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Race in American Literature
Ann Rayson, University of Hawaii
English 780C
The general topic of this course is the conscious and particularly unconscious racial encoding in American literature by white authors in what we think of as the traditional canon and the subversion of this encoding by African American and Native American writers. The emphasis in this course is on the dark other in American fiction, the slave and the Indian, and how racial encoding has enabled American literature to express two contradictory themes, the striving for individualism alongside an acceptance and justification of subjugation by "race," class, ethnicity, and gender. Toni Morrison, in her critical work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), sets up a theoretical structure for looking at American literature in a new way. Morrison asks, in her preface, "how is 'literary whiteness' and 'literary blackness' made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be'humanistic'? . . . Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer" (xii-xiii).
The course assumes and expects that students have read enough of the "classic" American novels to build a context for this approach to the traditional canon along with works by ethnic American writers to determine what differences in language and racial encoding exist and why they exist. Morrison, according to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "proposes the perfectly sound and simple theory that in 'traditional, canonical' American literature the absence of the black experience is so profound that it constitutes a presence, and that it is the effects of this absence on the excluders, not the excluded, that literary criticism ought to address." Since Playing in the Dark appeared in 1992, several other critiques of race in American Literature have been published, most notably Paul Sundquist's To Wake the Nations (1993) and Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993). A new volume of primary source material, Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century, edited by Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, was published in 1995. The Black Columbiad (1993), a collection of essays on African American writers edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, has a similar diasporic emphasis and works well with Gilroy.
The course will first examine the literature of slavery: Frederick Douglass's classic slave narrative, Twain's portrait of Jim in Huckleberry Finn, and William Styron's controversial modern novel about Nat Turner's slave revolt. Then the class will turn to images of Indians in American fiction and the language used to describe them, looking first at Cooper, then at critics Fiedler, Dearborn, Boelhower, Takagi, Vizenor, and Berkhofer to determine ways Native Americans have been portrayed in literature compared to ways black characters have been stereotyped and encoded according to Sterling Brown's 1933 essay, "Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors" and book, The Negro in American Fiction (1937). We will look for racial encoding of Indians in Hemingway's In Our Time and other stories, then read contemporary Chippewa author Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and David Seals's Powwow Highway as subversions of white encoding. We will read and discuss Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s essay on The Education of Little Tree, a supposed "authentic" Native American autobiography, but, in fact, written by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
From slaves and Indians, we progress to Hawaiians and other Polynesians, using Stephen Sumida's And the View from the Shore (1991) and the proceedings from the 1994 Conference on Local Literature to read local and Hawaiian writers and discuss ways in which Hawaiians have been racially encoded in American fiction, then examine how Hawai'i's writers subvert these codes. The course will explore Asian-American writing only peripherally, because Asian Americans have, until recently, been of little presence, concern, or interest to traditional American writers; however, local literature from Hawai'i belies this national exclusion. We will read Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging and examine issues of race in local culture.
The course ends with two novels by African American women writers: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison (1981). Hurston's novel succeeds in nearly ignoring white American society as it portrays a self-contained black folk culture and community in Florida that has little dependence on or reference to a larger society, setting new norms for ethnic fiction. Morrison's Tar Baby, a contemporary novel set in Paris, the Caribbean, and New York City, formulates the ongoing tension between whites and blacks, assimilation versus cultural nationalism, issues of the black diaspora, and what it is or means to be an African American in the United States today.
The major course project will be an original research paper that explores forms of racial encoding in a "classic" American novel, play, or short story/stories of the student's choice in consultation with the instructor or shows how an ethnic text subverts these codes. The text can be from any historical or literary period in America and can focus on any ethnic encoding. The paper should be 15-20 pages with primary textual analysis supported by secondary sources used in the class and supplemented by other outside reading and research the student has done.
Main discussions of literary texts and background material will be presented and led by the instructor. Students, however, will be responsible for presenting secondary material and reports on assigned topics during the semester. There will be an early short paper (5 pages) accompanied by an oral report to be given in class on the image of the slave and the language that creates that "white gaze" in American fiction. The final paper is due at the last class and will be presented additionally in the form of an oral report followed by discussion during the last week of the course. The final paper with oral presentation will equal 70% of the grade, the early short paper with report 20%, the assigned class report/reports and possibly other short writing assignments including weekly letters in response to seminar reading 10%. Class attendance/participation are required but not graded.
Note: I taught this specific course only in the fall of 1993; there are a few changes.
