Mulatto fictions: Gender, race and reunion in the family nation, 1877--1915

This dissertation project is centrally concerned with the response of African American intellectuals and writers in the post-Reconstruction-era to the emergence of a “white” America—of a distinction between “the nation,” on the one hand, and “the negro” on the other, which not only comes increasingly to be reflected in the rhetoric of postbellum reconciliation but which, once formalized through Supreme Court-approved separate-but-equal and other disfranchising statutes, comes eventually to serve as a template for prospective colonial relations. Other studies which have focused on this issue have treated what I view as responsive attempts to structure a political inter-racialism as illustrations of (or arguments for) a racial indeterminateness. I argue, however, that these texts treat the mulatto body as a naturalistic analog for accomplished inter-racial union; that they make a project of rewriting and revision, rather than of erasure; and that they are therefore crucially concerned to specify the nature and meaning of difference.; In the introductory chapter, I supplement discussion of relevant literary history with a discussion of the relationship between texts to which inter-racialism (racial hybridity) is central and the status of hybridity in African Americanist literary criticism. Thereafter I explore the intersection between political discourses of race, class, gender (the theoretical and/or the conventional) and constructions of race ontology in a chapter which focuses on the relationship between Charles Chesnutt's non-fiction writings on whiteness and the novels Mandy Oxendine and The House behind the Cedars; in a chapter on Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (where minstrel-masking is the controlling metaphor in a novel whose central concern is the power of representation, both literary and political); in a chapter on Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces (where the central issue is the politicization of black female instrumentality); and in a chapter on Hopkins' Of One Blood (where the “logic of the supplement” controls the construction of inter-racialism in an international frame and the reconstruction of the race-mother). Other writers discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois; and in an epilogue, James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen.