Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction [1 ed.] 0816670986, 9780816670987

Imperfect Unions examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century dramatic and literary enactments played

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Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction [1 ed.]
 0816670986, 9780816670987

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction. Setting the Stage: The Black–White Binary in an Imperfect Union
1. Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions as Surrogates
2. Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy
3. Staging the Unspoken Terror
4. The Remix: Afro-Indian Intimacies
5. The Futurity of Miscegenation
Conclusion. The “Sex Factor” and Twenty-First-Century Stagings of Miscegenation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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D
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I
J
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Citation preview

IMPERFECT UNIONS

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Imperfect Unions . . . . Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction

Diana Rebekkah Paulin

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

An earlier version of chapter 1 was previously published as “ ‘Let Me Play Desdemona’: White Heroines and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘My Contraband’ and ‘M.L.,’ ” in White Women in Racialized Spaces, ed. Samina Najima and Rajini Srikanth, 119–30 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). An earlier version of portions of chapter 2 was previously published as “Representing Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions, Surrogacy, and Performance,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (December 1997). An earlier version of portions of chapter 2 was previously published as “Performing Miscegenation: Rescuing the White Slave from the Threat of Interracial Desire,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 71–86. An earlier version of portions of chapter 2 was previously published as “Acting Out Miscegenation,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed. Harry Elam and David Krasner (2001); reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paulin, Diana Rebekkah. Imperfect unions : staging miscegenation in U.S. drama and fiction / Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-7098-7 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8166-7099-4 (pb) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Miscegenation in literature. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Literature and society—United States—History—19th century. 5. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 6. Racially mixed people in literature. 7. Race relations in literature. 8. Race in literature. I. Title. PS217.M57P38 2012 810.9'355—dc23 2012001200 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to my mother, Anne M. Anderson Paulin

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Contents Introduction. Setting the Stage: The Black–White Binary in an Imperfect Union 1. Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions as Surrogates

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2. Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy

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3. Staging the Unspoken Terror

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4. The Remix: Afro-Indian Intimacies

141

5. The Futurity of Miscegenation

187

Conclusion. The “Sex Factor” and Twenty-First-Century Stagings of Miscegenation

229

Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Index

291

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· INTRODUCTION ·

Setting the Stage: The Black–White Binary in an Imperfect Union In 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way. . . . Their very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse. —Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

Marriage proved to be such a fruitful ground for the growth of white supremacy because it reached well beyond the realm of romance. . . . When societies decide who can and who cannot legally marry, they determine who is and isn’t really part of the family. These inclusions and exclusions take place at such an intimate level that they shape what seems natural and, in turn, what is stigmatized as unnatural. —Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

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ere in the united states, the black–white encounter overshadows the complex national and transnational web of relations between and among the racially and ethnically diverse populations that came into play between the Civil War and World War I. Across this potent half century of history, an intimate relationship between a black person and a white person was one of America’s greatest preoccupations. Though such unions were relatively rare, they occupied center stage in American thinking. For the men and women daring enough to cross the color line, they offered both the promises and pitfalls of any relationship, but with the added intensity of trying to navigate sex and commitment and love while also violating a profound taboo. For much of the rest of America, intimate interracial relationships (or even the mere thought of them) · ix ·

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seemed an affront to the most basic order of things, an abomination against nature’s design. Perhaps the greatest evidence of how central such relationships were to the American consciousness is the sheer volume of ink spilled about the topic. Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries literally could not stop writing about — and talking about, and enacting — the union between black and white. Some of the most powerful of these explorations were found in fiction and in dramatic texts. This is a book about those productions, and what they mean for our understanding of racialized citizenship and national identity formation that coalesced in the years between the Civil War and World War I. Moreover, these texts offer cultural representations of how and why this crucial period established the foundations for the bifurcated racial and national landscapes that remain in place today. Imperfect Unions interrogates how fictionalized black–white interracial relations often veiled the processes through which complex racial, national, and transnational histories were overwritten with reductive, but culturally useful, binarisms.1 As scholars of race, diaspora studies, and immigration have documented, the demographics of the United States were continually shifting because of global economic and political events. Whether it was the importation of Chinese laborers to the United States, to compensate for emancipation and black migration, the relocation of Filipino, Cuban, and other displaced citizenry as a result of U.S. imperial expansion, or the huge influx of eastern and southern European immigrants fleeing poverty and political persecution, the black–white model could not account for the diverse nations, ethnicities, classes, and cultures that made up the U.S. populace during this unsettled period.2 This study exposes the process of demographic distillation that manifests in various reproductions of the polarized black–white paradigm, specifically in fiction and in drama. It examines the culturally significant ways in which spectacularized enactments of interracial entanglements rehearsed, remade, reiterated, and reproduced the overpowering presence of the black–white dyad in cultural narratives of U.S. nation formation. As we shall see, the black–white dyad can be understood as a static formulation of race that erases its complexity and reduces it to one of two narrowly defined, oppositional, and monolithic categories: black or white. It also anticipates the popularization of what white eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, in 1927, termed “bi-racialism”; in his book Re-forging America he argued for “a definite policy” of segregation, in which “the line separating

