readers to empathize with his response. “The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them,” he tells us. “To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception” (Narrative, 19). Although this account of his burgeoning awareness of the songs begins with a personal (and corporeal) reaction to their significance, Douglass then broadens his analysis with a significant shift in address. His description moves from autobiographic self-reflection to an implicit dare to his readers: If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,— and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.” (Narrative, 19)

The “any one” in Douglass’ challenge is not neutral. Because his appreciation of the songs is predicated on his current position outside the circle of slavery, Douglass suggests that those in a position comparable to his might similarly recognize the misery of these wild notes. Because his readers take up the Narrative precisely to gain a glimpse of life within the circle, they are, by definition, outside that circle. Consequently, these readers should be able to experience, like Douglass, the deep, despairing meaning of these songs. Indeed, he notes his shock that any other interpretation is even possible: “I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence

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of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake” (Narrative, 19). Douglass’ bewilderment addresses both faulty interpretation and faulty interpreters, and tellingly, he aligns his shock specifically with northern perspectives. Because he tacitly addresses whites in his correction of these faulty assumptions (and because northern whites constitute the Narrative’s primary audience), his astonishment at such misinterpretation ironically flatters his readers: his incredulity in meeting people in the North who hold such views suggests that he believes these people actually should know better. Indeed, he stops just short of suggesting that whites, because of their distance from the circle of slavery, might hold a more epistemologically advantageous perspective for interpretation than the ex-slave himself possesses. 25 As I have suggested, however, readers need not accept Douglass’ inference at face value, especially given the Narrative’s very deliberate construction. He likely uses this suggestion, instead, as a strategy to recruit sympathetic readers to the abolitionist cause. By insinuating that whites are indeed able to appreciate the slave’s agony, it would appear that Douglass hopes his readers will take concrete action to remedy slavery’s evils rather than merely to regard bondage as a distant southern institution. In this way, Douglass reinscribes race as a determining factor in understanding the songs’ significance, and as such the Narrative’s description of the slave songs portrays interpretation and comprehension as a series of analytical choices that are specifically based on personal identity. Understanding slavery and its evils is not necessarily predicated on either first-hand knowledge or geographic proximity; it is dependent, instead, on a willingness to look closely at the self to understand an “other.” While Douglass will ultimately problematize what it means to “know” a racial “other,” he strikes here an implicit bargain with his readers: in exposing details of slave life for the abolitionist cause, he asks, in return, that his audience acknowledge both the specificities of their own racial group and (willingly or not) their own personal connection to abolitionist action afforded through such racial identification. Identity here is not an inborn racial essence that necessarily determines one’s capacity for knowledge or even, perhaps, one’s way of being in the world. However, identity does inform each person’s individual epistemic perspective because such perspectives are dependent on specific social positions. In this sense, identity matters because there can be no epistemological perspective without identity. Douglass’ text highlights this understanding by requiring readers to consider racial identity itself as an epistemological position, as a specific way of knowing.26

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In this respect, the slave songs’ early position in the Narrative establishes a theoretical paradigm that influences subsequent scenes chosen to represent life within slavery. Douglass engages this strategy most explicitly through the true-life incidents he recounts to authenticate his document. Garrison notes, in his preface to the text, that Douglass “has frankly disclosed the place of his birth, the names of those who claimed ownership of his body and soul, and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has alleged against them.”27 These disclosures, however, do more than expose slavery’s particular horrors. Indeed, the data he offers implicitly asks northern white readers to consider their own relationship to the “peculiar” southern institution. The Narrative’s fourth chapter, for example, recounts in lurid detail specific instances of slavery’s inhumanity. Douglass reports, first, on the horrific career of Mr. Gore, the overseer who “dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as well” (Narrative, 23). He describes the extent of Gore’s savagery through his particular treatment of Demby, a slave on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. To escape a severe lashing, Demby plunges himself into a creek and refuses to emerge from the water. After warning Demby to return for his whipping, Gore shoots the slave point-blank—a crime that goes unpunished since the slaves who witness it cannot legally testify against the white overseer. Thus, Douglass notes, “the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensored by the community in which he lives” (Narrative, 24). Significantly, Douglass ends his recitation of this event by offering additional details about Mr. Gore. He provides not only the overseer’s home address but also a speculation on his current reputation: “Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael’s, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not been stained with his brothers’ blood” (Narrative, 24). This extra information is neither superfluous nor inconsequential; on the contrary, these facts serve as important complements to the slave songs’ earlier positioning vis-à-vis the Narrative’s audience. This association works through a chain of related insights. Douglass’ analysis of the slave songs suggests that whiteness might be understood as a specific epistemological position. This understanding, in turn, requires readers to acknowledge their own epistemic specificity afforded through the experiences connected to personal identity. And finally, such racial self-awareness is implicitly

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juxtaposed here against particular “cases” of white behavior. The text thus invites its readers to measure their understanding of what hegemony can mean (its powers and privileges) against discrete instances of racial abuse. In elucidating this connection, the chapter comes to resemble something akin to a horrific gossip column. Douglass satisfies his audience’s prurient desire for information about some of slavery’s worst atrocities, but, significantly, he also carefully references the names and addresses of those who have committed these brutal crimes. He exposes the cruelty of “Mr. Thomas Lanman, of St. Michael’s,” for example, a man who “killed two slaves, one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking his brains out” (Narrative, 24). He discusses, too, “the wife of Mr. Giles Hick, living but a short distance from where [he] used to live,” a woman who “murdered [his] wife’s cousin . . . mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor girl expired in a few hours afterward” (Narrative, 24). And finally, he mentions an appalling episode concerning Colonel Lloyd’s neighbor, Mr. Beal Bondly, who took offense at the unwitting trespass onto his property of one of the Colonel’s elderly slaves and “with his musket came down to the shore, and blew its deadly contents into the poor old man” (Narrative, 25). These gruesome details serve a crucial purpose in Douglass’ narrative strategies.28 By linking specific cruelties with specific names, the text directs readers toward a process of identificatory estrangement from those responsible for these crimes. This tactic works on two levels: first, the scenes Douglass describes aim to shock potential sympathizers into disavowing both these acts’ brutality and their perpetrators; second, the detailed information he provides about these individuals distances readers from them through a process of individuation. By supplying names, addresses, and reputations, Douglass implicitly urges his audience to disidentify with Mr. Lanman, Mrs. Hicks, and Mr. Bondly; the specific data he offers helps his readers to recognize that “they” are not “them.” Consequently, the facts Douglass includes to authenticate his story critiques the very culture that seeks that evidence in the first place. In this way, white readers’ self-knowledge about their relationship to hegemony (and its potential abuses) serves as an ironic complement to the knowledge about slave culture that the Narrative provides. Significantly, Douglass also omits information from his text for precisely the opposite effect. He describes in later chapters specific instances of beneficence on the part of whites, but he refuses

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to identify these allies. As part of his strategy to gain literacy, for example, he reveals the importance of the neighborhood white boys to his learning. In agreeing to provide knowledge in return for food, these children play a critical role in Douglass’ intellectual development; yet the Narrative offers little personal information about them. Douglass discloses why he deliberately will not name these friends: I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;—not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offense to teach slaves to read in this Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard. (Narrative, 32)

Douglass excuses his reticence by calling attention to the potentially harmful consequences that might befall his comrades should he name them outright. Though in providing their geographic location his recitation roughly follows his previous descriptions of slavery’s cruelties (since such information authenticates his story), his refusal to name names here makes tracking down these individuals a near-impossible endeavor. This event, and its omissions, thus serves a purpose apart from mere reportage. By declining to include the level of specificity he details in his previous discussions of white savagery, Douglass provides for his readers an avenue for positive selfrecognition. Unlike the Narrative’s instances of brutality (with their accompanying detailed information on the perpetrators of those crimes), this more altruistic example of white behavior encourages sympathetic identification. Because these individuals are described in such general terms, readers might more readily see themselves in a position comparable to those described within scenes of relative benevolence. Taken together, the information Douglass provides in these examples presents his (white) readers with what appears to be an ideological choice that has profound political consequences: they can decide either to identify with the specific cruelties of the slave owners, or with the more general goodwill of the unnamed white boys. The agency implied within this decision, however, is compromised by the strategies Douglass employs in outlining these alternatives. By subtly directing his readers toward identification with more positive representations of white conduct toward slaves, Douglass does more than merely engage abolitionist strategy; he also implicitly registers his

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doubt that whites will naturally come to the right conclusion about slavery. After all, the white boys who help him to read do so only with the promise of repayment in bread, not out of some internal moral obligation to help those less privileged than themselves. Similarly, Douglass’ white male sponsors expect, in return for their support, that the narrating ex-slave will remain mindful of his social position and not presume equality with (or independence from) his patrons. In highlighting such dynamics—which call attention to his inherent lack of faith in hegemonic compassion—Douglass reinscribes differences in social identity as critically defining elements in his readers’ desire to “know” about slavery. Although the slave songs suggest that whites might use racial self-awareness as a tool to empathize with the enslaved, the Narrative’s subsequent examples of white behavior (both bad and good) indicate Douglass’ skepticism that readers will actually act upon that opportunity. The ideological and political ramifications of the racial distance between Douglass and his white readers are expressed most fully in his unwillingness to reveal the information his audience most desires: the description of his flight from slavery. Because the Narrative’s publication is predicated on its author’s successful escape, the text necessarily builds to this climactic scene. Ultimately, however, Douglass refuses to provide these facts because to do so might jeopardize the escape of other fugitives. The obligation he feels to those still enslaved, he tells us, is more important than either the gratification he would gain from detailing his accomplishment or the episode’s intrinsic narrative value: I deeply regret the necessity that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience in slavery. It would afford me great pleasure indeed, as well as materially add to the interest of my narrative, were I at liberty to gratify a curiosity which I know exists in the minds of many, by an accurate statement of all the facts pertaining to my most fortunate escape. But I must deprive myself of this pleasure, and the curious of the gratification which such a statement would afford. (Narrative, 65)

Here, social differences between whites and blacks intersect with the Narrative’s status as a text that purports to offer an “authentic” representation of slave life. Up to this point, Douglass has included in his tale the information he knows readers expect from the slave narrative as a genre: specific instances of racial cruelty; his acquisition of literacy; his burgeoning sense of self. As I have suggested, he

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follows these dictates, despite their ideological and literary restrictions, because he knows it is only through their implementation that his voice will be heard at all. His unwillingness to offer comparable information about his escape, however, implicitly suggests that even attempts at sympathetic identification on the part of whites cannot supersede fundamental social inequities between the races.29 Ironically, then, this refusal to reveal the facts of his escape stands out as perhaps the most authentic episode of the Narrative as a whole. Douglass cannot dismiss or disregard his inherent mistrust of white readers and their motives in picking up his text in the first place. Although Douglass’ demurral, like his description of the slave songs, positions white readers as compassionate allies in the fight against slavery, he nevertheless demarcates here the epistemic limitations to “knowing” both slavery and the slave. Differences between the races—and their disproportionate relationships to social power hierarchies—ultimately prevent his full disclosure. No matter how sympathetic the reader, he tells us, some information cannot (and should not) cross racial lines: “We owe something to the slaves south of the line as well as to those north of it . . . Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother” (Narrative, 66). Douglass’ decision to withhold this essential information engages what might be called a politics of reticence: by choosing to remain silent, he reminds us that knowledge can be denied as well as given, and that responsibility to one’s own cultural, social, or political group (however personally defined) often takes precedence over ostensible obligations to others. Despite white readers’ desire to know about slavery—and perhaps even to effect social change through that knowledge—the Narrative regards this desire to know with an intrinsic skepticism. 30 The tension between Douglass and his readers thus emphasizes the understanding that what we know is inextricably linked to both who we are and how we know. While Douglass’ narrative strategies usefully highlight whiteness’s visibility as both a racial category and a specific way of knowing, they also note that certain kinds of knowledge should perhaps remain unknown and unknowable. In this respect, Douglass’ work offers important lessons on the ways that particular epistemic perspectives inform our interpretive decisions. Indeed, in its ability to call attention to alternative ways of evaluating social structures and value systems we believe we already know quite well, his Narrative reminds his readers that identity categories, far from limiting our analytical abilities, in fact help to explain

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the social world by virtue of the epistemological perspectives they provide. By thus considering the ways that personal identity can be both constructed and authentic—particularly in terms of the lived experiences that arise from inhabiting specific social groups—we broaden our knowledge of the world and our place within it.31 Such an understanding, as Satya P. Mohanty notes, explains how “certain social arrangements and conditions—social struggles of dominated groups, for instance—can help produce more objective knowledge about a world that is constitutively defined by relations of domination. . . . [G]ranting that the oppressed have this privilege opens up the possibility that our own epistemic perspective is partial, shaped by our social location, and that it needs to be understood and revised hermeneutically.”32 Douglass’ work underscores Mohanty’s observations both by emphasizing how identity categories do not always neatly correspond to our knowledge of others, and by revealing how identity itself is fundamental to social analysis. As the example of the Narrative thus makes clear, identity categories, and their attendant political commitments, continue to matter deeply in (and to) American culture.

5

Fac e Va lu e: A m bi va l e n t C i t i z e nsh i p i n I O L A L E R OY

From the moment of its initial publication in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted has experienced a decidedly ambiguous critical reception. In William Still’s introduction to the second edition of the novel, for example, the famed abolitionist records his doubts over Harper’s decision to write “ ‘a story’ on some features of the Anglo-African race, growing out of what was once popularly known as the ‘peculiar institution.’ ” Still worries that in focusing on mixed-race characters, “one of the race, so long distinguished in the cause of freedom” risks “[making] a blunder which might detract from her own good name.” While he ultimately praises Harper’s achievement, Still tells us that “it was far from being easy for [him] to think that she was as fortunate as she might have been in selecting a subject which would afford her the best opportunity for bringing out a work of merit and lasting worth to the race.”1 The scholarship on Iola Leroy tends to echo Still’s concerns. Approving early critics suggested that the book’s apparent celebration of white bourgeois values signals a successful (and desirable) cultural assimilation, a perspective reconfigured in modern analyses of the novel that view black adoption of such ideologies as inherently subversive within the cultural context of the nineteenth century. By contrast, readers critical of the book see it as too invested in value systems that, until emancipation, had typically oppressed black communities.2 Tellingly, both analytical perspectives share a tendency to read the novel primarily in terms of its relationship to white culture. Scholarship on Iola Leroy (on both sides of the debate) thus often relies on a number of shared assumptions about activism, racial solidarity, and civic enfranchisement; and perhaps even more significantly, this body of criticism generally assumes that Harper’s relationship to ideologies of racial uplift is unambiguously positive.3

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In this chapter, I want to suggest that such paradigms minimize the full scope of Harper’s argument. I am interested, in particular, in extending chapters two and three’s observations about the scholarly erasure of nonnormative minority identity in the antebellum period (evident as well, though to a lesser degree, in the scholarly reception of Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom) by considering how same-sex eroticism in Iola Leroy might overlap with other forms of minority identity undergoing redefinition in the postbellum era. The book’s thematic rejection of racial passing, I argue, offers one way to begin this analysis by requiring its readers to reevaluate Iola Leroy’s apparent investment in ideologies of racial uplift. On the surface, the novel positions passing negatively; its black characters refuse to pass as white in order to affirm their loyalties to the race. But in this refusal of passing, and its corresponding lessons on the ways that visibility and knowledge do not always neatly correspond, the book calls our attention to other sites of cultural (and critical) misrecognition. We might read passing in the novel, then, as both theme and interpretive method, as a paradigm that allows us to acknowledge those aspects of the book we may not otherwise see. In its attention to the complex cultural position of black identity in the postbellum era, Iola Leroy not only records African Americans’ hope for social equality following Reconstruction but also delineates the unspoken value systems that characterize democratic citizenship. By implicitly considering what (and who) may be overlooked in uplift’s attempts to empower black communities, the novel chronicles some of the specific intracultural consequences of civic enfranchisement. The book’s engagement with issues of ideological representation thus extends beyond black-white relations to examine how black culture defines itself after emancipation. In this respect, the book seems less a roadmap for the future of the race than it does an examination of the processes by which such roadmaps are created—offering an analysis whose social and cultural repercussions require not only a reevaluation of Harper’s relationship to hegemonic ideologies, but also a reassessment of our contemporary paradigms for minority identity and their attendant political concerns. Iola Leroy, in other words, may be much more than the novel readers think it is.