This course could be cross-listed with Cultural Studies and Literary Studies, but be situated in Literary Studies. The section on Native Hawaiian and Local literatures would reflect the Asia/Pacific focus of the Cultural Studies concentration.
Either semester. READING LIST
Morrison: Playing in the Dark, Tar Baby, "Recitatif." Critical essays: Trudier Harris, Barbara Christian, Elizabeth Abel. Joel Chandler Harris, "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story"
Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Critical essays: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Robert Stepto, Robert O'Meally
Melville, "The Whiteness of the Whale" from Moby Dick Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia"
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Critical essays by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Leslie Fiedler, Sterling Brown
Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner; selections from Ten Black Writers Respond
Hemingway, In Our Time and other short stories. Essays by Mark Twain and D. H. Lawrence on James Fenimore Cooper; critical essays by Takagi, Boelhower, Dearborn, Hegeman.
Erdrich, Love Medicine Critical essays from SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures) special issue on Erdrich.
Seals, Powwow Highway Critical essays: SAIL special issue with essays on film and novel.
Sumida, And the View from the Shore; excerpts from Hawaiian and Local writers, including Trask and Yamanaka. Critical essays from the 1994 proceedings of the Local Literature of Hawai'i conference.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Specifically: "Introduction," 1-24; "Nat Turner, Thomas Gray, and the Phenomenology of Slavery," 36-56; "Frederick Douglass's Revisions," 83-93; and "Mark Twin and Homer Plessy," 225-233.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Sections from chapters 1, 2, and 6: "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity," "Masters, Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antimonies of Modernity," and "Not a Story to Pass On,": Living Memory and the Slave Sublime."
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Critical essays by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed
Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Blu's Hanging. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
2. Week-by-Week SCHEDULE:
1) Introduction to the course, overview of history and literature, time line, theory and PLAYING IN THE DARK as construct for reevaluating classic American literature. Documentary film "Ethnic Notions" and discussion of literary and cultural stereotypes reinforced through the history of white America. Some short samples of textual decoding for introduction to method and approach of this course.
2) Have read for discussion Toni Morrison's PLAYING IN THE DARK: WHITENESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION (1992), chapter XLII of MOBY DICK "The Whiteness of the Whale," and a handout from Poe, GORDON PYM or "The Gold Bug."
3) NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (1845) and from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. FIGURES IN BLACK: WORDS, SIGNS, AND THE "RACIAL SELF" (1987) chapters 3 and 9.
4) THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, stereotypes and racial encoding. Chapter 12 of Leslie Fiedler's LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (1960) and Sterling Brown's "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors" (1933).
5) THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron (1967) and selections from TEN BLACK WRITERS RESPOND (1968): contemporary racial encoding in American fiction; the canonical slave and subversion.
6) Oral reports and papers (5 pages) on images of the slave in American fiction, including an original analysis of a particular text.
7) Twain and D. H. Lawrence on James Fenimore Cooper; samples/handouts from American literature on the image of Indians; chapter V, "The Red Race on Our Borders" from Ronald Takaki's IRON CAGES: RACE AND CULTURE IN l9th-CENTURY AMERICA (1990).
8) "Powwow Highway" film (1989) and three critical essays on the film published in STUDIES IN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURES (fall l991); Boelhower, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: ETHNIC SEMIOSIS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE(1987).
9) IN OUR TIME (1925), Hemingway and racial encoding (Indians in the Nick Adams stories); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., THE WHITE MAN'S INDIAN (l979) Part Three, "Imagery in Literature, Art, and Philosophy: The INDIAN in White Imagination and Ideology."
10) LOVE MEDICINE (1984) by Louise Erdrich; selections from SAIL special issue on Erdrich (winter 1991); Mary Dearborn's POCAHONTAS'S DAUGHTERS: GENDER AND ETHNICITY IN AMERICAN CULTURE (1986), chapter 1. 11) AND THE VIEW FROM THE SHORE, Stephen Sumida (1991): local literature and images of Hawaiians and Polynesians in American literature. Handouts on primary sources.
12) THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston; "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" by Alice Walker; chapter 5 of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY (1988).
13) TAR BABY by Toni Morrison (1981); another look at PLAYING IN THE DARK; chapter 5 of Trudier Harris's FICTION AND FOLKLORE: THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON (1991); Joel Chandler Harris's "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" (1880); Barbara Christian's "Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction" (1985).