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the races would be straight and logical,” would preserve “race-identity,” and would ensure “a parallel evolution of white and negro race-lives, biologically distinct, yet bound together.”3 Well before the eugenics craze of the 1920s and the publication of Stoddard’s book, white supremacists and their mainstream counterparts deployed the black–white binary to fight against competing visions of nationhood in the United States. Potential challenges to advocates for an Anglo-Saxon republic included diasporic alliances, indigenous communities, immigrant populations, and occupants of territories acquired through imperial conquests and transactions, such as the indigenous and former slave populations in the annexed parts of Mexico. Through lynching, minstrelsy, and other powerful performative and discursive acts, black–white unions remained hypervisible, the ultimate threat to American life and culture. In and through this overproduction, hype, and fear-mongering, such white-supremacist thinking retained its representative and cultural power in the public sphere. Set in this historical context, Imperfect Unions examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century dramatic and literary enactments played in the ongoing constitution and consolidation of race in the United States, and explores how the ever-shifting concept of race was fundamental to Americans’ vision of nationhood. Attending to the particularities of both fiction and drama, this comparative study examines how these representations not only produced but were also produced by the black–white binary that informed them. My focus is a close scrutiny of works by Dion Boucicault, Louisa May Alcott, Bartley Campbell, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Pauline Hopkins, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Bob Cole. From this variety of texts, written across our potent half century by men and women, blacks and whites, playwrights and novelists, and critics and activists, we see the contours of the color line. Texts that seem to occupy oppositional and nonnegotiable ideological camps, such as white-supremacist and black racial uplift texts, can be reevaluated in terms of their interdependence and interactivity. We see too that the spectrum of expression was incredibly broad; I demonstrate how racist, conservative, and other straitjacketed accounts of interracial entanglements shared the public and cultural stage with multivalent formulations of race, sexuality, and nation, and we see how this range of ideas was circulating both within and across U.S. borders.

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It is now a commonly held belief that race is a social, cultural, and historical construct,4 and that identities are performable. Your average nineteenth-century American would have thought quite differently. The texts of our study are thus fascinating, a catalog of the often unseen processes in which race is created and performed, made visible and available for analysis. Along these lines, textual and staged depictions of miscegenation5 and interracial encounters should be read not merely as registers of prevalent racializations; in addition, I consider how they served as readily available channels that broadcast complex histories and relations in palatable and recognizable polarized forms that were familiar to mainstream audiences. For example, these complicated dynamics included both emergent diasporic and cosmopolitan movements and pro-imperial aspirations that were unfolding simultaneously in the United States and around the world. This rereading of historical representations of black–white unions investigates how and why these allegedly illicit interactions transformed the cultural scene in the postbellum period. Rather than remaining hidden, this great American fear was actually paraded and spectacularized in public sites. Rather than being relegated to the realm of the invisible, black–white relations were continually staged. Why, so to speak, all the drama? Why the consistent production—and from available historical evidence, the eager consumption by the masses — of something that deeply unsettled so many Americans? I believe that interracial relationships were written about and performed so that they could be tracked, regulated, and prohibited. And I believe, beyond the effort to control, the abundant depictions of interracial relationships — the overexposure of our great American taboo — actually elided other types of power relations that were crucial to forming our understanding of race and nation. As we examine these texts, we come across a fundamental tension: on the one hand we have the proliferation and promotion of the premise that illicit interracial unions, and later miscegenation, defied the rigid racial binary that structured U.S. identity; on the other, we have a variety of competing, often ignored or suppressed, manifestations of race and nation that this discourse masked. This examination reveals the collective role of multiple stagings of miscegenation as a “cover story” for the complex processes of racialization and the ongoing performances of bifurcated nationhood. It exposes the processes through which marginalized relations and events were often upstaged or relegated to the wings by the dominant polarized racial para-

