Chapter 1 - Tracing Race

Summary

The presence of race is seemingly obvious in American literature. Yet many readers either misunderstand the role it plays or simply don’t pay attention to it as a subject worthy of analysis. Written in language accessible for both the undergraduate and graduate classroom, this chapter targets such misapprehension. It first makes a series of arguments diagnosing the phenomenon of racial misapprehension, including the way whiteness purports to racelessness, the overreliance on a Black–white binary, the multiple different meanings of race across time, and the influence played by race and racialization within histories seemingly distanced from racial identity. Second, it suggests methods for apprehending and interpreting racial meaning, focusing specifically on genres and tropes. Both constitute key pathways through which race enters literary texts and through which literary texts, in turn, come to inform how their readers think about and perceive race.