I. From its first pages, Iola Leroy engages the dynamics of social passing. By detailing the ways that slaves feign indifference to the Civil War and its personal significance to those held in bondage, the text

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challenges the assumption that minority populations can be known by virtue of their public personae. Within seemingly innocuous discussions of the produce market, for example, slaves communicate important news on the war’s battles while attending to their daily tasks. “[U]nder this apparently careless exterior,” Harper tells us, “there was an undercurrent of thought which escaped the cognizance of their masters. In conveying tidings of the war, if they wished to announce a victory of the Union army, they said the butter was fresh . . . If defeat befell them, then the butter and other produce were rancid or stale.”4 Through such acts of social masquerade, slaves acquire and circulate knowledge of the war. In so doing, they rely on white culture’s presupposition that, because traditionally illiterate, slaves have no means by which to assess the political climate. The book emphasizes this dynamic by describing the alternative literacy strategies slaves employ to gather information typically withheld from them.5 While attending to her chores, for example, Aunt Linda is able to gauge the Union army’s progress by closely reading her mistress’s face: “ ‘I looks at her ebery mornin’ wen she comes inter dis kitchen,’ ” she says. “ ‘Ef her face is long an’ she walks kine o’ droopy den I thinks things is gwine wrong for dem. But ef she comes out yere looking mighty pleased . . . den I knows de Secesh is gittin’ de bes’ ob de Yankees’ ” (9–10). Linda notes that even those slaves seemingly least interested in the war only mask their true concerns. She describes the antics of another slave, Jake, but notes that his cavorting serves a distinct purpose: “ ‘[T]o look at him skylarking dere while de folks is waitin’ for dere letters, an’ talkin’ bout de war, yer wouldn’t think dat boy had a thimbleful of sense. But Jake’s listenin’ all de time wid his eyes and his mouf wide open, an’ ketchin’ eberything he kin, an’ a heap ob news he gits dat way’ ” (11). As Linda’s comments suggest, social passing in these instances is more than a strategy to acquire knowledge; it is also a literal survival tactic. Because slaves and their masters hold diametrical opinions on the war’s outcome, the slave population is forced to appear indifferent to the war’s progress or suffer punishment for their insubordination. Acts of social impersonation thus reflect the power inequities within slavery and ultimately serve as a crucial means for racial solidarity. In “[inventing] a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battle-field” (9), slaves band together under a shared oppression. Even traditional occasions for communal bonding are reconfigured within slavery as opportunities for strategic intracultural communication. Prayer meetings, for instance, are held not only to celebrate the gospel but also to “mingle [the participants’] prayers

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and tears, and lay plans for escaping to the Union army. Outwitting the vigilance of the patrollers and home guards, [slaves] established these meetings miles apart, extending into several States” (13). The importance of such survival tactics, the book tells us, does not diminish with emancipation. Indeed, the multiple levels of discrimination and racial abuse facing African Americans during Reconstruction require perhaps an even greater commitment to racial solidarity. To contend with the newly stoked hostility white society feels toward the black population, cultural survival comes to depend less on covert alliances and more on open displays of racial unity. Passing’s efficacy as a strategy for social bonding, therefore, is significantly reconfigured following the war. Given postbellum efforts to pathologize cultural difference, the novel suggests that African Americans locate community in Reconstruction not through a masking of their political concerns but rather through a public assertion of their loyalties to the race. The book implies that such allegiances are all the more radical when claimed by those who are not obviously marked as racial minorities. In several scenes, black characters light-skinned enough to pass for white choose, instead, to identify publicly as African American. The novel promotes this understanding most comprehensively through Iola’s character, a mixed-race woman raised as white who is remanded to slavery when her father unexpectedly dies. Upon learning her racial identity, Iola does not lament her fate but instead embraces her black heritage, sparking a commitment to the race that will characterize her role throughout the remainder of the novel. When the white Dr. Gresham proposes marriage to Iola, for example, she muses on the consequences of such a union, expressing concern not over Gresham discovering her “secret,” but rather over the possibility that the marriage will not allow her fully to express her black identity. She concludes that she can never marry Gresham, since, to the man she weds, her “ ‘heart must be as open as the flowers to the sun. [She] could not accept his hand and hide from him the secret of [her] birth’ ” (111). When Iola ultimately reveals her racial background to Gresham, he again presses her to accept his proposal. Her heritage does not affect his love, he tells her, since her “ ‘complexion is as fair as [his]’ ” (116). Iola responds with an affirmation of her new-found racial pride: “ ‘[S]hould the story of my life be revealed to your family, would they be willing to ignore all the traditions of my blood, forget all the terrible humiliations through which I have passed? I have too much selfrespect to enter your house under a veil of concealment’ ” (117). Iola

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envisions a future for herself in the public world of racial uplift, her sense of duty forged by the difficulties she has recently endured: “ ‘I intend, when this conflict is over, to cast my lot with the freed people as a helper, teacher, and friend. I have passed through a fiery ordeal, but this ministry of suffering will not be in vain’ ” (114). By refusing to pass, Iola does more than assert her racial identity; she also signals a specifically female form of social activism by subverting traditional gender roles. Not content to retreat into the privatized domestic realm as wife and mother, particularly if such a move requires her to conceal her racial heritage, Iola opts instead for a public life dedicated to service to her race. In so doing, she rejects both the role of the tragic mulatto and the cultural logic of the separate spheres.6 As critic Carla L. Peterson points out, “Iola works to redeem her race, not by remaining by the hearth, but by mediating between private and public spheres within the black community— between home, church, and school.”7 By subordinating private desire to public duty, and by refusing a proposal that would require their separation, Iola gestures to the political possibilities black women might embrace in the postbellum United States. Iola’s affirmation of her racial identity thus has consequences specific to her identity as a woman. In this way, the text notes that identity categories typically understood as discrete actually exist in complex imbrication, offering a nineteenth-century illustration of what we would today call intersectionality—an analysis of the ways that categories of identity (such as race, gender, sexuality, and class) might profitably be examined in relation to one another.8 Valerie Smith notes that intersectionality, as praxis, “can illuminate the diverse ways in which relations of domination and subordination are produced” by offering a “site of critique that challenges monolithic notions of Americanness, womanhood, blackness, or, for that matter, black womanhood.” 9 Smith suggests, moreover, that intersectional analysis provides a means to identify some of the ways in which discursive forms not typically associated with theoretical critique (such as oratory, autobiography, and the novel) might in fact function as theory. “Too frequently,” Smith observes, “the adjective ‘theoretical’ is bestowed upon specific texts by the corporate culture of the academy and becomes a manifestation of the uneven distribution of power that conceals its own contingencies.”10 With Smith’s caveat in mind (and as the intersectional dimensions of Iola’s character illustrate) we might thus read Iola Leroy not only as a literary effort in the cause for racial uplift, but also as a theoretical analysis of the ramifications the movement has for the diverse identity categories that exist within black culture.

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This understanding helps broaden the perspective of some contemporary scholarship on the novel. Analyses of the text’s ideological strategies have tended to focus almost exclusively on Iola’s character, and as a result, the book’s political significance has been defined primarily in relation to black womanhood.11 To a considerable degree, the text encourages this association, since the struggles of its female protagonist largely propel the novel’s plot. But while it is surely true that Harper intends to counter her era’s degrading stereotypes of African American women, interpreting the novel’s ideological critique chiefly in relation to Iola’s character may unintentionally elide its significance to other minoritized populations. If, for example, Harper aims to carve out cultural space for black female activism by blurring the distinctions between separate spheres of action for men and women, that objective also holds crucial repercussions for black masculinity. Indeed, the text notes that African American women and men encounter different problems in the postReconstruction United States based on differences in gender. While black women faced dangers that accompanied privatization (particularly in terms of their ostensible sexual availability), black men, by contrast, faced dangers due precisely to their identities being rendered too public. As demonstrated by the widespread practice of lynching, black men’s public visibility in the postbellum era increasingly became for them a personal liability.12 To counter cultural stereotypes that characterized black men as sexual menaces (and thus as threats to the purity of white womanhood), the black male body needed to be privatized, rendered harmless and explicitly sympathetic. Accordingly, Harper’s political and ideological project appears to follow two distinct but complementary trajectories. The text not only depicts virtuous women publicly committed to the race; it also portrays upstanding black men who are domestically inclined. Both characterizations, the book suggests, are necessary to offset the era’s stereotypes of black women as private sexual concubines and of black men as public sexual predators. Consequently, Harper presents several black male characters whose priorities are overtly domestic. Uncle Ben, for instance, describes the agony he feels in having to choose between freedom and familial obligation but notes that for him such decisions are ultimately moot. Despite his desire to fight in the war, he is unwilling to leave behind his aging mother. “ ‘I mean to stick by her as long as there is a piece of her,’ ” he tells us. “ ‘I can’t go over to the army an’ leave her behind, for if I did, an’ anything should happen, I would never forgive myself. . . . I don’t want to be free and leave her behind in

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slavery’ ” (31). In a comparable act of devotion, Uncle Daniel also refuses to join the Union forces, claiming that his promise to look after his master’s family outweighs his personal desire for freedom. Although his friends chide him for this decision, Daniel explains that his obligations to his master rest along familial lines. As a child, Master Robert looked to Daniel as a surrogate for his dead mother, and later, it was Master Robert who made possible Daniel’s marriage to his beloved wife, Katie. While Daniel thus supports others in their quest for freedom, his personal responsibilities preclude his ability to fight: “ ‘I’se mighty glad you hab a chance for your freedom; but, ez I tole yer, I promised Marse Robert I would stay, an’ I mus’ be as good as my word’ ” (28). Harper makes clear that for men like Ben and Daniel, unselfish loyalty to family (however defined) is as important as freedom or personal gratification. In this way, the text overturns cultural stereotypes that portray black men as public threats by emphasizing their private domestic investments. More than merely pointing out the ways that these men are principled members of society and dedicated to their race, the book specifically highlights their individual commitments to hearth, home, and family. This dynamic is most fully embodied in the character of Iola’s uncle, Robert Johnson. In many respects, Robert functions precisely as the book operates as a whole. Like the text, he is principled, righteous, even decorous, blending social critique with a combination of dignity and grace. He takes offense at hypocrisy in any form and condemns the particular inconsistencies that exist between slavery and the value systems of the dominant culture. He notes, for instance, that he does not “ ‘take much stock in white folks’ religion,’ ” especially “ ‘that kind which could ride to church on Sundays, and talk so solemn with the minister about heaven and good things, then come home and light down on the servants like a thousand of bricks’ ” (47–48). Robert values honesty and candor over pretense and affectation, a principled stance that also encompasses his opinions on racial identity. Despite his own light skin, he refuses to pass as white. At the suggestion that he pass in order to further his career in the Union army, for example, Robert notes that for him personal ambition is less important than assisting his race as a whole: “ ‘[W]hen a man’s been colored all his life it comes a little hard for him to get white all at once,’ ” he tells us. “ ‘Were I to try it, I would feel like a cat in a strange garret’ ” (43). Tellingly, it is Robert’s dedication to his race that inspires his bravery, and the novel links Robert’s subsequent heroism in the war directly to his racial identity. “ ‘I think my place is where I am

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most needed,’ ” he sums up, a perspective he echoes in his admiration for his nephew, Harry, who similarly refuses to pass. “ ‘I think it would be treason not only to the race, but to humanity,’ ” Robert states to Harry, “ ‘to have you ignoring your kindred and masquerading as a white man’ ” (43, 203). Keenly aware of society’s pervasive racism and bigotry, Robert underscores the need for racial solidarity following emancipation. Indeed, he posits such commitments as critical to black cultural survival. While these beliefs point undeniably to a strong affirmation of black agency and cultural self-worth, they also translate for Robert into a very personal quest for domestic contentment. Harper mitigates Robert’s activist inclinations by depicting him as principally invested in the home; he reads racial solidarity explicitly through the family. Indeed, the text tells us that “the earnest purpose of Robert’s life” following the war was “to bind anew the ties which slavery had broken and gather together the remnants of his scattered family” (148). Robert realizes these goals by embarking on a quest to find his mother, from whom he has been separated for nearly thirty years. When a chance encounter at a church revival reunites them, Robert sets his mother’s future comfort as his highest priority: “ ‘My dear mother . . . now that I have found you, I mean to hold you fast just as long as you live. . . . I am going to take you home to live with me, and to be as happy as the days are long’ ” (183). As the family settles in the North, the text describes Robert’s home as a center of domestic bliss: “Robert had given his mother the pleasantest room in the house, and in the evening the family would gather around her, tell her the news of the day, read to her from the Bible, join with her in thanksgiving for mercies received and in prayer for protection through the night” (267). Through such scenes, Harper refutes stereotypes of black men as socially threatening. At the same time, she challenges the cultural supposition that only white society values familial relations. Because Robert refuses both the gender and racial stereotypes typically assigned to black men, his investment in the domestic thus serves as a tacitly political statement. Through his character, Harper underscores the ways that African American culture’s apparent capitulation to conventional hegemonic values may in fact implicitly critique such principles.13 In this respect, the numerous black characters who refuse to pass as white may comment ironically on the text’s own willingness to pass as conservative. The book repeatedly highlights this understanding by emphasizing the ways that African American civic involvement politicizes

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hegemony’s most cherished values by engaging them on their own terms, a dynamic illustrated by the novel’s complex treatment of the intersections among race, gender, and domesticity. As an extension of these concerns, marriage, in particular, functions in the text as an important marker of newly acquired black civil rights. As scholar Claudia Tate explains, because African Americans were denied the legal right to wed under slavery, the act of marrying in the postbellum era became for black culture an important political expression of civic participation. “Matrimony, in this context,” Tate notes, “is the very sign of social progress for black Americans; it provides the medium for expressing a people’s affirmation of their civil liberty and for measuring their propensity for civilization.”14 As noted earlier, Iola rejects Dr. Gresham’s proposal because marriage to him would require her to repress her heritage and thus abandon her efforts to assist the race. For precisely the opposite reason, she accepts the marriage proposal of Dr. Latimer (who, like Iola, is from a mixed-race background). Because they share similar goals, marriage to Latimer represents not a rejection of but rather a commitment to racial uplift: “Kindred hopes and tastes had knit their hearts; grand and noble purposes were lighting up their lives; and they esteemed it a blessed privilege to stand on the threshold of a new era and labor for those who had passed from the old oligarchy of slavery into the new commonwealth of freedom” (271). This union does not limit Iola’s activism by relegating her to the home; on the contrary, it marks an extension of her public political endeavors. In the couple’s commitment to racial uplift, marriage allows black women to participate in the political realm. With the newly sanctioned freedom to wed, public and private spheres also unite. As I have suggested, however, individual differences within black culture lead to tactical differences in black civic involvement. While marriage may serve as an empowering act for black women, intersectional analysis would encourage us to consider also matrimony’s particular significance for black men. Because black civic participation is by definition a public act—and because such publicity signifies differently on the basis of gender (as the text’s treatment of domesticity illustrates)—the act of marriage carries complementary but necessarily distinct meanings for African American women and men. As an expression of civil liberty, marriage challenges hegemonic representations of black women as objects of sexual availability. Equally significant, however, is the way in which the act implicitly repudiates cultural stereotypes that define black men as sexual predators. For black women, marriage provides an avenue for public activism. But

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for black men, the institution serves as an opportunity for a crucial privatization, one that complements the text’s portrayal of black men who value the domestic. As the black male character most fully invested in home and family, Robert would thus seem an ideal candidate for matrimony. It seems highly significant, then, that he never weds. Indeed, at the several points where the issue of marriage is put to him, he evades the topic entirely. Aunt Linda, for example, probes into his personal life through a series of circuitous statements. “ ‘I specs yer’s got a nice little wife up dar whar yer comes from, dat kisses yer ebery day, an’ Sunday, too’ ” (154), she says, while cautioning Robert not to treat his phantom bride as her husband treats her. To these indirect interrogations, Robert merely smiles or changes the subject. At his reunion with his mother, he similarly elides talk of his romantic life. When she mistakenly assumes that Iola is Robert’s wife, he responds with an emphasis placed squarely on the family’s blood relations: “ ‘Oh, no . . . but I believe she is your grandchild, the daughter of the little girl who was sold away from you so long ago’ ” (182–83). Because marriage acts as a crucial sign of black cultural enfranchisement following emancipation, Robert’s implicit resistance to this civic institution is notable in a text where every character, at one point or another, either weds or expresses keen interest in matrimony. While this is not necessarily to suggest that Robert’s character is homosexual, it is certainly not out of the question that Harper was aware of her era’s increased interest in identifying and policing sexual “inversion” and thus was alert to the tacitly ideological statement she makes by including this childless bachelor among the text’s many happy couples.15 Because the book does not include an obvious figure (male or female) for Robert’s affections, however, his disinterest in marriage appears instead to comment indirectly on the text’s ideological interrogation of the civil liberties granted with emancipation. “ ‘I think there is a great deal of misplaced sentiment at weddings,’ ” Iola’s brother Harry claims at the end of the novel. “ ‘Oh, here are a couple just married, and who are as happy as happy can be; and people will crowd around them wishing much joy; but who thinks of wishing joy to the forlorn old bachelors and restless old maids?’ ” (277). Harry’s declaration calls attention to his uncle’s domestic lack. True fulfillment—as linked to both personal satisfaction and, in Tate’s formulations, to racial commitment—can be realized only within matrimony. Those who remain unattached are, in Harry’s definition, either sad or discontent.