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digm: the black–white binary. In doing so, it illuminates intersections in and among diverse communities, regions, and nations and opens up reductive hierarchical oppositions, based on race, class, gender, and national status, for critique and reevaluation. Throughout this literary and historical study of miscegenated racial formations, I purposely engage with multiple scholarly fields that intersect with my own. My comparative approach draws from theatre and performance studies, comparative race and ethnic literary studies, American studies, literary history, and trans-hemispheric studies. Although these fields of inquiry inform my study, my miscegenated reading practices also intervene in this interdisciplinary scholarship by reframing the critical cultural roles that drama and fiction played in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, my study examines how the cross-pollination of fiction and drama played a vital role in the production of racial miscegenation ideologies during this era. I also demonstrate, through my critical framework, both the powerful results and challenges of crossing scholarly boundaries, some that echo the many crossings — racial, gender, nation, class, hemispheric — that complicated the black–white divide at the turn of the century and that continue to do so today. Although I examine a variety of public and private enactments of miscegenation in both drama and fiction, these scenes remain in conversation with the vital cultures of theatre and performance that were in place during the transitional years following the Civil War and leading up to World War I. Although entertainment in the nineteenth century may seem quaint compared with our unending plethora of choices, Americans at the time could find spectacle and amusement and distraction in abundance, through reading, theatre, musical and street performances, museums, and public and private speech venues (lectures, sermons, debates, recitals, political rallies or protests, etc.). The most indigenous embodiment of American theatre in the first half of the nineteenth century — both in its explicit racism but also in its vivacity — is blackface minstrelsy. These extremely popular song-anddance shows were typically performed by white performers in blackface, but also by black performers with and without makeup. These shows offered endless intensity, an electric energy often matched only by the ugliness of their racial and gendered characterizations. Such shows were less expensive to produce than traditional plays, and the audiences were much more diverse, more often than not including working-class members.

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In this heady mix of dramatic performances and eager audiences, it was not uncommon for some theatrical productions to instigate riots. One of the more famous eruptions of violence was the Astor Place riot in New York City in 1849, leaving at least twenty-five people dead and hundreds injured. In this instance, violent clashes erupted at the Astor Place Opera House during a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Even this presumably respectable play was not excluded from growing tensions around national and ethnic loyalties, class affiliations, and the alleged divide that separated high and low culture. These concerns were often racialized in and through the popular blackface minstrelsy performances during this period; these spectacular stagings of race, gender, and class helped bring about the public mixing of members of distinct class, racial, and national identities.6 Arguably public performance spaces, such as this one, allowed for different types of cultural miscegenation that heightened anxieties around class differences, gender roles, racial divides, and political ideologies. Other later episodes of violence, such as the 1900 antiblack violence in New York City, targeted well-known black performers, like George Walker and Bert Williams; along with other black citizens who were attacked, these performers were “called by name” because they represented the growing and increasingly visible black population and the heightened interracial tension in the city.7 Riotous and sometimes lethal, the theater was not the refined space that mainstream audiences expect today but rather an interactive site, a manifestation of the churning, roiling brew of American culture and ideology. During the Civil War, more formulaic yet equally spectacular and technically complex performances emerged throughout the South and North. Antislavery and sentimental melodramas offered familiar stock characterizations in a more predictable format. These melodramas appealed to a more bourgeois class of spectators; however, they were still very much participatory spectators who did not hold back their pleasure or disapproval of the performances. A range of issues was narrated and rehearsed in many of these pieces, including emancipation, sectional differences, and U.S. expansion. As theatre matured in the United States, it evolved into varied forms and genres; as critics like William Dean Howells noted in the late 1880s, it interacted with the reading culture and the social experiences of those who viewed it. The subjects represented on the stage echoed contemporaneous issues and interests, ranging from slavery, the frontier, class conflict,

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sectional differences, and racial and ethnic stereotypes. And, although the elite often retreated to the sanctity of their self-contained parlors to perform and read plays, theatre still attracted cross-cultural and cross-class audiences. Despite the diversity, however, these audiences remained segregated, with the morally suspect members, which grouped together prostitutes, unescorted women, and black men and women, seated in the separate and less-expensive “third tier.” Refined audiences, who frequented bourgeois sites like the opera houses, also flocked to the theaters, sharing spaces with more bawdy and lowbrow audiences, such as the infamous Bowery theatregoers in New York City. And though most theaters were concentrated in urban centers and monopolized by a few powerful booking companies, competition produced an array of offerings that ranged from larger companies to independent local stock companies, thus expanding theatre’s audience and its reach. Like other businesses, theatre also relied on profit, so many theatrical productions, including those discussed in this study, took to the road, the railways, and the steamships, traveling across the country and even internationally to attract new audiences and earn more revenue.8 Theatre increased in both its formality and diversity throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, as older staples matured and as enormous historical shifts filtered onto the stage. Black performers revised the conventions of blackface minstrelsy, for example, and incorporated distinct forms of expressive culture like the cakewalk. The stage remained a place to air America’s preoccupations, and to both perpetuate and explore the country’s anxieties. The postbellum decades saw the debut of “savage” Indians transformed into reformable members of society, along with an abundance of drunken Irish immigrant and “heathen” Chinese stereotypes. Additionally, narratives of U.S. expansion—both westward and globally — were incorporated into popular dramas depicting the triumph of white Western civilization over “primitive” communities and nations. Amid the preponderance of stereotypes, however, were a small but growing number of alternatives. American theatre could upend expectation as well as reinforce it. Particularly by the turn of the century, and during the years before World War I, black and indigenous performers created work that responded to the imperialism and increasing segregation of the age, both on the stage and in the audience. Some advocated for integrated theaters; others promoted all-black troupes as a show of progress and respectability; still others wrote and produced shows that challenged the

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reductiveness of America’s color line. Throughout, theatre is revealed as an essential American institution that held both the country’s great aspirations and ugliest fears. These performances helped constitute and narrate cultural concerns by calling forth highly visible scenes that were then strategically mobilized, deployed, enunciated, and embodied for public consumption.9 At the same time, other parts of the drama remained mostly offstage and segregated so that they were usually excluded from view. Nevertheless, the relegation of intimate interracial unions to the shadows, beyond the reach of “civilized” Western culture, was often undermined by their highly visible stagings and censure. Still, their presence in our culture generated an obsessive preoccupation with them as symbols of corruption and unnaturalness that required vigilant prohibition, punishment, and eradication. This logic follows Foucault’s repressive hypothesis in which he argues that there is no binary division between the spoken and unspoken discourses of sex and sexuality. Instead, there are “many silences” that “underlie and permeate [multiple] discourses” for the purpose of surveillance, regulation, reproduction, and prohibition of sex and disparate sexualities.10 Like the discourses of sex and sexuality, the racialized discursive landscape both highlighted and hid interracial unions and sex; however, the cultural preoccupation with miscegenation’s threat to white supremacy and the polarization of race overshadowed attempts to repress or extinguish its emblematic power. Instead, it remained the black–white headliner that overwrote stories featuring other intersecting relationships, such as the structures of nation, gender, and sexuality that were unfolding. For instance, black–white encounters in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, first staged in New York in 1859, serve to cohere the production around a seemingly stabilized heteronormative, racialized, classed, and gendered patriarchal plantation structure. However, the white–Indian and black–Indian relations and characterizations that emerge both within and outside of the staged frame generate questions about the simplistic staging of race, gender, and nation presented in the play. They unsettle this seemingly binary domestic structure by linking it to the transcultural New Orleans setting and the various diasporic, transnational, and postcolonial networks that emerge in the play.11 This rereading of the play includes rather than eclipses marginalized members of the racial and transnational landscape to unveil and reevaluate the vigorously reinforced centrality of the black–white divide. Attending to alternate matrices of re-

