Standards of value: United States monetary policy and the negotiation of racial difference in American literature, 1834--1952

"Standards of Value: U.S. Monetary Policy and the Negotiation of Racial Difference in American Literature, 1834-1952" shows how debates over the form the nation's money should take---a.k.a. the "money question"---became part and parcel of American popular culture, and how a century of American novelists helped renegotiate the value of racial difference in the United States by rearticulating the ideologies of value expressed by the "money question." From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, American authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Walter White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Ralph Ellison incorporated the language, logic, and imagery of U.S. monetary policy reforms into their texts to draw analogies between popular arguments about the form American money should take and an ongoing national debate about the form black-white relationships (and thus also the nation) should take. In so doing, cultural reformers connected the "monetary projects" of the period, which re-inscribed the ideological link between the form and value of U.S. currency, to their own "racial projects," which sought to rewrite the association between ethnicity and human worth. Using money to self-reflexively comment on both the cultural currency of "race" and his or her own participation in its circulation, each of these authors forged a connection between the cultural politics of "race" and the rhetoric of political economy---a connection that continues to make its unconscious return(s) in the popular cultural texts of contemporary America.; It took a cultural revolution for "race" to be accepted as the social construction it always already was. The authors this project studies did their part by rewriting "race" as a symptom of an evolving political economic episteme. But the progressive reforms that relocated both the value of money and the authenticity of "race" in performance led to a crisis among authors relocated both the value of money and the authenticity of "race" in performance led to a crisis among authors committed to remedying what W. E. B. Du Bois called the problem of the color line. For as cultural performances of "race" became race itself, so also did representations of racial difference redraw the color line.