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That Robert appears neither unhappy nor dissatisfied, however, suggests that an implicit irony may lie behind such judgments. On one level, his character might simply demonstrate that the civic promise of emancipation can be realized even outside traditional social structures. Yet there appear to be significant personal consequences to Robert’s bachelorhood. Although he espouses the need for racial solidarity more consistently than any other character in the novel, his voice increasingly fades as the text marches past the Civil War and into Reconstruction. By the time the novel’s talented tenth assemble to discuss the future of the race, he is completely mute. While some scholars attribute this silence to an ideological displacement of folk culture (which, in this view, Robert ostensibly represents), the fact that Robert has functioned as the text’s principal mediator between diverse communities suggests that he is equal to the task of discussing the race question with this august group.16 As such, it would appear that other reasons effect his silence. Because civic enfranchisement (and racial duty) is linked repeatedly in the text to marriage, and because marriage is predicated on a public heterosexual commitment, it seems that African Americans who remain unattached—whatever their private reasons for doing so—cannot fully enjoy the civil liberties granted with emancipation. As a result, the dejection Harry describes is thrust upon Robert. Although his commitment to racial uplift remains steadfast, Robert’s disinterest in marriage appears significantly to compromise his status as a race man. Consequently, the text suggests that freedom’s unspoken ideological restrictions are not wholly consistent with its promise of individual autonomy. Robert’s bachelorhood thus might function as an implicit commentary on postbellum black solidarity. Prior to its depictions of Reconstruction, the novel emphasizes Robert’s central importance to black cultural survival. He not only fights for freedom in the battles of the Civil War; he is also instrumental in reuniting the various branches of his family. That his strong voice and physical presence diminish following emancipation, however, suggests that black cultural values have shifted during Reconstruction. Slavery, of course, is never preferable to freedom. But the novel seems to caution against accepting the values associated with hegemonic civic institutions without careful consideration of their specific ramifications for African American culture. Robert’s relationship to matrimony is paradigmatic in this regard. Alone, his usefulness is uncertain. Like the eccentric uncle relegated to an upstairs bedroom, Robert is similarly shuttled out of sight—a relic of the past.

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II. I offer this sexualized, not to say queer, reading of Robert’s character as an example of how readers might reconsider Iola Leroy’s political agenda. As a nineteenth-century version of intersectional analysis, the novel describes the ways that black participation in civic culture has different social implications based on differences in personal identity, and in this respect, scholarship that gauges the text’s literary and cultural merit solely in terms of its seemingly positive relationship to the objectives of racial uplift may neglect other facets of Harper’s critique. While the novel clearly seeks cultural enfranchisement for African Americans as a whole, it is also attuned to the specific distinctions among identities that affect how uplift is experienced by the race’s individual members—an understanding underscored by Robert’s declining importance to African American culture. Indeed, the text’s treatment of marriage suggests the extent to which civil liberties understood as ideologically color-blind may in fact have radically different meanings for black and white culture, respectively. The book thus notes that enfranchised citizenship carries specificities that are based precisely on the differences it purports to ignore in the name of liberal democracy. While Iola Leroy does not propose a specifically black model of sovereignty as an alternative civic paradigm, it does tacitly suggest that the nation’s new citizens need not adopt, pro forma, the hegemonic value systems that accompany enfranchisement. In fact, the book implies that resistance to such ideologies may represent for the minority subject the truest measure of one’s civil liberty. Aunt Linda, for example, repeatedly rejects conventional forms of literacy. Traditionally described as the most important step in the slave’s progress up from bondage, book learning, to Linda, is less important than basic survival: “ ‘[S]ence freedom’s com’d,’ ” she tells us, “ ‘I’se bin scratchin’ too hard to get a libin’ to put my head down to de book’ ” (156). Linda explains her lack of interest in learning to read through a series of self-deprecating comments—“‘I think it would gib me de hysterics ef I war to try to git book larnin’ froo my pore ole head’ ” (156); “ ‘Oh, yer can’t git dat book froo my head, no way you fix it. I knows nuff to git to hebben, and dats all I wants to know’ ” (276)—but the text insists that Linda is in fact quite intelligent. Her illiteracy is understood, instead, as a deliberate choice on her part to remain uneducated. While Linda never directly states her reasons for this decision, the book describes her resistance as a kind of implicit protest: “Aunt Linda was kind and obliging, but there was one place where she drew the line, and that was at learning to read” (276).

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Linda’s opposition to reading reconfigures the values attached to traditional literacy practices. Her wisdom stems not from books and schooling, but from an alternative literacy predicated on the sharp observational skills that were necessary (and valued) within slavery. While she clearly relishes her freedom, Linda cannily notes the intracultural changes wrought by a perhaps too-easy adoption of the unstated ideologies that have accompanied emancipation. Literacy may indeed serve as an index of newly acquired civic rights, but such enfranchisement also has the potential, in Linda’s view, to diminish the black cultural values that strengthened the race during the antebellum era. Because the value systems of the dominant culture may manipulate (and even corrupt) black people, and because these ideologies are embedded within many aspects of enfranchised citizenship, some ex-slaves reject outright the hegemonic ideals they are expected to desire. Not all black people want to be like white people, the text implies, despite a pervasive cultural arrogance that presumes otherwise, an understanding Linda’s often frank commentary underscores. She is pleased, for instance, that prayer meetings among African Americans no longer have to be held in secret, but she laments the fact that these gatherings have lost some of the religious integrity they possessed before the war: “ ‘[I]t don’t seem as ef de people had de same good ‘ligion we had den. ‘Pears like folks is took up wid makin’ money an’ politics’ ” (162). Linda implicitly links such cultural distortions with hegemonic influence. Although she “ ‘thinks a powerful heap’ ” of the white men who fought for her freedom, she does not automatically embrace (or approve of) all white people and their actions. For example, she condemns those “ ‘mean white men comin’ down yere an’ settin’ up dere grog-shops, tryin’ to fedder dere nests sellin’ licker to pore culled people. Deys de bery kine ob men,’ ” she tells us, “ ‘dat used ter keep dorgs to ketch de runaways’ ” (159). Through such observations, Linda qualifies her appreciation of white culture. Although some white people may be responsible for her freedom, not all whites are deserving of her gratitude or admiration. Despite the promise of emancipation, Linda’s commentary underscores the extent to which black people, as a group, must still band together under hegemonic subjugation. Even African Americans with impeccable moral character are denied equal rights within postbellum social hierarchies. For instance, although Iola and Robert lead upstanding, dignified lives in the North, they are still subject to racial intolerance and overt prejudice. Iola’s attempts to secure employment are met with the bigotry of white employers and co-workers, and

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Robert’s quest for a suitable home for his family is frustrated by the explicit racism of white landlords who refuse to rent to a black man. As such, the text casts racial harmony as a future goal rather than as a present reality. Discrimination against blacks does not end following the war; it is merely reconfigured under Jim Crow segregation.17 Thus while the text suggests that emancipation remedied several of slavery’s inequities (as families are reunited, and abusive masters receive their just deserts), such depictions may not reflect Harper’s optimism so much as they ironically acknowledge the dominant culture’s own needs. Given the social turmoil of Reconstruction, many whites were unlikely to be sympathetic to overt protests against postbellum bigotry. Presumably, the “real” issue—freedom—had been solved by the Civil War, and thus some white readers would be loath to believe that the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment had not been fulfilled. We might read Iola Leroy, then, as a careful negotiation between diverse groups of readers with competing interests. While Harper defers to the sensibilities of hegemonic culture (both in the book’s apparent capitulation to white bourgeois values, and in its lack of radical social critique), she also embeds within her text concerns that speak directly to her African American readers.18 By depicting the ways that racism affects all black people, Harper illustrates the difficult social realities of African American life in the postbellum era, problems that cannot be remedied by an uncritical adoption of the hegemonic values that accompany civic enfranchisement. The novel’s final scenes reflect this inherent skepticism. Although the family achieves some measure of personal success in the North, ultimately they return South because the need for racial uplift remains keen. While we might interpret this return to an all-black community as a positive example of African American self-sufficiency, such an explicit disconnect from white culture also suggests the degree to which self-segregation may be a matter of basic cultural survival.19 That is, the reasons that impel the family’s return South complement the text’s more general exposé of racial discrimination and bigotry. Significantly, while the majority of the novel is narrated retrospectively (which distances the reader, temporally, from its accounts of racial prejudice), the story shifts to the present tense as it describes the family’s uplift efforts. Emancipation’s promise for full and equal citizenship, it would appear, is as yet an unrealized goal. Accordingly, Iola Leroy highlights the motivations behind (and continuing need for) what we would today call identity politics.20 While the text attempts to refute insidious cultural stereotypes about African Americans, it simultaneously notes that such ideological

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interventions do not automatically guarantee that white culture will refrain from categorizing minoritized populations on the basis of their (ostensibly) public identities. Indeed, the novel reminds us that the identity politics so often disparaged in contemporary culture are themselves a product of hegemony, a necessary return to cultural specificity mandated by the dominant culture’s manifold expressions of intolerance toward “the other.” To thus characterize the novel, as several critics do, as a naively cheerful, accommodationist account of race relations in post-Reconstruction America may be to misrepresent its narrative strategies.21 Indeed, as a whole, the text appears to operate in inverse relation to its light-skinned characters. That is, to the degree that Iola, Latimer, Harry, and Robert refuse to pass as white, the novel itself passes as a sanguine meditation on the status of African Americans in the postbellum era. As an experienced political activist, Harper understood the need to appease the dominant culture.22 But the novel’s apparent concessions to white readers may only mask a more fundamental discontent. Iola Leroy might thus be understood as a book that uses passing not only as a theme but also as a paradigm for analyzing the ongoing difficulties of black life in the postbellum United States. Consequently, Dr. Latimer’s suggestion that Iola write a “good, strong” book to aid in racial uplift is not merely an attempt to prove that African Americans are as talented as whites; it is also a vital expression of intracultural definition, since in Latimer’s view, “ ‘[I]t seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man’s soul’ ” (263). As scholarship on the novel frequently points out, Iola Leroy is Harper’s attempt to provide this crucial text, one with distinctly pedagogical aspirations. More than a celebration of African American bourgeois morality, the book is an implicit evaluation of postbellum culture offered through the perspective of its black citizens, providing an alternative understanding of civil liberty predicated on the difficult lessons of Reconstruction.23 In this respect, the novel asks its readers to consider very carefully the specific intracultural effects of uplift’s future-oriented vision. Social advancement, the text implies, does not necessarily entail inclusion, and those who were crucial to the race prior to emancipation may get left behind in the name of progress.24 The nostalgia embedded in such analysis—and the sensitivity to intracultural difference it implies—suggests a somewhat different relationship than is typically observed between Iola Leroy and the hegemonic value systems the text supposedly embraces. Indeed, the scholarly reluctance

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to acknowledge Harper’s concern for the past reveals much about scholars’ received (and often narrow) understandings of movements such as racial uplift and their ostensible champions, for as one critic incisively observes, “What we remember is highly selective, and how we retrieve it says as much about desire and denial as it does about remembrance.”25 It is in this context, then, that we might especially appreciate the novel’s subtitle, Shadows Uplifted. Not only does it call attention to Harper’s activist intent, but also draws attention to those figures relegated to history’s shadows (like Robert, like Linda) who do not necessarily fit neatly within the future’s political landscape, but who nonetheless shape that future in vital, inexorable ways.

C onc lusion

R e t u r n f rom t h e Be yon d

This book could not have been written even as little as a year ago.

Following a historic election in which racial, sexual, and gender identities played an unprecedented role in shaping political and popular opinion, the United States has voted into office its first president of African American descent, and President Obama, in turn, has assembled one of the most diverse cabinets in the nation’s history. It would seem that we have finally arrived at a point in American culture in which social identity has little or no bearing on public success—at a point, that is, in which we have indeed moved beyond race, sexuality, and gender. And yet the fact that this election has been hailed as a watershed moment in our nation’s history rests, ironically, on an acknowledgment of the social salience of identity categories themselves. We recognize this moment’s cultural importance, in other words, precisely because it demonstrates not only that identities exist but also that they have real, tangible social effects. Even those scholars most critical of identity would likely agree on this point; few would argue with the claim that racial, gender, and sexual identities (even if socially constructed) have important lived consequences. The sticking point in contemporary criticism, however, seems to rest in the extent to which we believe such identities matter in the social world itself. To some, race, sex, and gender are ideological nuisances to be overcome; to others, they are inescapable essences. But the polarization of these viewpoints neglects the epistemic possibilities of an alternative approach to identity, one that mitigates this apparent theoretical deadlock by exploring how identities themselves may be both constructed and real. As I have suggested, analytical paradigms that highlight the constructed nature of identity often do so for important, noteworthy ends. By emphasizing the ways that categories are too varied to contain common essences, such theories attempt to eradicate social oppression, economic segregation, and political disenfranchisement. But as the work of the authors in this

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study demonstrates, such theories also have the potential, paradoxically, to eradicate the means by which we come to understand both others and the self. To do away with categories entirely, then, may be to do away with significant epistemic and cultural tools. What is needed, instead, are analytical models that both highlight the contingencies of identity categories and acknowledge their potential as valuable sites of social knowledge. Such an understanding has been advocated by no less a public figure than President Obama himself. In “A More Perfect Union,” his now-famous March 2008 speech on race and race relations, Obama suggested that the divisive comments made by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright during his campaign (namely, Wright’s assertion that the United States has more faith in white supremacy and black subjugation than it does in organized religion) point to “the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through—a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” Tellingly, Obama calls for conversation on these issues precisely to break the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white,” Obama explains, “I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.”1 The solution to the challenges posed by social differences, Obama notes, is not to ignore or attempt to transcend them but instead to engage critically their cultural and epistemological potential. As I have suggested throughout Minority Reports, one way we might analyze and affirm social difference is by acknowledging the durability of distinct categories of identity; that is, rather than moving “beyond” these categories, we might examine such categories on their terms but to alternative strategic ends. In so doing, we open up a space for a deconstructive analysis that nevertheless respects the very real ways individuals experience cultural difference. Indeed, as critic Satya Mohanty notes, “[T]o say that experiences and identities are constructed is not to prejudge the question of their epistemic status. Radical skepticism about the cognitive implications of cultural identity is not the only alternative to an ahistorical essentialism.”2 In other words, contemporary critical theory may give too much credit to either/or approaches to identity. By acknowledging instead the ways that personal identity can be simultaneously constructed and authentic, Mohanty explains, we broaden our knowledge of the world and our place within it. Such an approach to the dilemmas posed by identity categories is encouraging for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the

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fact that students often grasp this understanding intuitively. My own students, for example, are aware that they live in a diverse nation, and they enjoy discussing how cultural identity can take on various forms. What they repeatedly point out, however, is that for them even the most complex identities are typically defined within very distinct categories. Despite the fact that many of my students understand their own identities as heterogeneous and diverse, they note that others often identify them as belonging to one specific race (or gender, or sexuality) by virtue of what they most appear to be. While my students are thus willing to consider the ways that identities may be constructed, they are quick to point out that how they are perceived in culture positions them in distinct ways in the world. To support this argument, they often mention their own experiences with racial profiling, gay bashing, or gender discrimination. Their examples demonstrate that identity categories exist with often very real social consequences.3 As I have noted at various points throughout this study, much recent scholarship would fault my students for their ostensibly naive understanding of personal identity—partly because identities are seen as inherently too diverse to justify (and sustain) communal affiliation, and partly because identity categories themselves are seen as promoting a kind of ideological sectionalism. Such critics view the discrete analytical paradigms initially established by ethnic, gay and lesbian, and feminist studies as evidence of an outmoded “identity politics”—a retrograde notion of belongingness that is seemingly out of touch with contemporary society. To correct this epistemological (and political) error, then, post-structuralist scholars often advocate a more syncretic focus on identity by emphasizing theories of hybridity and heterogeneity. The theoretical attraction of this solution, however, may not adequately address the significance of lived experience within (and to) such analytical paradigms. Indeed, as critic Christopher Castiglia notes, Leftist academics . . . have spent decades battling with humanism’s abstract vocabulary (“equality,” “liberty,” “consent,” “rights,” and “happiness,” to name a few), taking the ontological vacuity of these terms as proof of at best their political inefficacy and at worst their function as a disciplinary apparatus. . . . While humanism’s vocabulary is groundless, however, it is not arbitrary and, hence, should not be abandoned but debated and refined. In so doing, a humanist vocabulary might become not the grounds of a nebulous and anxiety-producing interiority, but the occasion for collaborative and at times fantastic invention. . . . Without the conflict provided by divergent experiences, interpretations, and demands, in other words, sociality is mooted.4