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lations elided in the play, such as those of indigenous and postcolonial populations, this analysis reconfigures its meaning and significance. As we shall see, the drama and fiction that I have chosen run the gamut of ideological persuasions and raise intersecting and competing questions about the legitimacy of the black–white binary. How, for example, might Bartley Campbell’s drama of white slavery actually reactivate anxiety about the presence of black bodies, even though they remain marginalized in the play? Or, in contradistinction, how does Thomas Dixon’s forceful endorsement of the black–white binary and segregation compel him to stage miscegenation obsessively and as inextricably linked to the maintenance of white supremacy? Where does each text fall on the spectrum between the reification of the binarisms and the disruption of them altogether? What does this comparative reading teach us about the ways that these works, despite their distinctions, participate collectively in the constitution of miscegenation discourse and in the production of its cultural significance? Or, is it possible that the contours of this intellectual inquiry risk reproducing the binaries that I seek to dislodge? The specific analyses that follow offer illuminating evidence and engage the provocative questions and concerns that each historical representation raises; at the same time, they challenge me to attend to the tension that rests between accurately representing the resilient role of the binary in the texts at hand and reading between the lines of the powerful cultural and historical scripts that produced them. Beyond Binaries

Representations of miscegenation produced from the eve of the Civil War to the eve of World War I serve as useful sites for examining how structures of the black–white binary were established, disrupted, reconstituted, and maintained in the United States, as well as applied to other parts of the globe. The portrayals in this study illuminate the processes through which the United States attempted to reconcile its internal conflicts and reformulate itself as a unified nation, while the country and the globe experienced significant demographic, economic, social, cultural, and political changes. These wars function as bookends that highlight the development of U.S. nationhood, both in terms of how its ruling powers imagined themselves at home (and the difficult and often bloody processes through which those rulers established their positions) and how that formulation

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was then solidified for social, political, and economic elites to deploy globally, in the name of democracy. Part of this study’s project then is to foreground how the spectacle of black–white encounters aided the performance of a particular version of U.S. nationhood, which cast the Civil War as a domestic consolidation that then allowed for the nation’s dramatically staged global entrance into World War I. The idea of nation from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century was neither cohesive nor monolithic, particularly given the tension between states’ rights and national sovereignty. Nor was the definition of America reinvented after the Civil War. Instead, as historian Matthew Jacobson argues, the early nineteenth-century antecedents for U.S. nativism and empire were already in place, such as the pursuit of “manifest destiny,” the 1840–50 anti-immigrant crusade, and Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian removal. Following these early exclusionary precedents, emancipation did not radicalize or blast open the requirements for U.S. citizenship — in fact, slavery’s abolishment increased white mainstream anxiety about who would be allowed equality and freedom after the war. For the majority of “white” Americans, the collective process of forgetting the past and turning away from the local and global contradictions of U.S. segregationist and imperial policies redirected their focus on an image of greatness inspired by the allegedly reconciled and reunified American states. U.S. political and corporate elites reactivated and updated American nationalism to meet the “sheer volume” of mass production, consumption, population growth, war, and burgeoning bureaucracies, all in the ser vice of “grand designs” to increase the scale, reach, and global power of the United States.12 Although this vision was contested — as the work of black anti-imperial activists like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells attests — the momentum of this cohesive U.S. nationalism upstaged ongoing debates about what it meant to be American and the direction in which the country should go in the post–Civil War era. At the same time that this revised U.S. nationalism was gaining popularity, expansive U.S. imperialist projects, such as conquests in the Americas and the Caribbean, along with the domestic conflicts within the borders of established states and in other parts of North America, generated even more discontent and instability. Both the meanings of “nation” and “America” were always in flux and understood as still in process, particularly once the United States began to expand and assert its prominence on the world stage. The image of postbellum reunification helped establish the United States’ geopolitical corporate identity as dis-

