| This dissertation examines key works of early U.S. multiethnic literature in the context of what I call "black-white multiracism." The term captures what I see as a constitutive asymmetry in U.S. racial discourse, an asymmetry also reflected in my title, "People of Color": although Indians, Asians, Latinos have all been identified with color labels historically, the singular formulation "the colored race" has applied only to blacks. This idiomatic sense of "color" reveals that, while "race" has always been more than black and white, the black-white binary has nonetheless been crucial to how U.S. national culture taxonomizes and manages its multiple others. Black-and-whiteness, I argue, is a polyvalent and multiracist construction that shapes and is shaped by U.S. efforts to control other racialized populations alongside African Americans. Through readings in law, ethnology, popular culture, and literature, I track how the state and other elite interests have deployed black-white binarisms, at specific historical junctures, to facilitate the rhetorical "disappearance" of Indians, the juridical exclusion of Chinese immigrants, and the mythology of U.S. imperialism as a global modernizing force.; Given its constitutive multiracism, black-and-whiteness can be reconceived as a contextual framework for multiethnic literature---for writings by black subjects who are conscripted into this dyad as well as for "other non-whites" who are displaced by, subsumed into, or made exterior to it. I am interested both in mapping the alternative practices of naming, comparing, and narrating that writers of color have used successfully to counter black-white multiracism, and in examining where and how they have fallen short. The body of the dissertation is organized chronologically around the following writers: William Apess, the Pequot activist who appropriated "men of color" for Native Americans in the 1830's, at a time when the hegemonic meaning of "color" was increasingly restricted to blackness; Frederick Douglass, whose postbellum speeches display a persistent, if ambivalent interest in comparing black history with Indian and Chinese immigrant experiences; and Edith and Winnifred Eaton, the Canadian emigres and self-described Eurasians, whose writings explore, in contrasting ways, the palimpsest of Atlantic slavery beneath turn-of-the-century imperialist designs on Asia/Pacific. |