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Castiglia’s comments echo the concerns of my students who repeatedly (and convincingly) argue that any attempt to move “beyond” identity categories faces a crucial paradox: though identities may indeed be multifaceted and hybrid, they are rarely granted that understanding in real life. Thus while privileging post-structuralist conceptions of the self may move us beyond an ideological determinism, such theories tend to offer little comfort to those who feel the social effects of identity categories on a regular basis. One pedagogical manifestation of this understanding frequently occurs, for example, when I teach Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a work that traces the complicated, often harrowing experiences of Jess Goldberg, a transgender activist modeled, in part, on Feinberg’s own life. Much of what my students find fascinating about this novel is Jess’s unwillingness to comply with any of the conventional categories society uses to make sense of others. Jess refuses to identify as female and finds it impossible as well to identify fully as male. The novel’s exploration of such in-betweenness extends also to its arguments about language. Because the existing categories of “he” and “she” do not easily apply to Jess’s understanding of personal identity, the book notes that new pronouns need to be invented to account for those who exist outside of traditional categories and, indeed, outside of traditional language. Ze and hir, therefore, are Feinberg’s pronouns of choice. Predictably, some students object to these linguistic reconstructions. But the majority of my students admire Feinberg’s unwillingness to be confined by definitions that would otherwise restrict Jess’s sense of self. They applaud this move to force language to fit identity, rather than the reverse. Moreover, their comments on Stone Butch Blues often have quite striking ideological ramifications. My students endorse Feinberg’s efforts at self-definition not for their deconstructive intentions, but rather for what they perceive to be clearly constructive ends. In their view, in other words, Feinberg is not muddling these categories in order to get rid of categories altogether. Instead, they see these redefinitions of identity (and of language) as efforts to find a place for transgender identities within the larger culture of which they are a part. They understand these linguistic reconstructions, that is, not as self-segregation on the basis of social exclusion but rather as an attempt to make the self understood by those who do not yet have the knowledge to appreciate Jess’s unique social position. My students thus see Jess’s need for identity recategorization not just as self-defining but also as culturally reparative. This interpretation of Stone Butch Blues tends to complement my students’ lack of tolerance for theoretical approaches to the world

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that ignore what they know to be true in their day-to-day existence. Consequently, much of what they appreciate about Feinberg’s text is its claim that those who are understood as “different” need to find realistic ways to negotiate that difference in their dealings with (and their own tolerance of) the culture at large. Perhaps even more telling, my students often describe their exposure to texts that address these cultural negotiations (such as Feinberg’s novel, or works by Harriet Wilson, Frederick Douglass, and Frances E. W. Harper) as a culturally reparative act in itself. Although they find many scenes in these texts upsetting (even profoundly disturbing), students note the ways that these works offer significant epistemic insights both culturally and personally; they provide them, that is, not just with new understandings of populations about which they may know very little, but also with new, unexpected understandings of themselves. Feinberg’s struggle with identity categories, and the concomitant linguistic struggle to define those categories, for instance, resonates with my students in compelling ways. They are not interested in discussing whether the categories “male” or “female” exist or whether they should be abolished entirely. Such questions are pointless, my students argue, because these categories obviously do exist and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. What is more important, they believe, is to figure out how each of us relate to these categories—to figure out how we might reconcile how the world makes sense of us with how we make sense of ourselves. I suspect that most of my students are not actively considering what it might mean for them to be transsexual or transgendered. Their comments, instead, point to an attempt to come to terms with the relationship between identity and epistemology. Like Feinberg, my students repeatedly note the ways that they too have felt different, misunderstood, and unacknowledged in their attempts to “fit in” with society at large. And thus in this respect, it is my students’ difference from Feinberg that allows them to understand their relationship to hir. Tellingly, the legal scholar Kenji Yoshino identifies this shared dynamic as the primary civil rights issue of our time. Yoshino is principally concerned with what he calls “covering”: the obligation “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” Everyone covers, he notes, since “[i]n our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way.”5 Nevertheless, Yoshino observes, being deemed mainstream is still often a requirement of successful social life. Yoshino notes: “We are at a transitional moment in how Americans discriminate. In the old generation, discrimination targeted entire groups—no racial minorities, no women, no gays, no

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religious minorities, no people with disabilities allowed. In the new generation, discrimination directs itself not against the entire group, but against the subset of the group that fails to assimilate to mainstream norms. This new form of discrimination targets minority cultures rather than minority persons. Outsiders are included, but only if we behave like insiders—that is, only if we cover.”6 Yoshino notes further that the expectation that all people should fit into the mainstream is “a hidden assault on our civil rights, [but] we have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. If we look closely, though, we will see that covering is the way many groups are being held back today.”7 Within this paradigm, Yoshino describes how gay people are often asked to be less “overtly” gay, or how black people are asked to be less “overtly” black in order to fit in with mainstream society. He also notes, however, how some people are forced to engage in what he calls “reverse-covering.” They face demands to act “more” gay or “more” black in order to uphold the stereotypes society associates with their respective groups. As a result of such dynamics, Yoshino claims, “Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register. That ascent begins with the recognition that the mainstream is a myth. . . . All of us struggle for self-expression; we all have covered selves.”8 It is precisely this dynamic that marks Feinberg’s struggle for self-definition; that characterizes Wilson’s uneasy relationship to genre throughout Our Nig; that sanctions the critical neglect of Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends; that explains the erasure of Adolph from the scholarship on Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; that informs some of the epistemological limitations of “knowing” Frederick Douglass’ narratives; and that misinterprets Frances E. W. Harper’s commitment to racial solidarity in Iola Leroy. It is also this struggle for self-expression to which my students respond when they claim affiliation with Feinberg, Douglass, or Wilson—one that informs the reactions even of those students who, on the surface, might appear wholly to embody the outward characteristics of social and cultural privilege. It is for this reason, in particular, that the study of identity (and multicultural study more generally) remains critically significant, since such affiliations are based neither on narrow definitions of belongingness nor on shared victimization. Instead, identity categories here are understood as social constructions that require us all to interpret the world in ways that are both personal and communal. It is in this respect, according to Mohanty, that “[identities] are valuable, and their epistemic status should be taken very seriously. In them, and through them, we learn to define and reshape our

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values and commitments, we give texture and form to our collective futures.” 9 Mohanty’s view of a “collective future” is one shared by President Obama, who noted in his comments on the Reverend Wright’s divisive statements that he “chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”10 This vision points to a new paradigm for civil rights, one built both on an acknowledgment of difference and, as Yoshino notes, on a shared “desire for authenticity, our common human wish to express ourselves without being impeded by unreasoning demands for conformity.”11 Such an understanding demonstrates how social categories do not always neatly correspond to our understandings of others or the self. Yet it also reveals how such categories continue to matter deeply in American culture. Ultimately, then, it may be our diversity that permits us to recognize what we have in common—an understanding made possible not by moving beyond our identities but rather by embracing them.

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Introduction: Identity, History, Narrative 1. As my comments here indicate, extremely diverse groups of critics, for extremely diverse reasons, have argued forcefully against both identitybased social struggles and analyses of identity more generally. While some see identity categories (and, indeed, identity itself) as threatening to individual freedom, others worry that such coalitions endanger progressive social movement; consequently, identity-based analyses have been assailed by a wide spectrum of political sensibilities. The scholarship here is farreaching, and I will discuss particular instances of these various positions in the chapters that follow. For representative examples, however, see Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge: 1990); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italian, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Gene Andrew Jarrett, ed., African American Literature beyond Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995); Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam Books, 1983); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998); Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 773–97; Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); and Peter W. Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).

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2. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 206. Despite the provocative claim implied by his title, Michaels does not in fact argue strictly against studies of identity; instead, he contends that studies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability should be subjugated to analyses of a social difference that he feels has been insufficiently examined—namely, class. In effect, then, Michaels merely pits class against other markers of diversity, and in doing so he ironically reifies the very social categories he means to dismantle. To support his position, Michaels cites other critics that, in his words, “share at least some of my [Michaels’s] skepticism about the value of identity” (206), but he provides little elaboration as to how these writers might (or might not) endorse his overriding argument. The authors Michaels cites in this regard include Brian M. Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003); and Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3. Michaels, Trouble, 39. In a positive review of Michaels’s book, Dalton Conley makes a similar statement when he notes that in regard to identitybased programs in American universities, “Perhaps it’s time to say enough is enough.” Conley’s exasperation specifically centers on scholarly studies of white identity; however, he does not discuss any of the key differences that might make various identity-based programs distinct from one another. Instead, his critique lumps together all scholarship organized around identity and then worries that such studies might have “the effect of elevating the unnamed default identity—whiteness.” By conflating diverse forms of identity-based scholarship, and by then positioning these studies (through whiteness) as a threat to racial diversity itself, Conley calibrates an ostensible racial sensitivity through what it is ultimately a call to erase racial identity itself. In this respect, his arguments are intellectually misleading, as are his claims that a better use of academic resources would be “[to] hire folks who study the intersection of race and class”—an oddly disingenuous suggestion, since such hires routinely have been made for several years. See Conley, “The Limits of Identity Politics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2006, B11. 4. Michaels, Trouble, 18. 5. My objections to Michaels’s arguments are shared by a number of other critics, including Stephen Knadler, Eric Lott, and Maria E. Montoya. Lott has been particularly forceful in his critique of Michaels; he notes in a review of The Trouble with Diversity, “It’s silly to claim, as Michaels does here, that class and race should be ‘disarticulated’ from each other, as though they were not interlocking systems of power and inequality. It’s just dumb to claim . . . that Americans can’t think straight about class because it doesn’t afford a politics of identity. . . . It is, finally, perverse to

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

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make the claims Michaels makes simply as a way of defenestrating once and for all the notion of identity politics” (“A Wrongheaded Focus on Class,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2006, B13). In her review of Michaels’ work, Montoya articulates similar reservations: “His [Michaels’s] description of how class and race work in this country is flip at best and cartoonish at worst. He portrays ethnic-studies programs as 1970s-era separatist cells existing only to engage in the identity politics of victimization and counting of brown faces” (“History, Class, and Race Cannot Be Separated,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2006, B11). For an extended critique of Michaels’s work, see Knadler, “Traumatized Racial Performativity: Passing in Nineteenth-Century African-American Testimonies,” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 63–100. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 10. Bill Albertini et al., “Is There Life after Identity Politics?,” New Literary History 31.4 (2000): 622. Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6. In this respect, one might also consider the political controversy surrounding President Obama’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who registered her hope during a 2001 UC Berkeley School of Law lecture that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Judge Sotomayor was forced repeatedly to clarify her remarks, for fear in some quarters that they indicated an unwelcome racial bias and a “liberal agenda.” See, for example, Hollinger, Postethnic; Jarrett, African American; Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Timothy B. Powell, ed., Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). See also several of the authors cited in note 1 (above). Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64. Lani Guinier, “Race and Reality in a Front-Porch Encounter,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2009, http://chronicle.com/article/ RaceReality-in-a/47509. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 7, 6. Emphasis in original. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 6. As I note in my preface, I deliberately use the term “minority” throughout this project to emphasize relations of social power in terms of categories of identity (as opposed to the sheer numbers of people within

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gender, racial, or sexuality-based groups). There are important reasons, of course, to be wary of the term “minority”—namely because such groups may not in fact be minorities outside of Western culture, and because even in the West the very groups to which the expression “minority” typically refers no longer will be minorities, technically speaking, in the near future due to shifts in population demographics. Still, I find the term useful because of its political overtones; in the academy, especially, there remains a nagging tendency to dismiss work that engages issues of minority identity as intellectually inferior or professionally indecorous (my own work included), and frequently such critiques emerge from constituencies that might otherwise position themselves as “allies.” Simply put, I intend my usage of the term “minority” to signal both an understanding that discrepancies in power among social groups continue to exist in the United States and an awareness that such discrepancies often manifest in uneven and unexpected ways. 16. The chapters that follow discuss many of these works in detail, but for early representative examples of this critical disposition, see Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Houston A. Baker, The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mary Helen Washington, Black-Eyed Susans (New York: Anchor Press, 1975); and Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1987). For an invaluable account of canon formation, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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For examples of critical analyses that situate identity as an important theoretical tool, see Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Linda Martín Alcoff et al., Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 357–83; Michael Hames-García, Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004); Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Paula M. L. Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Paula M. L. Moya and Michael HamesGarcía, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (2004): 1–22; and Sean Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 17. For key overviews of the essentialist/constructionist debate, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Edward Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York: Routledge, 1992). For an important consideration of the political and social limitations of speaking “for” others, see Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds., Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 18. Timothy B. Powell, “Introduction: Re-Thinking Cultural Identity,” in Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, ed. Timothy B. Powell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 1–13. Emphasis in original. 19. Critic Samira Kawash describes the appeal of hybridity as “a counter to the reductive, normative, or essentializing representations of authentic and autonomous racial and cultural identities. . . . Hybridity appears to escape from the essentialist logic that characterized previous understandings of cultural identity and difference, and this accounts for much

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

No t e s of its appeal.” Ultimately, however, Kawash is critical of the trend toward hybridity, since, as she puts it,”in the effort to surpass apparently erroneous ideas of purity and essence . . . one might be tempted too quickly to ignore or forget the constitutive power of the color line itself as it produces and organizes knowledge, power, and subjectivity” (Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 4). For example, see the authors listed in note 16 (above). See also Valerie Smith, “ ‘Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 342–55; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word,” differences 1.2 (1989): 124–56; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Strategy, Identity, Writing,” in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 35–49; and David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995). Indeed, as Linda Martín Alcoff puts this issue, “To say that we have an identity is just to say that we have a location in social space, a hermeneutic horizon that is both grounded in a location and an opening or site from which we attempt to know the world. Understood in this way it is incoherent to view identities as something we would be better off without” (“Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 335). In this regard, see especially Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). See also Karen L. Kilcup, ed., Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); and Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). Lawrence Buell, “Circling the Spheres: A Dialogue,” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 472–73. Emphasis in original. Guinier, “Race and Reality.” Guinier, “Race and Reality.” For indispensable studies of the intersection between minority identity and social and economic disparity, see William A. Darity, Jr., and Samuel L. Myers, Jr., The Black Underclass: Critical Essays on Race and Unwantedness (New York: Garland, 1994); and William A. Darity, Jr., and Samuel L. Myers, Jr., Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States since 1945 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1998). Rosaura Sánchez, “On a Critical Realist Theory of Identity,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 34. Paula M. L. Moya articulates a similar perspective

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28. 29. 30.