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tinct from and superior to other countries that occupied the Americas, such as Mexico and Canada. Still, despite this performance of a unified national identity, parochialisms of many kinds — such as the audible presence of diverse dialects, cultural beliefs, and multilingual populations — also marked the cosmopolitan demography and the diasporic ancestry that increasingly characterized the nation. For this reason, throughout my analysis, I refer primarily to this corporation of states as the United States rather than “America,” as well as to distinguish it from other nations and communities that occupied the Americas and were often at odds with the U.S. imperial vision. What did emerge unilaterally was a renewed commitment to maintaining the black–white binary, since the categories of slave and free were no longer legally valid. Despite some short-lived changes introduced during Reconstruction in the postbellum South, the return of Southern Democrats to power brought about renewed efforts to enforce antimiscegenation legislature, especially in those places where it had been permitted temporarily. By quickly reinforcing already existing laws criminalizing interracial marriage, as well as enacting new ones where none had previously existed, all the southern states and many of the northern and western states acknowledged the significance of the removal of the slave/free distinction in a way that also maintained the division between black and white. Marriage, as these statutes suggested, was an institution that was often considered a microcosm of the nation, and it should not be sullied by racial intermixture. Idealized homes, marriages, and procreators of future Americans were white. The focus on whiteness as the measure for citizenship in the newly reminted United States simplified the complex racialized, regionalized, economic, and political relations that reformulated nationhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The desire to remain as distinct as possible from the category of “black” served as a uniting force, as black had been representative of an alien status ever since the importation of slaves. Moreover, blackness also became emblematic of other forms of inferiority that deemed one unfit for citizenship and justified white supremacy at home and abroad. This dichromatic composition of nationhood was imagined and rehearsed in various stagings of miscegenation. Although proslavery journalists David Croly and George Wakeman did not coin the term “miscegenation” until 1863, interracial unions in virtually all of North America had existed, at least, since the colonial period. In fact, the first criminalization

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of an interracial union in the English colonies occurred in midseventeenth-century Maryland to prevent white women from marrying black slaves and thus producing racially mixed children who were legally free. The fear of a growing nonwhite free population was so great that the law not only reclassified the children of interracial unions as slaves, but also declared that white women who married black men would also be reduced to slave chattel for the remainder of their lives for this transgression. This 1664 decision was based on English colonial law in order to prevent cross-class marriage; it was revised to address the peculiarities of the southern colonial slave system.13 Such criminalization focused on marriages because of the fear that nonwhites would be the beneficiaries of inheritances that had long been the protected privilege of propertied white patriarchs. In one of the many ironies of our story, unmarried couples who crossed the color line existed either peacefully or, at least, under the legal and violently punitive radar, alongside the crippling horrors of slavery. Even more surprising and morally reprehensible was the presumption that some of these interracial relationships, both consensual and forced, were overlooked and condoned solely because they increased the slave population by producing children who were also sentenced to a life as slaves. Still, those interracial unions that were already in place before the Civil War remained legitimate and were often accepted or tolerated by the surrounding communities. Even more telling, though, is that once the antimiscegenation laws were reinstated in the wake of Reconstruction, they were not taken off the books in South Carolina until 1999, despite the 1967 federal Supreme Court case that overturned all antimiscegenation laws, Loving v. Virginia.14 As we shall see, it was after the Civil War, amid the vast uncertainty of a war-torn and slaveryless America, that intimate interracial relationships became the loci of the nation’s problems. These unions became a convenient receptacle for a whole spectrum of fears, particularly a displaced uncertainty about the role of whites in the postwar United States. In the five decades after the Civil War, miscegenation was deemed illegal in more than half the states and in several Indian nations.15 Complicated by an influx of immigrants, like eastern Europeans and Irish, and by the movement of racially marked communities, like Native Americans or imported Chinese “coolie” laborers, the accusation of miscegenation helped to police nonwhite members of society and maintain the illusion of white purity. Couples who dared to remain together were often punished, either by local

