Race Question, Racial Tensions and Contractarian Thought in Charles W. Chesnutt's Fiction (original) (raw)
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Violence/Accommodation Binary in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
Arab World English Journal, 2021
The present paper examines the divergent attitudes of black characters toward racism in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Traditions (1901). Chesnutt wrote his novel to reflect his opinions on how African Americans should act to improve their situation. To situate the study within the historical and cultural context of Marrow, Black intellectuals’ views, namely Washington and Du Bois, about the complicated problem of ‘color’ were explored. To analyze the contrasting views and actions of Chesnutt’s black characters, the paper uses the lens of postcolonial theory. Although Marrow is not set within a colonial context, postcolonial theoretical frameworks can be used as models to re-read this novel because they deal with intersections of races, classes, cultures, and the oppressor/ oppressed relationship. The paper concludes that Chesnutt has entertained the possibility of a hybrid or third race— as referred to within postcolonial framework—that may succeed where both races (pure white...
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center , 2015
When Charles Chesnutt entered the American literary sphere in the late 1800s, the nation was rife with racial turmoil following the Civil War. Both North and South attempted to rebuild economically and socially, making technological innovations such as the Transcontinental Railroad, and instituting Jim Crow laws aimed at limiting black social and economic mobility. Along with such rebuilding, though, came revisions of history—particularly, of slavery and the plantation system—through popular culture: literature, the continuing popularity of blackface minstrel shows, and film. The blackface minstrel stage and writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page worked to romanticize slavery’s narrative in writing plantation fiction: works set on the plantation, written largely to represent the writers’ versions of black speech and culture. Harris and Page’s works put forth a longing for a past that consisted of white benevolent paternalism and black subservience. Charles Chesnutt draws on the plantation fiction tradition in his works and uses several of the same mechanisms, like the representation of black speech and often, the plantation setting, in order to subvert the plantation myth. In the project that follows, I examine the role of Chesnutt’s dialect representations in The Conjure Tales and The Marrow of Tradition. I argue that rather than simply participating in dialect fiction, Chesnutt innovates within it; he uses dual meanings in the respellings of his words, legitimizes black orality, and represents a spectrum of dialect differences. This undermines the happy darky stereotype and de-hierarchizes racial structures constructed by plantation fiction and the plantation myth. Chesnutt breaks minstrel and dialect fiction tropes; while he draws on the exaggerated black speech of minstrelsy and plantation fiction, he effectively disrupts its subjugation of blacks and forges a unique, coded version of black dialect.
Into the Morass: Chesnutt, Antinormativity, and the Queer Politics of Early Jim Crow Literature
In this essay I discuss how Charles W. Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars— through the tropology of spatialization, illustrations of expansive human intimacy, and indictments of the triangulation of antinormatively gendered and sexed bodies as political capital—intervened in sexual respectability politics in the African American uplift culture of the post-Reconstruction era. In doing so I argue that Chesnutt consecrated the " noble strivings " of sexually antinorma-tive African Americans while simultaneously illustrating the way overdetermined sexual identity politics, especially those in the naturalist literary tradition, diminished black life. With Chesnutt as my starting point, I recommend a return to early Jim Crow novels—particularly those written between the years 1900 and 1905—to suggest their progenitorial role regarding recent turns in queer theory and queer of color critique. In doing so I take steps toward a literary genealogy of queer US sex politics that runs from Plessy v. Ferguson and early Jim Crow, into modernism, and down through women of color feminism of the late 1980s before its formal or academic consecration in contemporary US queer theory. I do this to emphasize an important but still-developing ethic in contemporary queer literary studies: the need to center the study of queer representation and politics on more than homosexuality and especially on blackness. Passing is often not about bold-faced opposition to a dominant paradigm or a wholesale selling out to that form. Like disiden-tification itself, passing can be a third modality where a dominant structure is co-opted, worked on and against. The subject who passes can be simultaneously identifying with and rejecting a dominant form. —José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications (1999)