Nicholas Rinehart | Dartmouth College (original) (raw)

Refereed Articles by Nicholas Rinehart

American Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2021, pp. 639-670.

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing ... more Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave testimony, specifically, the canonization of Anglo-American poets like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon has eclipsed the reception and translation of other enslaved poets across the Americas. This essay proposes a method of lateral reading to remedy this lopsided historiography. First, it tracks how conceptions of “American Negro Poetry” shifted throughout the twentieth century, from initially describing a multilingual, hemispheric network of Black writers to ultimately signifying an Anglophone, nationally bounded African American canon. Second, it considers the temporalities of lyric, which move outward rather than forward in time, to suggest how we might read enslaved poets without expecting that their works reflect the “experience” of enslavement. And third, it demonstrates how a cohort of enslaved Afro-Cuban poets together established and elaborated a “writing community” through lyric form, overlapping social networks, and shared participation in an urban periodical culture. Taken together, these insights enable us to glimpse a wider, hemispheric corpus of enslaved poetics in the Americas.

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-28.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel... more Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various characters. This generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt’s formal literary strategies. This paper shirks that tendency by considering The Marrow of Tradition not just as an historical novel, but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt’s fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature more broadly. It argues that the location of black consciousness in the novel is the soliloquy, and demonstrates that the soliloquy should be understood as a form of “embodied consciousness”: a narrative mode endowed with the expressivity of theatrical gesture. It further examines these performative gestures in relation to additional patterns in the novel: first, the destructive circulation of written, material texts; and second, recurring images of corporeality and physical breakdown wherein one’s capacity for speech is endangered. As they are invulnerable to such formal compromise and breakdown, Chesnutt’s soliloquies together produce a counter-archive of vernacular memory and reveal how dramatic form functions in the novel more broadly.

Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 164-92., 2018

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the publish... more This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.

Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-50., 2016

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the A... more This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.

Callaloo, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 439-56., 2016

This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several d... more This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several decades—namely, what is believed almost unanimously to be the absence of a Francophone equivalent to the slave narrative in English. My paper challenges this assumption by reconciling the legacies of slavery in both the Anglophone and Francophone “arenas” to examine their overlap in the French Creole culture of Louisiana. It focuses on the “other” slave narratives—the ex-slave interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, specifically those from Louisiana, as well as Texas and Arkansas, that were translated from French or Creole, include French or Creole words or passages, or recount the history of French slavery in the United States. These previously unacknowledged texts reveal how the histories of American and French colonial slaveries converged to produce an “unwritten” Francophone slave narrative tradition.

Book Chapters by Nicholas Rinehart

solicited for Looking Forward into the Past: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revolutionary Uses of History, edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere and Stephen G. Hall (volume at proposal stage)

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright. Ed. Glenda Carpio. Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 164-184.

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always exten... more This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single continuous thread. Wright’s work—including his fiction, essays, journalism, poetry, letters, and unpublished pieces spanning from the beginning of his career in the mid-1930s to his deathbed writings of 1960—crystallizes his globalist imagination even as it shifts registers: from an anti-fascist political solidarity framed by Marxist internationalism, to an affective kinship among formerly colonized peoples expressed through existentialist proto-postcolonialism, and finally to a transcendent poetics in search of universal humanism.

Edited Books by Nicholas Rinehart

American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the ... more American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin's parables; Frederick Douglass's correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders; Langston Hughes's journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler's Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology. (from https://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-literature-in-the-world/9780231157377)

Magazine Articles (online) by Nicholas Rinehart

Los Angeles Review of Books, June 29, 2020.

Public Books, June 12, 2018.

Magazine Articles (print) by Nicholas Rinehart

ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 17.2 (2018): 30-32.

This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-C... more This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella's 1983 novel, "Changó, el gran putas," translated into English in 2010 by Jonathan Tittler as "Changó, the Biggest Badass." By way of Zapata Olivella, it examines Sandoval's treatise "De instauranda Aethiopum salute," which ventriloquizes and refracts the voices of enslaved Afro-Cartagenans. The postmodern surrealist novel revisits and transforms these encounters in the early modern theological text, thereby rendering Sandoval's representations of joyous redemption into duplicity, fugitivity, and resistance.

Transition 117 (2015): 13.

Transition 112 (2013): 117-30.

Reference Works by Nicholas Rinehart

Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Franklin W. Knight. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020.

Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Franklin W. Knight. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.

Book Reviews by Nicholas Rinehart

Invited Talks by Nicholas Rinehart

W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, Harvard University, February 20.

UMass Amherst, December 7, 2018.

Conference Presentations by Nicholas Rinehart

MLA Annual Convention, Toronto, ON, January 7-10, 2021.

Biennial C19 Conference, Coral Gables, FL, April 2-5, 2020.

American Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2021, pp. 639-670.

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing ... more Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave testimony, specifically, the canonization of Anglo-American poets like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon has eclipsed the reception and translation of other enslaved poets across the Americas. This essay proposes a method of lateral reading to remedy this lopsided historiography. First, it tracks how conceptions of “American Negro Poetry” shifted throughout the twentieth century, from initially describing a multilingual, hemispheric network of Black writers to ultimately signifying an Anglophone, nationally bounded African American canon. Second, it considers the temporalities of lyric, which move outward rather than forward in time, to suggest how we might read enslaved poets without expecting that their works reflect the “experience” of enslavement. And third, it demonstrates how a cohort of enslaved Afro-Cuban poets together established and elaborated a “writing community” through lyric form, overlapping social networks, and shared participation in an urban periodical culture. Taken together, these insights enable us to glimpse a wider, hemispheric corpus of enslaved poetics in the Americas.

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-28.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel... more Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various characters. This generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt’s formal literary strategies. This paper shirks that tendency by considering The Marrow of Tradition not just as an historical novel, but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt’s fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature more broadly. It argues that the location of black consciousness in the novel is the soliloquy, and demonstrates that the soliloquy should be understood as a form of “embodied consciousness”: a narrative mode endowed with the expressivity of theatrical gesture. It further examines these performative gestures in relation to additional patterns in the novel: first, the destructive circulation of written, material texts; and second, recurring images of corporeality and physical breakdown wherein one’s capacity for speech is endangered. As they are invulnerable to such formal compromise and breakdown, Chesnutt’s soliloquies together produce a counter-archive of vernacular memory and reveal how dramatic form functions in the novel more broadly.

Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 164-92., 2018

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the publish... more This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.

Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-50., 2016

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the A... more This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.

Callaloo, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 439-56., 2016

This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several d... more This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several decades—namely, what is believed almost unanimously to be the absence of a Francophone equivalent to the slave narrative in English. My paper challenges this assumption by reconciling the legacies of slavery in both the Anglophone and Francophone “arenas” to examine their overlap in the French Creole culture of Louisiana. It focuses on the “other” slave narratives—the ex-slave interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, specifically those from Louisiana, as well as Texas and Arkansas, that were translated from French or Creole, include French or Creole words or passages, or recount the history of French slavery in the United States. These previously unacknowledged texts reveal how the histories of American and French colonial slaveries converged to produce an “unwritten” Francophone slave narrative tradition.

solicited for Looking Forward into the Past: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revolutionary Uses of History, edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere and Stephen G. Hall (volume at proposal stage)

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright. Ed. Glenda Carpio. Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 164-184.

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always exten... more This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single continuous thread. Wright’s work—including his fiction, essays, journalism, poetry, letters, and unpublished pieces spanning from the beginning of his career in the mid-1930s to his deathbed writings of 1960—crystallizes his globalist imagination even as it shifts registers: from an anti-fascist political solidarity framed by Marxist internationalism, to an affective kinship among formerly colonized peoples expressed through existentialist proto-postcolonialism, and finally to a transcendent poetics in search of universal humanism.

American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the ... more American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin's parables; Frederick Douglass's correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders; Langston Hughes's journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler's Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology. (from https://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-literature-in-the-world/9780231157377)

ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 17.2 (2018): 30-32.

This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-C... more This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella's 1983 novel, "Changó, el gran putas," translated into English in 2010 by Jonathan Tittler as "Changó, the Biggest Badass." By way of Zapata Olivella, it examines Sandoval's treatise "De instauranda Aethiopum salute," which ventriloquizes and refracts the voices of enslaved Afro-Cartagenans. The postmodern surrealist novel revisits and transforms these encounters in the early modern theological text, thereby rendering Sandoval's representations of joyous redemption into duplicity, fugitivity, and resistance.

Transition 117 (2015): 13.

Transition 112 (2013): 117-30.

Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Franklin W. Knight. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020.

Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Franklin W. Knight. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.

MLA Annual Convention, Toronto, ON, January 7-10, 2021.

Biennial C19 Conference, Coral Gables, FL, April 2-5, 2020.

ACLA Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, March 19-22, 2020.

ASECS Annual Meeting, St. Louis, MO, March 19-21, 2020.

ALA Symposium, Washington, DC, February 22, 2020.

Literature and Event: Reformulations of the Literary in the 21st Century, University of Warwick, February 15, 2020.

Biennial ASWAD Conference, Williamsburg, VA, November 7, 2019.

Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance, Pennsylvania State University, October 11, 2019.

MLA International Symposium, Lisbon, Portugal, July 25, 2019.

Caribbean Philosophical Association Annual Meeting, Providence, RI, June 7, 2019.

Annual ALA Conference, Boston, MA, May 23-26, 2019.

Biennial SEA Conference, March 1, Eugene, OR, 2019.

Annual AATSEEL Conference, New Orleans, LA, February 10, 2019.

Annual MLA Convention, Chicago, IL, January 4, 2019.

Slave Subjectivities in the Iberian Worlds, Lisbon, Portugal, July 4, 2018.

Annual Omohundro Institute Conference, Williamsburg, VA, June 16, 2018.

Annual ALA Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 27, 2018.

ACLA Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, March 31, 2018.

Biennial C19 Conference, Albuquerque, NM, March 23, 2018.

Annual MLA Convention, New York, NY, January 6.

This Junior Colloquium asks how and why we might bring the perspectives and methods of queer stud... more This Junior Colloquium asks how and why we might bring the perspectives and methods of queer studies to bear upon the history of slavery-and vice versa. We will examine questions of gender and sexuality, kinship and belonging, desire and the erotic, and history and futurity through readings in fiction, poetry, and drama alongside key works in the history of gender and sexuality, queer theory, and queer of color critique. Students will also develop critical skills and strategies for producing scholarship in literary and cultural studies, culminating in an original research paper that will prepare students to complete senior seminars and honors theses in the English Major.

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright, Mar 21, 2019

Journal of American Studies, 2017

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the pub... more This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's c...

Journal of Social History, 2016

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the A... more This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as "commodities," thereby "dehumanizing" them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism-namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the "dehumanized" or "commodified" slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the "commodification" of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly "commodified"; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity-and its close relation to notions of "social death"-in favor of Igor Kopytoff's theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human. Book titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin was "The Man Who Was a Thing." In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all of the changes that would happen to make a "Thing" into an "I Am." Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic slave hole.-Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976) Between the modern master and the nonmodern slave, one must choose the slave not because one should choose voluntary poverty or admit the superiority

Transition, 2013

The Question Was Beethoven black? He surely wasn't, but some insist otherwise. The question is no... more The Question Was Beethoven black? He surely wasn't, but some insist otherwise. The question is not a new one-it has been rehashed over the course of several decades, although it never seems to have caused much of a stir in any public intellectual debates. Indeed, what is perhaps most fascinating about this question is that is has remained somewhat under the radar despite its stubbornness. Nobody really thinks Beethoven was black. And only a few have even stumbled upon the possibility. That Beethoven may have been black is pure trivia-a did-you-know factoid for the classical music enthusiast. The composer ranks with Alexanders Pushkin and Dumas as one of history's great ethnic surprises, with the obvious exception that Beethoven wasn't ethnic. He was simply swarthy. The logic goes something like this: Beethoven's family, by way of his mother, traced its roots to Flanders, which was for sometime under Spanish monarchical rule, and because Spain maintained a longstanding historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, somehow a single germ of blackness trickled down to our beloved Ludwig. This very theory-that Beethoven was descended from the Moors-has reappeared in several works throughout the twentieth century. Jamaican historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966) popularized this theory in several writings around midcentury, but the birth of the myth can be traced back further to approximately 1915 or even earlier according to music historian Dominique-René de Lerma, the world's leading scholar on classical composers of color. Rogers asserted in his provocative and controversial works such as the three-volume Sex and Race (1941-44), the two-volume World's Great Men of Color (1946-47), 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (1934), Five Negro Presidents (1965), and Nature Knows No Color Line (1952), that Beethoven-in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others-was genealogically African and thus black. Musicologist Donald Macardle and de Lerma both refuted this possibility with several decades between them. De Lerma also authored a brief account