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law enforcement or by the community, or they were driven out of town. The explicit brutality of slavery gave way to other forms of control, ranging from subterranean hostility to openly antagonistic violence and cruelty. Although other interracial relationships besides black–white unions were also included under the umbrella of miscegenation, there was less resistance to couples where both partners were nonwhite, such as marriages between Native Americans and “blacks” or between Mexican Americans and “blacks.” But even in these marginalized communities, particularly certain indigenous nations, such as the Cherokee in 1824, the Creek in 1825, the Chickasaw in 1858, and the Choctaw in 1888,16 interracial marriages with “blacks” were also outlawed or shunned, in the desperate quest to inch closer to the American brand of whiteness, and to attain the rights and privileges of a legitimate U.S. citizen. All interracial couples risked censure, both from outside and from within their designated racial groups. However, the preponderance of mixed-race individuals provided uncontestable evidence that these unions continued to occur, an ongoing testimony to the futility of policing human emotion, as well as the immense difficulty of delineating racial categories and containing a diverse and mobile population. Still, despite its fictional fabrication, the term “miscegenation” was deployed successfully to label black–white interracial sex and, in doing so, prohibit and invalidate marriage or any other interracial alliance deemed threatening.17 Its pseudoscientific valence was manufactured by combining two Latin roots, miscere (to mix) and genus (race). Croly and Wakeman popularized their innovative term in a pamphlet titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the White Man and the Negro in which they disingenuously promoted interracial unions and suggested that the abolition of slavery for blacks was the equivalent of social and political equality, something that Abraham Lincoln himself — the Great Emancipator — argued against vehemently. Although the term was devised to describe the mixing of two distinct oppositional races, it can also be translated as “mixed race,” which would connote a hybrid rather than a pure racial classification. Moreover, the term’s inclusion, inadvertently or not, of the word “nation” — miscege(nation) — following the descriptor “mixed race,” is suggestive of the idea of a mixed nation, a concept that has been the source of great anxiety and fear, as well as of hope and pride, during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Its direct connection to the question of emancipation demonstrates how U.S. nation formation was entangled with the highly contentious debate

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about how freedom and mobility for the formerly enslaved black population might reconfigure the intimate yet polarized dynamics of interracial relations that supported white supremacy. The term took hold quickly, by rendering black–white marriage, sex, and intimacy18 into a tangible concept that was easily pathologized and criminalized. The term “miscegenation” transmogrified interracial relations into something illicit, explicit, and corporeal. The process of circulating and institutionalizing this homogenizing name for black–white unions of all kinds, such as friendships, political alliances, and labor organizations, produced a cultural legibility of these relations that concretized their transgressive status. The effect of this production and transmission of miscegenation discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to amplify the boundaries separating black from white and to heighten the disruptive impact of crossing those racially demarcated lines. Once miscegenation became commonplace in mainstream discursive culture, it produced the very act that it named.19 Whether or not black–white relations were, in fact, sexual, the discursive act of labeling them miscegenation, despite the diverse relations it encompassed, promoted the monolithic definition that reinforced its forbidden and disruptive status. Black–white relations of all kinds were conflated into one reductive formulation: a sexual union that could potentially produce racially mixed, and therefore racially corrupt and alien, members of the population. This explosion of the term to include much more than sex must have surpassed Croly and Wakeman’s wildest dreams. In fact, its inflation suggests how highly susceptible mainstream white America was to theories of contamination and mythologies of hypersexuality and savagery associated with black bodies, especially recently liberated ones. Even though other types of interracial and often homosocial interactions, like the political alliances in the Fusion Party, and cooperative religious and social organizations, like the women’s temperance movement, may have been much more critical in shaping the nation’s future, their visibility and effect were often eclipsed and limited by the fears generated around the possibility of black– white sex. Although the interracial associations of such groups were not sexual, they were intimate, which opened them up to criticism and surveillance. Rather than fully engaging in political and social activism unmolested, such groups often found their efforts hampered because they had to stave off condemnation and accusations that they were somehow promoting and practicing unnatural black–white sex.

