The existing scholarship on the dynamic of race in American literature and culture, broadly speaking, focusses either on transcultural or interracial dynamics or on the variety of literary traditions that have emerged from the complex history of race in the trajectory of American society. As an illustration of the first type of scholarly preoccupation, one could turn to Eric J. Sundquist's To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), which examines how white and black literatures create an intertwined tradition by way of the dialectics of African American and European American perspectives, thus reevaluating American literature from 1830 to 1930. On the other hand, Richard Gray and Richard J. Gray's A History of American Literature (2011), which extensively surveys American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present, can be cited as an instance of the second kind of scholarly preoccupation.
From this perspective, Race in American Literature and Culture, edited by Prof. John Ernest, is a laudable endeavour as it blends together these two distinct, but intersecting, strands of scholarship, seeking to overcome the limitations of both. In other words, Ernest's critical anthology aims to simultaneously address the intercultural interactions and the variety of literary and cultural traditions that have resulted from the ideological constructions of race (including the white, the African American, the Chinese, the Latinx, and the indigenous traditions), focussing on the interpretive and representational conflicts between these traditions. The work is thematically divided into two parts. The first of these two parts consists of four sections – “Fractured Foundations,” “Racial Citizenship,” “Contending Forces” and “Reconfigurations.” According to Ernest, this part is in fact concerned with “the cultural construction of race” (7), or in other words, with the “white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race … a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement” (7, italics original). To achieve this aim, these sections have been arranged in a partially causal sequence that seems to respectively emphasize the problematic and unstable nature of white, racist constructions; the protest against such constructions on behalf of the marginalized communities; the conflict, uncertainties, and a degree of integrative and egalitarian promise conditioned by oppositional views of race; and the annihilation of the racist standpoints to reconceptualize racial concepts.
In keeping with this sequence of emphasis, the three chapters in “Fractured Foundations,” by Edward Larkin, Katy Chiles, and Gesa Mackenthun, portray the contradiction between commitment to diversity and racially motivated discrimination against certain communities in American empire since its birth, and the historically specific nature of racial construction in the late eighteenth century and the continuing functions of slavery and settler colonialism that defy temporal specificities, in addition to a white-supremacist anxiety about the loss of domination over nonwhite individuals and a black Atlantic literary discourse (that challenges racial capitalism and the attendant slavery) through “the trope of racial hybridity” (42). A part of the same sequence of emphasis, “Racial Citizenship” consists of three essays by Derrick Spires, Koritha Mitchell, and Edlie L. Wong. These essays address the reimagination of the concepts of citizenship and communities by the African American and Chinese American writers of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century to challenge the social assumptions and practices of the dominant white population that supported citizenship based on race and thus denied official recognition to certain racial groups (e.g. African Americans and Chinese immigrants). In the same way, “Contending Forces” deals with the issues of heightened racial tensions, the resultant uncertainty, and the probabilities of national integration in the wake of the Civil War, and “Reconfigurations” examines the part of American literature (African American stories addressing racial passing, Latinx writings, and so on) that deals with racial overlap, the pressure of assimilationist calls, and the trope of passing from one culture and race to another. Through this sequential arrangement of four sections, the first part of this book, which aims to focus on “the cultural construction of race” (7), stresses not only the subjective and exploitative construction of racist thoughts, but also the conflicting strands of racial thought in American literature and culture that have shaped the trajectory of American society. Through the same sequence, especially through the chapters of the second, third, and fourth sections, the first part also emphasizes the intercultural interactions between the white racist and the white liberal traditions, and between the white racist and the minority traditions, alongside anticipating the emergence of a variety of literary and cultural traditions in the second part of the book.
The second part of this book is divided into three sections – “Envisioning Race,” “Case Studies,” and “Reflections and Prospects.” As the editor asserts, this part aims to “focus primarily on the cultural communities and literary traditions that have emerged from this history (the racial history indicated in the first part of the book), exploring the representational priorities and the interpretive methods central to these traditions” (7). Accordingly, “Envisioning Race” examines the technologies of vision – whether literary or non-literary – developed by different racial cultures, and the role of literature both to strengthen and to challenge our habits of viewing, while “Case Studies” attends to the scholarship on the variety of literary traditions influenced by the racial history of America. Such scholarship has a broad range of focus that includes, among other issues, the attempt to recover marginalized texts, as part of the stated objective of the second part in this book. Finally, in line with the same objective, “Reflections and Prospects” speaks to “the brutal inhumanity of systemic white supremacy” and stresses the necessity of appreciating the humanities to address stories relating to the racial injustices of the past and to raise future possibilities (395).
The book is notable for its extensive scope that encompasses the ideological constructions of race, the different literary and cultural traditions that have emerged from such constructions, and the intercultural dynamics. By simultaneously possessing these three aspects, the book enhances Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, which is concerned exclusively with intercultural (or interracial) dynamics; Valerie Babb's Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature (1998), which focusses only on the evolution of white identity by examining the representation of it from the early American literature to the literature of nineteenth-century America; Anna Brickhouse's Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004), which considers nineteenth-century American literature as the outcome of the interactions between US, Latin American, and Caribbean literatures, and thus ignores the internal dynamics of American literature; and Brook Thomas's The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White (2017), which considers American literature of the Reconstruction era as a site of moral, political, and economic debates about the birth of a new nation after the Civil War, and reflects no consciousness of the variety of literary traditions within American literature.
However, the book's focus on the conflict between various literary and cultural traditions makes it partially indifferent to causality in the arrangement of the sections, causing the repetitive focus on the idea of racial overlap in “Fractured Foundations” and “Reconfigurations.” A consistent focus on such conflict also prevents the essays included in this book from adequately exploring whether there are commonalities between these traditions, and whether such commonalities imply the universality of certain literary canons. Despite this methodological limitation, Race in American Literature and Culture deserves appreciation as it equates American racial history with a palimpsest and thus leaves open the possibility of further exploration of this fraught area of knowledge.