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on the value of history in studies of identity when she notes that “an ability to take effective steps toward progressive social change is predicated on an acknowledgment of, and a familiarity with, past and present structures of inequality—structures that are often highly correlated with categories of identity” (introduction to Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 8). This view echoes Paula Moya’s observation that “[o]ur conceptions of who we are as social beings (our identities) influence—and in turn are influenced by—our understandings of how our society is structured and what our particular experiences in that society are likely to be” (introduction to Reclaiming, 8). As Eric Lott wryly notes, however, such sentiments are not likely to “settle the hash of anyone who believes identity-politics is so over” (“After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism,” New Literary History 31 [2000]: 667). Emphasis in original. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2–3. Sánchez, “Critical Realist,” 40. See Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Romero, Home; and Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). The chapters that follow consider many of these studies in further depth. For additional important analyses of the intersections among epistemology, experience, and identity in the nineteenth century, see Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); Michele Birnbaum, Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Theo Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007);

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Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006). 31. Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 3. 32. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–12. 33. Emphasis in original. Hendler notes that much of the recent scholarship on nineteenth-century expressions of sympathy and sentimentality tends to emphasize the dynamic’s imperialistic tendencies. In this regard, see Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Hartman, Scenes; Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in NineteenthCentury America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12–32. For other significant studies of sentimental literature (and the often problematic dynamics of sympathy), see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008); David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century

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34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

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America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Tompkins, Sensational; and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Castiglia, Interior, 125. Moya, introduction to Reclaiming, 18. Rosaura Sánchez makes a similar point: “Both identification and identity are discursive processes that cannot be examined outside of experience, that is, outside of the varied social positionings and positionalities that situate individuals. . . . Experience, then, can only be considered within a constellation of positionings that interconnect in multiple ways, never only in one way, as there are always social boundaries and limits that impact particular interconnections and overlappings that are open or closed, that is, available or unavailable, to us, depending on our positioning” (“Critical Realist,” 42). Kawash, Dislocating, 22. Hybridity, Kawash points out, “is a challenge, not only to the question of human ‘being,’ but to the status of knowledge itself, the question of how and if we can know identity or hybridity. To rest with the conclusion that identity is really always hybridity deflects the real challenge of hybridity itself, a challenge posed to the very conditions of modern epistemology and subjectivity” (20). Emphasis in original. Mohanty, Literary Theory, 232–33. For important related discussions, see Alcoff, Visible; Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid”; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing”; Crenshaw, “Mapping”; Harding, Feminist; and Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 339–51. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xix. Critic Holly Jackson reported the original discovery of Kelley-Hawkins’s “true” racial identity. See Jackson, “Mistaken Identity: What If a Novelist Celebrated as a Pioneer of African-American Women’s Literature Turned Out Not to Be Black at All?” Boston Globe, February 20, 2005, D1. For the follow-up article that notes Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s decision to withdraw Kelley-Hawkins from the Schomburg collection, see David Mehegan, “Correcting a Case of Mistaken Identity,” Boston Globe, March 5, 2005, C1. The controversy surrounding Kelley-Hawkins centers on her two novels: Megda (1891); and Four Girls at Cottage City (1898). For relevant scholarship that precedes the revelation about KelleyHawkins’s racial identity, see Dale M. Bauer “Master Thoughts,” in White Scholars/African American Texts, ed. Lisa A. Long (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 186–97; and Carla L. Peterson, “New Negro Modernity: Worldliness and Interiority in the

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42.

43.

No t e s Novels of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins,” in Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, ed. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 111–29. For scholarship that follows it, see Katherine E. Flynn, “A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity: Finding Emma Dunham (née Kelley) Hawkins,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 9.1 (2006): 5–22; Jennifer Harris, “Black Like? The Strange Case of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins,” African American Review 40.3 (2006): 401–19; and Holly Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley: Rethinking Race and Authorship,” PMLA 122.3 (2007): 728–41. See also the collection of essays edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, “Racial Identity, Indeterminacy, and Identification in the Nineteenth Century,” Legacy 24.2 (2007): 157–330; and in particular, the essays by Foreman, “Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews, and The Woman’s Era,” Legacy 24.2 (2007): 248–77; and Sherrard-Johnson, “Radical Tea: Racial Misrecognition and the Politics of Consumption in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at Cottage City,” Legacy 24.2 (2007): 225–47. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006), 192, 187. Guinier, “Race and Reality.” Guinier defines racial literacy as “the capacity to conjugate the grammar of race in different contexts and circumstances. Like the verb ‘to be,’ race takes a different form when we speak about ‘I am’ versus ‘you are’ compared with ‘he is.’ In other words, race still matters at a psychic, economic, and sociological level for people of color, even for those who are middle class or multiracial . . . always the meaning of race needs to be interrogated and conjugated carefully in light of relevant local circumstances and their historic underpinnings.” Yoshino, Covering, 26. Joel Pfister makes a similar point when he notes that “American authors have from the get-go been among America’s most complex, self-reflexive, daring, and artful cultural theorists. When critics grant many of these authors and their fictions the credit they deserve, it is easier to see that their creative insights contribute much to modern understandings of the workings—and political possibilities—of culture” (“Hawthorne as Cultural Theorist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 35). In this respect, scholar John Ernest’s comments on the relationship between interpretation, history, and understanding are particularly apt: “In the most practical and simple terms . . . interpretation involves not only providing a historical context for understanding the text, but also a metacontext for understanding the discourse, documents, and interpretations that usually constitute historical understanding” (“Still Life, with Bones: A Response to Samuel Otter,” American Literary History 20.4 [2008]: 758).

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What Do We Want from Harriet Wilson?

1. As I will argue, the high expectations attached to Our Nig are less a scholarly “problem” than they are a sign of the text’s ongoing significance to contemporary discussions of minority identity. The scholarship here is extensive, but two brief examples may serve as representative in this regard. Hazel V. Carby, for instance, reads Our Nig as an allegorical slave narrative that condemns antebellum racist society (Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]). Margaret Lindgren, on the other hand, delineates a specifically female discourse within the novel that crosses racial lines in an attempt to counter hegemonic patriarchal domination (“Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Redoubled Voice in Black Autobiography,” Obsidian II 8.1 [1993]: 18–38). 2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 147. 3. See Carby, Reconstructing; P. Gabrielle Foreman, “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” Callaloo 13.2 (1990): 313–24; Carla L. Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559–83; and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The arguments that follow are indebted to the scholarship (and critical methods) of these and several other path-breaking feminist scholars, particularly those that examine the intersections of racial and gender identities. I cite several of these critics directly in my text, but for other significant influences on my analysis, see Johnnella E. Butler, “African American Literature and Realist Theory: Seeking the ‘True-True,’ ” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 171–92; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press, 1995); Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Deborah E. McDowell, “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds.,

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6.

7.

8.

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Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). For representative examples of the critical disposition against studies of identity, see note 1 of my introduction. Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 7, 6. Emphasis in original. Valerie Smith offers an important commentary on this dynamic by noting the ways that novels and other discursive forms (especially those by minority authors) are not typically associated with sophisticated theoretical critique (Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings [New York: Routledge, 1998]). Frances Smith Foster, introduction to “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” “Sowing and Reaping,” “Trial and Triumph”: Three Rediscovered Novels, by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xx. Although more recent analytical study may now possess greater analytical awareness into the problematic dynamics Foster mentions, John Ernest notes, in response to Foster’s claims, that “one can still find in scholarship, teaching, and conversation evidence that the pattern of regressive advance still persists and that the presentation of the great majority of nineteenthcentury African-American literary texts is still largely restricted to what amounts to a chapter on ‘Negroes and Slaves,’ surrounded by updates but still largely the same” (“Still Life, with Bones: A Response to Samuel Otter,” American Literary History 20.4 [2008]: 754). For the historical evidence that supports this assertion, see P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts, introduction to Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, by Harriet E. Wilson (New York: Penguin, 2005), xxxiii–xliii; and Barbara A. White, “ ‘Our Nig’ and the SheDevil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family,” American Literature 65 (1993): 19–52. For analyses that comment on the relationship between Frado And Wilson’s respective stories, see Carby, Reconstructing; Beth Maclay Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies,” American Quarterly 43.2 (1991): 199–222; R. J. Ellis, “Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 99–122; R. J. Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig”: A Cultural Biography of a ‘Two-Story’ African American Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003); R. J. Ellis, “Our Nig: Fetters of an American Farmgirl,” in Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854–1936, ed. Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 65–88; R. J. Ellis, “Traps Slyly Laid: Professing Autobiography in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” in Representing

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11.

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13.

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Lives: Women and Auto/Biography, ed. Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 65–76; Foster, Written; and Tate, Domestic. Foreman and Pitts, introduction to Our Nig, xxx. Emphasis in original. John Ernest, “Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” PMLA 109 (1994): 431. See also David Dowling, Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009); Thomas B. Lovell, “By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 52.3 (1996): 1–32; and Joyce W. Warren, “Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism,” in Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 3–25. For example, see Carby, Reconstructing; Ellis, “Body Politics”; Barbara Krah, “Tracking Frado: The Challenge of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig to Nineteenth-Century Conventions of Writing Womanhood,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49.4 (2004): 465–82; Jill Jones, “The Disappearing ‘I’ in Our Nig,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 13.1 (1996): 38–53; Ellen Pratofiorito, “ ‘To Demand Your Sympathy and Aid’: Our Nig and the Problem of No Audience,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 24.1 (2001): 31–48; and Julia Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” American Literature 67.3 (1995): 439–66. Tate, Domestic, 39; Harryette Mullen, “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved,” in The Culture of Sentiment, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 244–64. See also Florence Marfo, “Marks of the Slave Lash: Black Women’s Writing of the 19th Century Anti-Slavery Novel,” Diáspora: Journal of the Annual AfroHispanic Literature and Culture Conference 11 (2001): 80–86; and Angelyn Mitchell, “Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels—William Wells Browns’ Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” American Literary Realism 24.3 (1992): 7–21. In an interesting reading, Linda Grasso links the “masks” Wilson must wear in order to adhere to nineteenth-century conventions of female propriety (including conventions of genre) to the rage that motivates the text’s production (The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002]). This dynamic has important consequences for the scholarship on the book, for as Lois Leveen puts it, “We long for textual representation of a black female’s agency, but we can hardly celebrate Frado’s subjectivity if it results in her subjugation. Despite the important position Our Nig occupies as an early piece of published African American literature, it frustrates our desire for empowering narratives”

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15.

16. 17.

No t e s (“Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” African American Review 35.4 [2001]: 577). For additional discussions on the complex relationship between social agency and textual representation in Our Nig, see Elizabeth Breau, “Identifying Satire: Our Nig,” Callaloo 16.2 (1993): 455–65; Doriani, “Black Womanhood”; Ellis, “Body Politics”; Foreman and Pitts, introduction to Our Nig; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “ ‘To Weave It into the Literature of the Country’: Epic and the Fictions of African American Women,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 31–45; Ronna C. Johnson, “Said but Not Spoken: Elision and the Representation of Rape, Race, and Gender in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 96–116; Karsten H. Piep, “ ‘Nothing New under the Sun’: Postsentimental Conflict in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique 11 (2006): 178–94; Pratofiorito, “To Demand”; and Stern, “Excavating.” Eric Gardner’s research into the publishing history of the book supports this assertion. He notes that “although Wilson clearly addressed a black readership in her preface, this readership may never have been reached by the original edition of Our Nig. . . . [I]t appears that it instead attracted primary white, middle-class readers who lived close to Wilson’s home in Milford, New Hampshire” (“ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig from Printer to Readers,” New England Quarterly 66 [1993]: 227–28). See, for example, the underlying argument in the work of Gene Andrew Jarrett (African American Literature beyond Race: An Alternative Reader [New York: New York University Press, 2006]), which discusses African American literature “beyond” race—a proposal to which I respond at length in chapter 2. See also the authors cited in note 1 to my introduction. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 7. For other detailed analyses of this argument, see Linda Martín Alcoff et al., Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Michael Hames-García, Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Harding, Feminist; Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Paula M. L. Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Paula M. L. Moya and Michael Hames-García, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); José David Saldivar, “Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and

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19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

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Realist Interpellations: The Coloniality of Power from Gloria Anzaldúa to Arundhati Roy,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 152–70; and Smith, Not Just. Sharon P. Holland, “ ‘From This Moment Forth, We Are Black Lesbians’: Querying Feminism and Transgressing Whiteness in Consolidated’s The Business of Punishment,” in Beyond the Binary, ed. Timothy B. Powell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 157. Gates, Figures, 147. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 168. Wald, Constituting, 169. Emphasis in original. While I do believe it to be dangerous, given the important information excavated through historical research, to presume that circumstances in Wilson’s life had no effect whatsoever on her text, it may be equally problematic to presume that Wilson lacks the ability to craft a narrative independent of those facts. Katherine Clay Bassard, for example, observes the novel positing “ ‘life’ producing ‘myth’ even as it assumes mythmaking as central to the construction of subjectivity.” In her reading, Bassard emphasizes “the ‘novelness’ of the text as a way of countering a prevailing tendency to see it as rather simplistically ‘autobiography’ ” (“ ‘Beyond Mortal Vision’: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 199). Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North (1859; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1983), 104, 105. Emphasis in original. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. The contrast between Frado and Douglass’ respective insurrections is striking. Frado’s triumph is extremely short-lived, and readers receive very little information on how this defining moment might affect her psychologically. Douglass, by contrast, explains in detail the significance of his rebellion against the “nigger-breaker,” Mr. Covey: This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. . . . I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845; reprint, New York: Norton, 1997], 50) The differences between Frado and Douglass’ rebellions may, of course, concern literal differences in gender. Because the slave narrative

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24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

No t e s was understood as a normatively masculine genre, antebellum readers would expect Douglass to speak at length of this crucial turning point. Wilson’s voice, however, would likely seem out of place within this literary form; as a woman, any extended discourse she might offer on her revolt might appear unseemly. For examples of this critical disposition, see the authors listed in note 1 of my introduction. Mohanty, Literary Theory, 205–6. Mohanty, Literary Theory, 216. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 335. For important readings of the intersections among labor, class, and race in Our Nig, see Gretchen Short, “Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and the Labor of Citizenship,” Arizona Quarterly 57.3 (2001): 1–27; and Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See also Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), who offers crucial analyses of these issues in broader terms. For readings that comment on the importance of the physical body in Wilson’s novel, see Cynthia J. Davis, “Speaking the Body’s Pain: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” African American Review 27.3 (1993): 391–404; and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “ ‘Everything ‘Cept Eat Us’: The Antebellum Black Body Portrayed as Edible Body,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 30.1 (2007): 201–24. The concept of “intersectionality,” of course, informs much of the work performed within the aegis of critical race theory; it has been most fully articulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. See, for example, Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67; and Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 357–83. Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 344. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 246. As Berlant notes, in antebellum America privilege is reserved for those who inhabit nonraced and nongendered bodies. The nation’s promise of citizenship, therefore, is fundamentally incompatible with its explicitly corporealized populations, since “anyone coded as ‘low,’ embodied, or

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subculturally ‘specific’ continues to experience, with banal regularity, the corporeal sensation of nationality as a sensation over which she/he has no control” (239). 32. Paula M. L. Moya, “Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 81. Emphasis in original. 33. The legal scholar Kenji Yoshino (following sociologist Erving Goffman) calls this shared dynamic “covering”: the attempt to “tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” Everyone covers, he notes, since “in our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life” (Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights [New York: Random House, 2006], ix). As a form of cultural subjugation that crosses innumerable social groupings, covering, Yoshino observes, is one of the primary civil rights issues of our time. It is, he says, “a hidden assault on our civil rights. We have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. But if we look closely, we will see that covering is the way many groups are being held back today” (xi). 34. Satya Mohanty similarly observes the oppressive forces of cultural assimilation. He notes that such expectations [amount] to a repression of alternative sources of experiences and value. That repression would explain why the feelings of minority groups about their “racial” or cultural identities are so tenacious, for instance, or why claims about the significance of gender or sexual identity represent more than the simple “politics of recognition.” Quite often, such claims and feelings embody alternative and antihegemonic accounts of what is significant and in fact necessary for a more accurate understanding of the world we all share. (Literary Theory, 237–38)

2

Frank J. Webb and the Fate of the Sentimental Race Man

1. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6, 7. See also Frances Smith Foster, introduction to “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” “Sowing and Reaping,” “Trial and Triumph”: Three Rediscovered Novels, by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xi–xxxvii. 2. Arthur P. Davis, introduction to The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb (New York: Arno Press, 1969), viii. 3. Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 13, 14; Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University

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of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 43. Other studies that see The Garies as an insufficient protest novel include Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); and Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). For scholarship that explains the text’s lack of popularity because of its critique of whiteness and white racism, see James H. DeVries, “The Tradition of the Sentimental Novel in The Garies and Their Friends,” College Language Association Journal 17 (1973): 241–49; and Robert S. Levine, “Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 19 (1994): 349–73. Finally, for analyses that suggest that part of Webb’s canonical exclusion is due to the lack of information on Webb himself, see Davis, introduction to The Garies; and Rosemary F. Crockett, “Frank J. Webb: The Shift to Color Discrimination,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 112–22. This latter deficiency has been at least partly corrected by Eric Gardner’s excellent archival work on Webb (“ ‘A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement’: Recovery the Biography of Frank J. Webb,” African American Review 35.2 [2001]: 297–308). Tellingly, Phillip Lapsansky notes that while The Garies was well received in England, its place of publication, there appears to be no significant extant response to the novel’s appearance in the United States (“Afro-Americana: Frank J. Webb and His Friends,” Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia for the Year 1990 [Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1991], 27–43). 4. Robert Reid-Pharr, introduction to The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), viii. For additional analyses that tend to be more generous than earlier critics in their assessments of Webb’s novel, see Jeffory A. Clymer, “Family Money: Race and Economic Rights in Antebellum US Law and Fiction,” American Literary History 21.2 (2009): 211–38; John Ernest, “Still Life, with Bones: A Response to Samuel Otter,” American Literary History 20.4 (2008): 753–65; M. Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in NineteenthCentury America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Samuel Otter, “Frank Webb’s Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends,” American Literary History 20.4 (2008): 728–52; and Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. Henry Golemba, “Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends Contextualized within African American Slave Narratives,” in Lives out

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8. 9. 10.

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of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation, ed. Robert D. Habich (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 121, 133. Emphasis in original. For other significant studies that resist castigating Webb and his novel and remark, instead, on The Garies’ celebration of African American solidarity in defiance of racist ideologies, see Anna Mae Duane, “Remaking Black Motherhood in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” African American Review 38.2 (2004): 201–12; Anna Engle, “Depictions of the Irish in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends and Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph,” MELUS 26.1 (2001): 151–71; Stephen Knadler, “Traumatized Racial Performativity: Passing in NineteenthCentury African-American Testimonies,” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 63–100; Robert Nowatzki, “Blurring the Color Line: Black Freedom, Passing, Abolitionism, and Irish Ethnicity in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” Studies in American Fiction 33.1 (2005): 29–58; and Carla L. Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559–83. See also Gardner, “A Gentleman”; and Levine, “Disturbing.” Otter, “Still Life,” 748. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (1857; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 137. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. Davis, introduction to The Garies, vii. Jackson, History, 348. Levine, “Disturbing,” 351, 368. Samuel Otter articulates a similar perspective on the novel’s relationship to hegemonic culture: “Webb’s narrator—arch, ironic, setting and skewing his tables—does not capitulate to the values of a dominant culture or recommend an elevation that is really a submission, in moves that many critics and historians have seen as characteristic of Philadelphia’s African-American leaders or a wider devotion to ‘respectability’ in the nineteenth century” (“Still Life,” 747). For important considerations of racial uplift in its nineteenth-century context, see Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). As Robert Nowatzki notes, the decision facing Clarence either to pass as white or to embrace his blackness is “necessitated not by a biological

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15. 16.

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No t e s incompatibility of white and black ‘blood,’ but by white hostility toward miscegenation and its offspring, and by the power that whites exercise to use knowledge of a mulatto’s ancestry to define that person as ‘coloured’ and inferior” (“Blurring,” 57). In noting the crushing traumatic events Clarence faces in his young life, critic Stephen Knadler offers an important corrective to analyses that would reduce Clarence’s story merely to sentimental allegory: “To make Clarence the tragic mulatto who is a sign of ambiguity, critics [of The Garies] . . . derealize his story, as histrionic as it may be, and trivialize the formidable weight of a traumatic past and its wounds for the higher purpose of creating an ideologically useful token ‘black’ man. . . . Wanting to make Clarence a representative son of a racial self-consciousness, on the other hand, African-American critics can, likewise, reduce Clarence’s pain to alienation, something that can be overcome through selfdetermination and black pride” (“Traumatized,” 80). Engle, “Depictions,” 159. I find many of Engle’s observations convincing, though I am slightly uncomfortable with her claim that “the riot, although white on black, is motivated more by class than by race” (158). While Engle rightly points out that the mob’s violence affects all sectors of the black community, and is indeed motivated in large part by class issues, the attack is described overtly as being provoked by racial difference; indeed, as the mob threatens the group assembled within Mr. Walters’ mansion, its members cry out: “ ‘The house is full of niggers!—the house is full of niggers! . . . Shoot them! kill them!’ ” (213). Carla Peterson similarly observes that the resilience of the African American community in the wake of the attack demonstrates “the effectiveness of an economics of marginality that resists black underdevelopment, relies on community interdependence, and works to forge collective identity” (“Capitalism,” 579). Levine, “Disturbing,” 363. Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 5. Gene Andrew Jarrett, “Introduction: ‘Not Necessarily Race Matter,’ ” in African American Literature beyond Race: An Alternative Reader, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2; Jarrett, Deans, 15. Jarrett, Deans, 3. Jarrett also references the work of critics Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Claudia Tate in his discussion of anomalous texts. Fishkin notes how such texts violate scholarly expectations that require “black fiction writers . . . to focus on African-American life in the United States as seen through the eyes of black characters” and are “considered suspect when they do not” (“Desegregating American Literary Studies,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott et al. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 125). Similarly, Tate claims that anomalous works are “indisputably marginal in African-American

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literary history” because “they resist, to varying degrees, the race and gender paradigms that we spontaneously impose on black textuality” (Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 7–8). Jarrett, Deans, 11. Jarrett, Deans, 3. Jarrett, Deans, 3. Jarrett, “Introduction,” 5. Nowatzki, “Blurring,” 52. Henry Golemba makes a similar point about Webb’s work in this regard. In his analysis of Mr. Stevens’ racial transformations, he notes that “all this masking highlights the superficiality of social constructions of race, but only the foolish would forget that prejudice—though artificial and downright inane—can be deadly, as witnessed by the death of the Garies and the crippling of [Mr.] Ellis” (“Frank Webb’s,” 133). As Satya P. Mohanty notes, “Oddly enough, [the] postmodernist response turns out to reveal a disguised form of foundationalism, for it remains within a specifically positivist conception of objectivity and knowledge. It assumes that the only kind of objective knowledge we can have is independent of (socially produced and revisable) theoretical presuppositions and concludes that the theory dependence of experience is evidence that is always epistemically suspect” (Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997], 209). This is the argument made by Robert Reid-Pharr. He also notes that “Webb was clearly in conversation with a score of authors, mostly female, of the mid-nineteenth century whose sentimentalism and emphasis on the domestic helped shape the ideological structures of the antebellum writing world.” “Still,” Reid-Pharr observes, “it is important to reiterate that Webb, although he was thoroughly integrated into that world, the world of ‘right feeling,’ continued to insist upon a black distinctiveness within it. He worked to articulate a specificity, or peculiarity, that marked The Garies as not simply a novel about domesticity, or even abolitionism, but also—and importantly—about race, about blackness” (introduction to The Garies, xviii). Knadler, “Traumatized,” 66, 71.

3

Setting the Record Straight in UNCLE TOM ’S C A BIN

1. Other significant connections also exist between Webb and Stowe. Stowe was particularly impressed by the dramatic skills of Webb’s wife, Mary, and adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a performance piece specifically for her (renamed as The Christian Slave). For scholarship that explores this relationship, see Susan F. Clark, “Solo Black Performance before the Civil War: Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Webb, and ‘The Christian Slave,” New

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Theatre Quarterly 13.52 (1997): 339–48; Eric Gardner, “ ‘A Nobler End’: Mary Webb and the Victorian Platform,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 29.1 (2002): 103–16; and Eric Gardner, “Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Christian Slave,” Legacy 15.1 (1998): 78–84. 2. The scholarship here is enormous. For classic examples of the rich criticism devoted to the novel, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, eds., Slavery and the Literary Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Eric Sundquist, ed., New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For more recent studies, see Ryan C. Cordell, “ ‘Enslaving You, Body and Soul’: The Uses of Temperance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and ‘Anti-Tom’ Fiction,” Studies in American Fiction 36.1 (2008): 3–26; Jeanne Elders DeWaard, “ ‘The Shadow of Law’: Sentimental Interiority, Gothic Terror, and the Legal Subject,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 62.4 (2006): 1–30; Marcy J. Dinius, “Slavery in Black and White: Daguerreotypy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52.3 (2006): 157–91; Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Jo-Ann Morgan, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Jason Richards, “Imitation Nation: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of African American Selfhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39.2 (2006): 204–20; Arthur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Cindy Weinstein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3. I name specifically African American stereotypes here since their representations are immediately germane to my argument. I want to note, however, that white racial stereotypes certainly exist in the novel as well, and that readers might profitably analyze figures like the “southern belle” and “southern gentleman” (types embodied by Marie and Augustine St. Clare). 4. To my knowledge, only one study exists that seriously considers Adolph’s role within the novel. See P. Gabrielle Foreman’s probing essay that argues “that death in Uncle Tom’s Cabin acts as an insistent sign not of redemption but of the consequence of sexual transgression” (“ ‘This Promiscuous Housekeeping’: Death, Transgression, and Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Representations 43 [1993]: 51). Centrally, Foreman’s study is concerned with reading Tom and Eva as

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“sinners” within this rubric, and the analysis it offers of Adolph’s character places him, primarily, as a key to understanding the homoerotic overtones of St. Clare and Tom’s relationship. Foreman’s insights are striking—and though I share some of her concerns, my comments in this chapter differ in significant ways. Chief among these is my desire to read Adolph apart from St. Clare, to see him as a “problem” in and of himself. This goal seems particularly crucial in order to circumvent another racist stereotype: namely, that slaves are not capable of originality, and thus can be understood only as facsimiles of their masters. Foreman certainly does not endorse this view; I want only to clarify my reluctance to examine Adolph solely in relation to his master and to emphasize my desire to read him back into the critical conversation on his own terms. Lindon Barrett, “Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambara’s ‘The Hammer Man,’ ” Cultural Critique 39 (1998): 6. Barrett rightly cites Robyn Wiegman’s important work on this topic. Wiegman is primarily concerned with what she calls “feminism’s own myth of integration,” but her statements have far-reaching import for studies of identity in general: “[T]he challenge to modernity,” she states, “—which characterizes the tensions within and political stakes of feminism and other political discourses in the United States today—lies in a potential resignification, not of the body as such but of the relationship between its interior and exterior domains” (American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 191). Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 358, 377. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xv, xiv. For other significant analyses that employ intersectionality as critical praxis, see Susan Stanford Friedman, “Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse,” Signs 21.1 (1995): 1–49; and Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). I want to be clear that it is not my intention to minimize the important scholarly work on Stowe’s text performed under the aegis of feminist and African American studies; indeed, in ways I hope are evident, my analysis is indebted to the theoretical paradigms this criticism provides. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1981), 254. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. Eric Sundquist provides a useful overview of some of the cultural distortions these figures have endured since the book’s publication (introduction to New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Eric Sundquist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 1–44). See also Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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13.

14. 15.

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No t e s and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45–84. For additional analyses of popular appropriations of Stowe’s characters (and their racist repercussions), see Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947); Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking, 1973); J. C. Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom (New York: William Sloane, 1956); Stephen A. Hirsch, “Uncle Tomitudes: The Popular Reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Meyerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 303–30; and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). The standard reading on Dinah is by Gillian Brown, who links Dinah’s kitchen with the economies of the slave market (“Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly 36 [1984]: 503–23). Several studies have remarked on this dynamic, the most elegant and sophisticated articulations of which are by Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992). George’s passing here is an important example of a hybrid character inhabiting white masculine identity. His name becomes even more significant in this respect as it echoes the original founding father, George Washington. For an excellent reading of this scene, see Julia Stern, “Spanish Masquerade and the Drama of Racial Identity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine Ginsberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 103–30. Yarborough, “Strategies,” 50–51. The term “gender insubordination” comes, of course, from Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge: 1990]). The discrepancies between Emmeline and Adolph’s respective fates suggest that the character of the tragic mulatto is a gendered description with its own specific sexualized assumptions. As a figure, the mulatto calls attention to the sexual availability of black bodies within slavery through its literal embodiment of miscegenation. Because the lightskinned slave is necessarily an effect of heterosexual union (and because the likelihood that female slave-owners would seduce male slaves is unthinkable within antebellum mores), the mulatto is indicative of a white, male sexual aggression that is explicitly heterosexually oriented. The “tragedy” of the mulatto thus holds particular resonance for female slaves, since their light skin embodies the threat of sexual subservience their (female) ancestors also faced. The light-skinned male slave, by contrast, faces no comparable threat; antebellum ideologies (and the lack

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of bodily “evidence”) work to preclude the possibility of a specifically homosexual assault. We might also consider here the curious allusion Harriet Jacobs makes to her friend, Luke, a slave who was forced to submit to “the strangest freaks of despotism” by his bed-ridden master. “Some of these freaks,” Jacobs tells us, “were of a nature too filthy to be repeated.” Though the incident Jacobs describes carries heavy homosexual overtones (like Stowe’s description of Adolph in the slave market), Jacobs (also like Stowe) refuses to comment further on this scene—leaving Luke “still chained to the bedside of this cruel and disgusting wretch” (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). See Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “ ‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40.2 (2006): 223–37. For helpful discussions of the problems inherent in such anachronisms, see Martin Duberman et al., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Penguin, 1989); and David M. Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 416–31. We might usefully consider here Calvin Stowe’s own same-sex experiences. As he wrote to his wife during an extended separation, “When I get desperate, & cannot stand it any longer, I get dear, good kind hearted Br[other] Stagg to come and sleep with me, and he puts his arms round me & hugs me to my hearts’ content” (Calvin E. Stowe to Harriet Beecher Stowe, February 14, 1847, in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, by Joan D. Hedrick [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 180). For an indispensable study of the tragic mulatto figure, see Susan Gillman, “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 221–43. In this respect, my argument is not unlike that of Jean Fagan Yellin’s, who situates Uncle Tom’s Cabin at a kind of midway point between the conservative domestic philosophies of Stowe’s sister, Catharine Beecher, and the more overtly feminist polemics of the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah. Whereas Beecher believed women should limit their abolitionist sympathies to the domestic sphere, the Grimkés advocated for a movement that placed women’s role in both public and private domains. Yellin notes, however, that Stowe’s philosophies ultimately align her more centrally with Beecher’s “separate spheres.” See Yellin, “Doing It Herself: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Woman’s Role in the Slavery Crisis,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 85–105; see also Tompkins, Sensational. For the historical materials that inform this debate, see Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, or Principles

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of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869); Angelina Grimké, “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” Anti-Slavery Examiner 1 (September 1836): [1]–35; Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, Addressed to A. E. Grimké (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins; Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1837); and Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, in Reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimké (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838). 22. Traditionally, much criticism of nineteenth-century American literature has rested on the concept of the “separate spheres” as an explanatory model for cultural difference. Contemporary scholarship, however, has attempted to complicate (and even dismantle) this paradigm by noting the limitations of a theory that relies exclusively on gender as a marker of difference. See, for example, Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). See also Cathy Davidson, who notes that “the binaric version of nineteenth-century American history is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is simply too crude an instrument—too rigid and totalizing—for understanding the different, complicated ways that nineteenth-century American society or literary production functioned” (“Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70 [1998]: 445). Though I generally agree with this position, I nevertheless believe that Stowe’s novel often thinks in precisely the “rigid and totalizing” ways we find uncomfortable today. For additional readings of the relationship between sentimentality and gender in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Dawn Coleman, “The Unsentimental Woman Preacher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature 80.2 (2008): 265–92; Christopher Diller, “Sentimental Types and Social Reform in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Studies in American Fiction 32.1 (2004): 21–48; Barbara Hochman, “Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as History in the 1890s,” in New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 255–76; and Elizabeth Fekete Trubey, “ ‘Success Is Sympathy’: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Woman Reader,” in Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 53–76. 23. Myra Jehlen, “The Family Militant: Domesticity Versus Slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Criticism 31.4 (1989): 392–93. Emphasis in original. 24. We might also consider St. Clare’s character as indicative of this dynamic. His sympathy for the enslaved (understood as the specific result of feminine influence) does not translate into the manly act of freeing his slaves before his untimely death. Amy Schrager Lang comments on this “problem” with St. Clare, noting that “the two sides of his character, one feminine, the other masculine, rather than working in tandem to produce the ideal reformer, instead pull in opposite directions and immobilize

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

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him” (“Slavery and Sentimentalism: The Strange Career of Augustine St. Clare,” Women’s Studies 12 [1986]: 45–46). Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95. Eric Lott reads the black dandy as emblematic of the antislavery reformer through the figure’s compression of racial and class identities. “The black dandy,” Lott writes, “literally embodied the amalgamationist threat of abolitionism, and allegorically represented the class threat of those who were advocating it” (Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 134). While Lott emphasizes the black dandy’s threat to proslavery factions (and tends to repress the role of gender), I argue that this figure equally menaces abolitionist ideologies through its complex intersection of gender, class, and racial identities. The concept of “category crisis” is Marjorie Garber’s. In her masterful study, Garber examines the ways in which border-crossings instigate cultural anxiety by calling attention to “the crisis of category itself” (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York: Routledge, 1992], 17). Marlon T. Riggs, “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a SNAP! Queen,” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Devon W. Carbado (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 309. Emphasis in original. Riggs, “Black Macho,” 307. See also Marlon T. Riggs, “Unleash the Queen,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (New York: New Press, 1998), 99–105. For a relevant discussion of the ways in racial identity is gendered (and, specifically, the ways in which black masculinity is equated with “authentic” notions of African American identity), see Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). I rely here on Devon W. Carbado’s definition of antiracist discourse as “black legal and political scholarship, activism, and discussions aimed at eradicating racism against black people” (introduction to Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Devon W. Carbado [New York: New York University Press, 1999], 13). Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority,” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Devon W. Carbardo (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 263. There are numerous examples of such theorizing. For a particularly searing critique, see Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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34. In addressing this point, the sexuality critique of antiracist practice denounces the supposition that racism and homophobia are necessarily separate phenomena. Devon W. Carbado notes: “What does the antiracist assertion ‘being Black and being gay are not the same thing’ mean when the gay person imagined in the statement is Black? The antiracist challenges to race/sexual orientation analogies legitimized the disaggregation of Black identity from gay identity, rendering the existence of Black gay and lesbian life invisible” (introduction to Black Men, 8–9). 35. McBride, “Can the Queen,” 263. Though my argument exposes the dilemma of black gay male invisibility in respect to Adolph’s particular situation, this problematic certainly resonates for other comparably marginalized positions, such as black lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. For additional important analyses of the relationship among racial, gender, and sexual identities, see Michael Awkward, Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2005); Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

4

Frederick Douglass and the Limits of Knowledge

1. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerican Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 17. For additional important studies of the slave narrative as genre, see Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); and Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 2. Sidonie Smith, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (1995): 19–20. For additional studies of the interchange between autobiography and performativity (and the relationship of this dynamic to Douglass’ writings in particular), see Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,” MELUS 22.4 (1997): 91–108; George Newtown, “From Bottom to Top: Frederick Douglass Glimpses Male Identity from the Closet,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 20.2 (2005): 246–67; and Ben Slote, “Revising Freely: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Disembodiment,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 11.1 (1996): 19–37. 3. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xix.

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4. For examples of critical dispositions that seek, instead, to dismantle social identities, see the works listed in note 1 of my introduction. See, also, the discussion of Walter Benn Michaels’s work in my introduction. 5. Wilson J. Moses, “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67. 6. Eric Sundquist, introduction to Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4. For additional important analyses of Douglass’ work, see Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, eds., Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 7. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; reprint, New York: Dover, 1969), 222. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 8. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; reprint, New York: Norton, 1997), 45. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 9. Houston A. Baker, The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 43–45. 10. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 121. 11. Leverenz, Manhood, 109. 12. Critic Benjamin Quarles notes that the Narrative sold thirty thousand copies in its first five years of publication. My Bondage and My Freedom, by contrast, sold eighteen thousand copies in its first two years, after which sales dwindled (introduction to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960], xiii–xiv). 13. Sundquist, introduction to Frederick Douglass, 4. 14. Leverenz, Manhood, 122. 15. Sundquist, introduction to Frederick Douglass, 4. 16. I refer here to Douglass’ comments in My Bondage and My Freedom regarding condescending requests from white abolitionists to avoid thinking too deeply about his story and to stick only to narration. He writes: I could not always obey, for I was now reading and thinking. New views of the subject were presented to my mind. It did

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18.

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No t e s not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them. . . . These excellent friends were actuated by the best of motives, and were not altogether wrong in their advice; and still I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me. (361–62; emphasis in original) For an examination of the ways that Garrison’s preface to Douglass’ Narrative reduces him from “fugitive author” to “fugitive reporter,” and thus instantiates white supremacy, see Beth A. McCoy, “Race and the (Para)Textual Condition,” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 156–69. For a crucial analysis of this dynamic in terms of racial minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). William Andrews similarly remarks on the slave narrative’s literary masquerading before white readers: “The promise of a straightforward rendition of facts allowed the black narrator to pose as an artless and unaffected person whose simply narrative manner bore the conviction of truth that white Protestants in America had traditionally invested in the plain style” (To Tell, 9–10). Priscilla Wald’s reading of Douglass similarly probes the unstated pressures in his work. She argues that the text’s disjunctions “show a narrator compelled to tell a story different from the story he wishes to tell” (Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 74). Donald B. Gibson similarly highlights the Narrative’s implicit ideological conflicts, noting that “Douglass the rational, anti-slavery partisan and Douglass the man whose historical, social, and psychological pasts cannot be entirely constrained within the abstraction ‘slavery’ often vie for control of the narration” (“Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative,” American Literature 57.4 [1985]: 551). There is certainly not to minimize the significance of critical analyses of My Bondage and My Freedom. See, for instance, Lisa Brawley, “Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30.1 (1996): 98–128; Michael A. Chaney, “Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography,” African American Review 35.3 (2001): 391–408; Peter A. Dorsey, “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” PMLA 111.3 (1996): 435–50; Eric A. Goldman, “Spilling Ink and Spilling Blood: Abolitionism, Violence and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 17.2 (2002): 276–95; and Sarah Meer, “Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom,” in The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 89–97. Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 7, 6. Emphasis in original.

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22. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 6. Alcoff and Mohanty are also keenly attentive to the historical dimensions of this dynamic: Abolitionist and suffrage movements grappled with the conflicts among and within identities, with the role identity should play in determining leadership, and with whether the ultimate goal should be championing identity-based rights or de-emphasizing identity categories. Identity politics is only the most recent name given to this nest of issues concerning questions of separatism, nationalism, humanism, and the possibilities of a united front. (“Reconsidering,” 8) 23. For an important analysis of this dynamic, see Rafia Zafar, “Franklinian Douglass: The Afro-American as Representative Man,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 99–117. See also Valerie Smith, who notes that Douglass “attempts to articulate a radical position using the discourse he shares with those against whom he speaks” (Self-Discovery, 27). For additional important analyses see Vince Brewton, “ ‘Bold Defiance Took Its Place’—‘Respect’ and Self-Making in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” Mississipi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 58.3–4 (2005): 703–17; Mark K. Burns, “ ‘A Slave in Form but Not in Fact’: Subversive Humor and the Rhetoric of Irony in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Studies in American Humor 3.12 (2005): 83–96; Jeannine DeLombard, “ ‘EyeWitness to the Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” American Literature 73.2 (2001): 245–75; Lovalerie King, “Counter-Discourses on the Racialization of Theft and Ethics in Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents,” MELUS 28.4 (2003): 55–82; and Shaindy Rudoff, “Tarring the Garden: The Bible and the Aesthetics of Slavery in Douglass’s Narrative,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 45.4 (2000): 213–37. 24. In a crucial reading, Henry Louis Gates describes the ways in which meaning in the Narrative does not always align neatly with external signs. In outlining the contours of what he calls the “black hermeneutic circle,” Gates notes that “Douglass’s method of complex mediation— and the ironic reversals so peculiar to his text—suggests overwhelmingly the completely arbitrary relationship between description and meaning . . . Not only is meaning culture-bound and the reference of all signs an assigned relation, Douglass tells us, but how we read determines what we read, in the truest sense of the hermeneutical circle” (Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 89, 97; emphasis in original). See also Valerie Babb, “ ‘The Joyous Circle’: The Vernacular Presence in Frederick Douglass’s Narratives,” College English 67.4 (2005): 365–77; and David Messmer, “ ‘If Not in the Word, in the Sound’: Frederick Douglass’s Mediation

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26.

27.

28.

29.

No t e s of Literacy through Song,” American Transcendental Quarterly 21.1 (2007): 5–21. Douglass calls attention here to the inherent difficulty in delineating a specifically “white” perspective, since such a perspective seems grounded, simultaneously, both in slavery’s politics and in the social experience that whiteness makes normative. This ambivalence extends, as well, to what a misinterpretation of the slave songs might mean vis-à-vis white listeners—whether that inability is rooted in whites’ lack of experience of slavery, or in white people’s intrinsic interest in the perpetuation of slavery as a social and political institution. As Paula M. L. Moya observes, “[K]nowledge is not disembodied, or somewhere ‘out there’ to be had, but rather it comes into being in and through embodied selves. In other words, humans generate knowledge, and our ability to do so is causally dependent upon both our cognitive capacities and our historical and social locations” (introduction to Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 18). See also Gregory S. Jay, who notes that Douglass’ texts “are exemplary in that their subject is neither a predetermined automaton of the Symbolic nor a so-called autonomous self freely creating its world. The metaphor of agency suggests rather that the subject occupies a dynamic historical position in which he or she may at once be the medium for ideology’s reproduction and the device for its undoing” (“American Literature and the New Historicism: The Example of Frederick Douglass,” boundary 2 17.1 [1990]: 228). William Lloyd Garrison, preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, by Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1997), 8. For invaluable studies on the masochistic dynamic inherent in reading about the violence perpetrated upon slaves’ bodies, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Carolyn Sorisio, “The Spectacle of the Body: Torture in the Antislavery Writing of Lydia Maria Child and Frances E. W. Harper,” Modern Language Studies 30.1 (2000): 45–66. For a fascinating analysis of the intersections among racial violence, slavery, and sexual difference, see Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “ ‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40.2 (2006): 223–37. In a suggestive reading, Marianne Noble notes how Douglass cultivates sympathy for the enslaved specifically through an emphasis on racial difference rather than through cross-racial identification (“Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage and My Freedom,” Studies in American Fiction 34.1 [2006]: 53–68).

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30. William Andrews offers a helpful analysis on Douglass’ refusal to describe his flight: Douglass did not want [the discursive relationship between his readers and himself] predicated on the assumption that whites could read slave narratives from the standpoint of the distanced, uncommitted, merely curious collector of facts and still expect to know what and who they were about. Douglass did not want to indulge his reader in a servile way; he wanted his reader to learn something about his or her responsibility to the text. (To Tell, 136–37) Andrews argues that Douglass achieves this connection by implicitly asking whites to use their imagination as a tool for sympathetic identification. This interpretation is compelling, though it is perhaps more generous in its ascriptions of Douglass’ faith in white readers than my own reading. 31. For an examination of the ways that “personal” writing can help facilitate social analysis, see Timothy Barnett, who uses the example of Douglass’ Narrative to elucidate his argument (“Politicizing the Personal: Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Some Thoughts on the Limits of Critical Literacy,” College English 68.4 [2006]: 356–81). 32. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 232–33. For important related discussions of these issues, see Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 312–44; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 357–83; Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 339–51.

5

Face Value: Ambivalent Citizenship in IOL A L EROY

1. William Still, introduction to Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances E. W. Harper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1.

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2. For positive appraisals of Iola Leroy, see Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Woman Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Frances Smith Foster, introduction to Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances E. W. Harper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxvii–xxxix; Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1987); and Teresa Zackodnik, “Little Romances and Mulatta Heroines: Passing for a ‘True’ Woman in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 2 (2000): 103–24. For less-approving assessments of the novel, see Houston A. Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); Arlene Elder, The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications in Early African American Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Blyden Jackson, A History of AfroAmerican Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Vashti Lewis, “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy,” Phylon 45 (1984): 314–22; Deborah E. McDowell, “ ‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists,” New Literary History 16 (1986): 281–302; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1983); and Kimberly A. C. Wilson, “The Function of the ‘Fair’ Mulatto: Complexion, Audience, and Mediation in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy,” Cimarron Review 106 (1994): 104–13. 3. For purposes of definition, I rely here on Kevin K. Gaines’s summary of the arguments regularly leveled against late-nineteenth-century uplift efforts (charges that also frequently characterize critiques of Harper and her novel): [U]plift ideology’s argument for black humanity was not an argument for equality. Indeed, the shift from race to culture, stressing self-help and seemingly progressive in its contention that blacks, like immigrants, were assimilable into the American body politic, represented a limited, conditional claim to equality, citizenship, and human rights for African Americans. Black elites espoused a value system of bourgeois morality whose deeply embedded assumptions of racial difference were often invisible to them. It was precisely as an argument for black humanity through evolutionary class

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differentiation that the black intelligentsia replicated the dehumanizing logic of racism. (Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996], 4) For important additional analyses of racial uplift, see Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 4. Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9. For this chapter, all further references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 5. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which literacy is “stolen” in Iola Leroy (by slaves, by their masters), see Patricia Bizzell, “ ‘Stolen’ Literacies in Iola Leroy,” in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 143–50. 6. For readings that align Iola with the tradition of the tragic mulatto figure, see Christian, Black Women; McDowell, “ ‘The Changing Same’ ”; and Wilson, “Function.” The concept of the “separate spheres” is by now well known; it rests on the belief that men and women have equally important but necessarily separate roles to perform in nineteenth-century culture. Whereas men were understood to inhabit the public realm of commerce and politics, women were relegated to the privatized world of the home. For important studies of this paradigm, see Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75.1 (1988): 9–39; Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74. For analyses that complicate the concept of the separate spheres, see Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

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No t e s and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). Carla L. Peterson, “ ‘Further Liftings of the Veil’: Gender, Class, and Labor in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy,” in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102. For an indispensable discussion of intersectionality’s critical project, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67; and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 357–83. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xxiii, xv. Smith, Not Just, xix. Smith also cites Deborah E. McDowell’s important work in this regard (“The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]). See, for example, Carby, Reconstructing; and Foster, introduction to Iola Leroy. For additional significant analyses of Harper and her novel, see Julie Cary Nerad, “Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper,” American Literature 75.4 (2003): 813–41; Lori Robison, “An ‘Imperceptible Infusion’ of Blood: Iola Leroy, Racial Identity, and Sentimental Discourse,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 37.3–4 (2004): 433–60; Geoffrey Sanborn, “Mother’s Milk: Frances Harper and the Circulation of Blood,” ELH 72.3 (2005): 691–715; and Elizabeth Young, “Warring Fictions: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender,” American Literature 64.2 (1992): 273–97. For historical and critical analyses of lynching during the postbellum era, see James E. Cutler, Lynch-Law, An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 81–113; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). The strongest articulation of this position is Claudia Tate’s, who argues that modern value systems in contemporary scholarship often blind readers to the subversive discourses that would be more plainly apparent in the historical and cultural contexts of the nineteenth century (“Allegories of Black Female Desire; or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority,” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women,

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14. 15.

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ed. Cheryl A. Wall [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989], 98–126). See also Carby, Reconstructing; Foster, introduction to Iola Leroy; and Zackodnik, “Little Romances.” Tate, “Allegories,” 117. For a similarly helpful assessment of marriage’s specific importance to black culture, see duCille, Coupling. At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States witnessed increased interest in demarcating social divisions, often in terms of racial affiliation and sexual identity. As the legal case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the newly developed scientific language for sexual inversion made clear, this era exerted significant effort to categorize individuals on the basis of personal identity. The classification of bodies within binary structures (black/white; heterosexual/homosexual) aimed to identify, and thereby regulate, individuals defined as nonnormative. For a particularly helpful discussion of the ways that postbellum America attempted to categorize personal identity into ostensibly clear binary structures (and the resulting effects of such classifications), see Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). Somerville is specifically concerned with the ways that this era’s increased interest in analyzing sexual inversion was linked to the “separate but equal” segregation legitimized by the Plessy decision. For additional studies that examine how social difference in postbellum America comes to be understood as “essentially” pathological, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, eds., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Marylynne Diggs, “Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity,” in Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (New York: Haworth Press, 1993), 1–19; and Zackodnik, “Little Romances.” See, for instance, James Christmann, who attributes Robert’s silence primarily to differences in class. Robert, he states, “the one character whom the reader knows might bring an echo, at least, of the subaltern voice into the high-culture discussions of the ‘thinkers and leaders of the race,’ is conspicuously silent at the conversazione . . . Robert loses his dialect as he changes class, but because he never completely abandons folk speech or its values, he goes silent at the second climax” (“Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy,” African American Review 34.1 [2000]: 15). In this respect, Iola Leroy reveals the extent to which personal identity, particularly for those seen as cultural minorities, is fundamentally an oxymoron. Indeed, Harper’s characterizations (and the stereotypes she writes against) demonstrate the multiple ways that private identity is often an intensely public affair. As Phillip Brian Harper notes, “[S]ocial subjectivity depends upon a person’s having control over a body of interests that are agreed by all concerned parties to be private to that person. The problem, from the perspective of white patriarchal interests, is that

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21.

22. 23.

No t e s such a recognition with respect to certain historically oppressed populations necessarily constitutes a compromise of white patriarchy’s own subjective power” (“Private Affairs: Race, Sex, Property, and Persons,” GLQ 1.2 [1994]: 124; emphasis in original). For an important reading that also calls attention to the text’s multiple discourses, see P. Gabrielle Foreman’s analyses of Iola Leroy. Foreman argues that “Harper’s allusions to symbols of [black] resistance known to some subsets of her readers—white reformists and those who followed the Black press, for example—add a calculated activist charge to a text whose reformist message is simultaneously expressed in more accommodating prose” (“ ‘Reading Aright’: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 [1997]: 329). For example, see Carby, who argues that by the end of the novel “the group of black intellectuals had become self-sufficient, self-contained, and independent of the parameters of white intellectual debate” (Reconstructing, 93). For a less sanguine assessment, see Peterson, who argues that the family’s return South “signals Harper’s retreat from any attempt as yet to construct a place for blacks within the political economy of the nation” (“ ‘Further Liftings,’ ” 109). Suzanne Bost and Marilyn Elkins are two of the few critics who explicitly (and positively) discuss the text’s treatment of identity politics. In her discussion of Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, and others, Bost suggests that “these visionaries imagine decentered identities and inessential racial constructions without letting go of powerful identity politics that are rooted in culturally and historically specific moments” (“Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the ‘Tragic Mulatta’ Tradition,” African American Review 32.4 [1998]: 686). Similarly, Elkins notes that “readers of black women writers of the 1890’s often ignore the constraints under which these authors worked, viewing their writing as its conventions prescribe and overlooking its subversions” (“Reading beyond the Conventions: A Look at Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted,” American Literary Realism 22.2 [1990]: 44). Foreman’s discussion of Harper’s histotextuality also points to the novel’s engagement with a form of pragmatic identity politics (“ ‘Reading Aright’ ”). For example, see Christian, Black Women; Lewis, “Near-White”; and McDowell, “ ‘The Changing Same.’ ” Even critics attuned to the nuances of Harper’s text (and who do not castigate her as a sell-out to her race) often describe the novel in primarily optimistic terms. See, for instance, Diggs, “Surveying.” For an overview of Harper’s political activism, see Foster, introduction to Iola Leroy. John Ernest points out the ways that the novel provides important lessons on the nation’s civic duty: “Iola Leroy is a novel designed to inspire readers ‘to feel right’ by engraving upon readers’ hearts images representative of a

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transcendent standard of thought and of action, a union of meaning and of mode, of matter and of manner. Harper, however, locates the vehicle of that transcendent standard specifically in African American thought and literary culture” (“From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy,” American Literature 64.3 [1992]: 509). M. Giulia Fabi notes a comparable dynamic in the text, claiming that “Iola travels beyond the privileges of whiteness into the realities of blackness, and her increasingly sophisticated knowledge of African American culture eventually culminates in the articulation of the social, economic, legal, and Christian principles upon which a utopian, egalitarian social order should be based” (“Reconstructing Literary Genealogies: Frances E. W. Harper’s and William Dean Howells’s Race Novels,” in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999], 58). For a significant reading that also examines Iola Leroy’s pedagogical intent, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 24. As Crenshaw explains, intersectional analysis may provide a means to mitigate such exclusions. With an understanding of how identity categories are complexly intertwined, [I]t may be easier to understand the need for—and to summon—the courage to challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, “home” to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. This takes a great deal of energy and arouses intense anxiety. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of “the group” has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few. . . . Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics. (“Mapping,” 377) 25. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. In this regard, Kevin Gaines’s comments on the relationship between racial uplift and cultural memory are similarly useful: “Contestation surrounds the idea of uplift, which embraces elite and popular meanings and encompasses the tension between narrow, racial claims of progress and more democratic visions of social advancement. In another sense, uplift, as African Americans of all social positions have known it, marks the point where history falls silent and memory takes over” (Uplifting, 2).

Conclusion: Return from the Beyond 1. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (speech presented at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 18, 2008).

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2. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 205–06. 3. Tellingly, the social effects of identity are seen, as well, in the sharp criticism leveled at the Obama administration by gay and lesbian populations in response to his Justice Department’s ongoing support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize such marriages performed in other states. While Obama himself has argued that DOMA is discriminatory, many gay rights activists were appalled at the language the Justice Department employed in its June 2009 legal defense of the law, particularly its comparison of same-sex marriage to incest and child abuse as a grounds for DOMA’s constitutionality. The brief reads in part: Both the First and Second Restatements of Conflict of Laws recognize that State courts may refuse to give effect to a marriage, or to certain incidents of a marriage, that contravene the forum State’s policy. See Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 134; Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws § 284.5. And the courts have widely held that certain marriages performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. See, e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728–29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, “though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened the public policy of th[at] state”); Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 140 A.2d 65, 67–68 (N.J. 1958) (marriage of 16-year-old female held invalid in New Jersey, regardless of validity in Indiana where performed, in light of N.J. policy reflected in statute permitting adult female to secure annulment of her underage marriage); in re Mortenson’s Estate, 316 P.2d 1106 (Ariz. 1957) (marriage of first cousins held invalid in Arizona, though lawfully performed in New Mexico, given Arizona policy reflected in statute declaring such marriages “prohibited and void”). (Smelt, et al. v. United States of America, et al.) 4. Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 295–96. As critic Brook Thomas notes in a similar vein, “only when a space is allowed to exist between the political sphere and civil society can a productive interaction between the two take place, for it is only through the relative independence allowed in the relations of civil society that alternative possibilities to the existing basis of political rule can be imagined. Ideally, then, the interaction between civil society and the state allows for perpetual transformation that keeps the civil order from stagnating” (“Love and Politics, Sympathy and Justice in The Scarlet Letter,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 180).

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5. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006), ix. 6. Yoshino, Covering, 21–22. 7. Yoshino, Covering, xi. Mohanty similarly observes the oppressive forces of cultural assimilation. He notes that such expectations “[amount] to a repression of alternative sources of experience and value. That repression would explain why the feelings of minority groups about their ‘racial’ or cultural identities are so tenacious, for instance, or why claims about the significance of gender or sexual identity are more than the simple ‘politics of recognition.’ Quite often, such claims and feelings embody alternative and antihegemonic accounts of what is significant and in fact necessary for a more accurate understanding of the world we all share” (Literary Theory, 237–38). 8. Yoshino, Covering, 25; emphasis in original. In this respect, Yoshino notes, contemporary civil rights law may be flawed in assuming that “those in the so-called mainstream—those straight white men—do not have covered selves. They are understood only as impediments, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals are themselves struggling for self-definition” (Covering, 25). Obama makes a similar point: “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything; they’ve built it from scratch” (“More Perfect”). While the degree to which white people (and especially straight white men) may experience cultural oppression comparable to those belonging to more “traditional” minority groups is debatable, Yoshino’s and Obama’s comments helpfully point to the ways in which an alternative civil rights paradigm might emphasize a shared commitment to reject any call to mute difference in the name of “mainstream” assimilation. 9. Mohanty, Literary Theory, 216. 10. Obama, “More Perfect.” 11. Yoshino, Covering, xii.

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I n de x

abolitionism, 75, 86, 145 African American literature critical expectations of, x, 20, 23–24, 26, 34, 38–39, 42, 46, 80, 82, 127 and notions of authenticity, 39, 77, 136 see also minority authorship Alcoff, Linda Martín, 5, 20–21, 24, 30, 83, 122 allies, problem of, 120 Andrews, William, 75, 146, 149 antiracism, 143–44 autobiography, 75, 77, 144 Baker, Houston A., 79 Barrett, Lindon, 56 Bassard, Katherine Clay, 131 Bell, Bernard W., 38 Berlant, Lauren, 33, 132 Bizzell, Patricia, 151 Bost, Suzanne, 154 Buell, Lawrence, 8 Carbado, Devon W., 143 Carby, Hazel, 20, 154 Castiglia, Christopher, 10, 12, 111 Christmann, James, 153 civil rights, 17, 133, 157 see also covering Connerly, Ward, 47 covering, 113–14, 133 see also civil rights; Yoshino, Kenji Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 56, 155 see also intersectionality

Davidson, Cathy, 142 Davis, Arthur P., 38, 41 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 156 see also civil rights Douglass, Frederick, 16, 76 see also My Bondage and My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass duCille, Ann, 37 Elkins, Marilyn, 154 Engle, Anna, 45, 136 epistemic identification, 9, 12, 19, 75 see also identity Ernest, John, 126, 128, 154–55 experience and social change, 12 and knowledge, 12 Fabi, M. Giulia, 155 Feinberg, Leslie, 112–13 see also Stone Butch Blues Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 136 Foreman, P. Gabrielle, 20, 22, 138, 154 Foster, Frances Smith, 37 Fugitive Slave Law, 8 Fuss, Diana, 9 Gaines, Kevin K., 150–51, 155 Garber, Marjorie, 143 Gardner, Eric, 130, 134 Garies and Their Friends, The and canonical exclusion, 134

180

I n de x

Garies and Their Friends, The—Continued and challenge to racial stereotypes, 40 and class mobility, 42, 45 as insufficiently activist, 15–16, 38, 41–42 and racial passing, 43–44, 51, 135 and racial solidarity, 42–45, 135 and racial uplift, 45 and racism, 40–41 relationship to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 52 and sentimentality, 39, 50–52 see also Webb, Frank J. Garrison, William Lloyd, 80, 87 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 19–20, 26, 147 Gayle, Addison, Jr., 38 Gibson, Donald B., 146 Golemba, Henry, 38–39 Grasso, Linda, 129 Guinier, Lani, 4, 8, 17–18, 126 Harper, Frances E. W., 17, 38, 150 see also Iola Leroy Harper, Phillip Brian, 153–54 Hartman, Saidiya V., 10 Hendler, Glenn, 10–11, 124 see also sympathy heterogeneity, 4, 7, 82, 111, 121–22, 125 history abandonment of, 2 and epistemic insight, 2 and identity, 2, 9, 47 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 10, 25 identification, 9, 12, 125, 149 identity categories, 1 and citizenship, 33 and constructionism, 2 continued investment in, 1, 14 and cultural analysis, xi, 30, 33, 76

as epistemic resource, x–xi, 2–3, 9, 20, 34, 39, 50, 82, 110, 113 and essentialism, 2, 32 essentialist/constructionist debate, 6, 8 and experience, ix–xi, 30, 32, 49, 125, 149, 156 and history, 2, 9, 147 and identification, 9, 12, 125, 149 and identity politics, 6, 111 and narrative, x saliency of, 4, 7, 29, 47, 52, 57, 109, 113, 118 as self-construction, 3, 35 and social change, 123 see also minority identity identity-based theoretical paradigms continued significance of, x, 1, 14 defense of, xi see also identity identity politics, 6, 111 intersectionality, 32, 39, 55–56, 71, 97, 104, 127, 155 intracultural difference, 73 see also Iola Leroy Iola Leroy and alternative literacy, 95, 105 bachelorhood, 17, 102–03 and black masculinity, 98–100, 102 and black womanhood, 97, 101 and cultural assimilation, 93 and cultural subversion, 93 disinterest in heterosexuality, 103 disinterest in literacy, 104–05 and identity politics, 106–07, 154 intracultural dynamics within, 94, 97, 104, 107 marriage in postbellum era, 17, 101–03 and racial passing, 94, 99–100, 107 and racial solidarity, 95–96, 100, 103, 105 and racial uplift, 93–94, 97, 101, 103, 107 and rejection of hegemonic values, 104–06

I n de x and same-sex desire, 94 and social masquerade, 95 and tragic mulatto figure, 151 see also Harper, Frances E. W. Jackson, Blyden, 41 Jacobs, Harriet, 141 Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 46–47 Jay, Gregory S., 148 Jehlen, Myra, 67 Kawash, Samira, 13, 121–22, 125 Kelley-Hawkins, Emma Dunham, 14–15 Knadler, Stephen, 53, 118, 136 Lang, Amy Schrager, 142 Lapansky, Phillip, 134 Leveen, Lois, 129 Leverenz, David, 79–80 Levine, Robert, 42, 45 Lott, Eric, 118–19, 123, 143 Lubiano, Wahneema, 4 Luciano, Dana, 10 lynching, 152 McBride, Dwight A., 72 Michaels, Walter Benn, 2, 8, 118 minority authorship and social analysis, xi, 13, 86 and theoretical critique, 14–15, 21, 29, 76 see also African American literature “minority”, concept of, x, 119–20 minority identity and authenticity, 15, 73 and epistemology, 86 social investment in, xi, 13, 127 see also identity minority studies, x, 5–7 Mohanty, Satya P., 5, 13, 20–21, 24, 29, 83, 92, 114, 133, 157 Montoya, Maria E., 118–19 Morrison, Toni, 47 Moses, Wilson J., 77

181

Moya, Paula M. L., 12, 34, 122–23, 148 Mullen, Harryette, 22 My Bondage and My Freedom and epistemic limitations, 16 sales of, 145 and sentimentality, 78–79 see also Douglass, Frederick Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass comparison to Our Nig, 131 and epistemic limitations, 16, 76, 91 and faulty epistemology, 84 and identificatory estrangement, 88 and ironic authenticity, 91 and narrative reticence, 91 sales of, 145 and social performance, 82 and sympathetic identification, 89 and whiteness, 16, 85, 87–88, 148 see also Douglass, Frederick nineteenth-century America and history, 7–9 and relationship to contemporary culture, 18, 20–21 and sexual identity, 8, 17 see also nineteenth-century American literature nineteenth-century American literature and minority identity, 10, 153 and social epistemology, 10 see also The Garies and Their Friends; Iola Leroy; My Bondage and My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Our Nig; Uncle Tom’s Cabin Noble, Marianne, 148 Nowatzki, Robert, 135 Obama, Barack, 1, 3, 109–10, 115, 157 Otter, Samuel, 39, 135

182

I n de x

Our Nig autobiography, 22, 26 comparison to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 131 as critical theory, 15, 22 and economics, 22, 31, 34 and Northern racism, 22–23 and sentimentality, 22, 30–32 and slave narrative, 22–23, 27–28 see also Wilson, Harriet E. Peterson, Carla L., 20, 97, 154 Pfister, Joel, 126 Pitts, Reginald H., 22 Plessy v. Ferguson, 153 postracialism, 4, 47–48, 109, 118 post-Reconstruction era, 94 post-structuralism, 4, 7, 24–25, 29–30, 48, 111–12, 137 Quarles, Benjamin, 145 racial literacy, 126 see also Guinier, Lani racial uplift, 150–51 see also The Garies and Their Friends; Iola Leroy Reid-Pharr, Robert, 38 reverse-covering, 114 see also covering; Yoshino, kenji Riggs, Marlon T., 71 Romero, Lora, 10 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 68 Sánchez, Rosaura, 9, 125 Santamarina, Xiomara, 10 separate spheres, ideology of, 151 slave narrative, 75 Smith, Adam, 10–11 Smith, Sidonie, 75 Smith, Valerie A., 14, 56, 76, 97 social constructionism, 5, 29, 48–49 social difference elimination of, 1, 4 Somerville, Siobhan B., 153

Sotomayor, Sonia, 119 Still, William, 93 Stone Butch Blues, 112–13 see also Feinberg, Leslie Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 16, 137 see also Uncle Tom’s Cabin Sundquist, Eric, 77, 79–80 sympathy and identification, 10–11, 148 and social action, 10, 12 and social appropriation, 11, 124 Tate, Claudia, 20, 22, 101, 136, 152 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The, 10–11 Thomas, Brook, 156 transgender identity, 112–13 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and abolition, 56, 66, 68 and anti–racism, 72–73 and boundary crossing, 58, 60–61, 70, 140, 143 and dandyism, 57, 62–63, 68–69, 143 and effeminacy, 58, 63–64, 66, 68–69, 142 and homoeroticism, 65–66, 139, 141 and humor, 58, 61, 70 and hybridity, 62 and masculinity, 69, 71 and minority identity, 58 non-normative identity, 16, 56–57 and racial solidarity, 59 and racial stereotypes, 55, 57–58, 138 and relationship to The Garies and Their Friends, 50 and relationship to Webb, 137 and same-sex desire, 66 separate spheres, logic of, 67, 142 and social reality, 59–60, 64, 69

I n de x tragic mulatto, figure of, 66, 140–41 see also Stowe, Harriet Beecher Wald, Priscilla, 26, 146 Webb, Frank J., 15–16, 37 see also The Garies and Their Friends Wiegman, Robyn, 139

183

Wilson, Harriet E., 15, 22, 33 see also Our Nig Wright, Jeremiah, 110 Wylie, Alison, 33 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 141 Yoshino, Kenji, 17–18, 113–15, 133, 157 see also covering; reverse-covering