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Once called into being, or “uttered,”20 the charge of miscegenation reclassified any black–white interaction as transgressive, solely because it exceeded the limited roles of free/enslaved, citizen/occupant, and master/servant. It also amplified white anxiety: the mere mention of intimate interracial relationships was suggestive of a racial equality that challenged the institutions of slavery and segregation embedded in the nation’s foundation. Additionally, the domestication of miscegenation isolated interracial relations, distancing them from potential affinities with non-U.S. diasporic anti-imperial and antiracist movements that challenged white supremacy and colonialism, such as the performative post-racial image of the Cuban mestizo that promoted a collective transracial and transnational independence movement.21 Textual and dramatic stagings of miscegenation, as they are examined here, engage with dominant and marginalized narratives of (inter)racial relations and (trans)national identities in ways that restructure current understanding of the cultural power of the black–white binary in the United States and across its borders. By placing representations of black–white encounters in conversation with each other, Imperfect Unions demonstrates how our ongoing discussions about race can be read as part of an ongoing discussion about nation formation. Its comparative critical apparatus crosses historical, geographical, generic, and racialized boundaries in order to reconsider how historical formulations of miscegenation can be seen as critical enactments of nationhood that were deeply invested in questions of race, as well as their global implications. In an effort to consolidate U.S. citizenry and the emergent position of the United States as a world power, the supremacy of white Western civilization became synonymous with imperial power and successful conquest, embedded in the colonial history of empires like Great Britain and France. As the United States attempted to legitimize its own pedigree and global ascendancy, the goal of eliminating evidence of inferiority — conflated with nonwhite, non-Western ancestry — became paramount. At the same time, however, the very foundation of the United States was inextricably linked to slavery and conquest — to the indigenous and “Africanist presence” — that served as perpetual reminders of its “mongrel” origins.22 As efforts increased to eradicate the intermixed component of U.S. history and citizenry, the cultural production of miscegenation and antimiscegenation discourse created the opposite effect. Rather than maintaining the secret, private, unsanctioned status of interracial entanglements,

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it ushered them into a highly visible political, cultural, social, and public arena; in this way, the very idea of racial intermingling — along with actual enactments and a variety of depictions — was available for critique, regulation, and evaluation. Literary and theatrical representations of interracial unions contributed to this public debate around the meanings and power of miscegenation by documenting and rehearsing its social, political, and cultural effects. The almost hysterical obsession with interracial sexualized unions that was performed and popularized in fictional accounts simultaneously upstaged and sometimes troubled other forms of interracial alliances that were also shaping domestic and transnational policies and politics. . . . In the following discussion, I explore and compare a range of texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their environments. Reading these texts comparatively, we will locate and mark how distinct yet intersecting stagings of miscegenation expose both the underlying racism and cultural imperialism of seemingly progressive representations, such as William Dean Howells’s Imperative Duty and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. We will also consider how Pauline Hopkins and J. Rosamond Johnson rehearse their utopian visions of an alternate future by reconfiguring the black–white binary in their turn-of-the-century AfroIndian stagings of interracial intimacies, Winona and The Red Moon. By moving in, through, and across genres, we will learn how the forwardlooking visions of the abolitionist and activist cultural producers negotiated the powerful miscegenation discourse that emerged during the Civil War and shaped our understanding of how race was performed and understood historically and contemporaneously. Whether they articulated the utopian white-supremacist vision of Thomas Dixon or the proto-feminist abolitionist ideals of Louisa May Alcott, these imaginative yet highly performative stagings of ongoing struggles over what the nation would look like and how it would be defined provide space for a critical interrogation of the black–white binary’s resilience. (Like the phoenix, it is reborn time and time again after apparent destruction.) They also highlight the broader implications of the cultural logic that insists on miscegenation and black–white oppositionality as the central organizing structure for understanding and representing race and nation, as well as gender, class, and sexuality.

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The power of this binary as a “cover story” deepened as the United States was forced to reckon with increasingly diverse demographics as a result of its attempts to incorporate indigenous, nonwhite, non-European populations and nations like Cuba, the Philippines, and Mexico into this bifurcated structure. Rather than become a spectacle itself, by exposing its own repressive and genocidal acts as it expanded, the nation redirected attention to the most familiar and reductive binarism that it could transport and export to justify particular political, social, and economic acts: black versus white. If, for example, Irish immigrants became white in the United States, they were absorbed into the citizenry and recruited to maintain segregation that excluded nonwhites, particularly blacks who were relegated to the lowest position on the racial ladder. In contrast, because Filipinos, Hawaiians, Cubans, and Chinese were excluded from the category of whiteness, their status was easily conflated with the inferior position of blacks. In this way, military annexations and civilizing missions undertaken by the United States, and even aggressive trafficking of cheap Chinese “coolie” labor, could also be explained with a simple gesture. If these populations were not white, then they were “black.” Along these lines, their racialized identity — and therefore their cultural, political, and economic identity — was deemed inferior, and therefore they were available for U.S. occupation and control. However, it wasn’t enough to circulate the black–white binary as a narrative explanation for these policies and beliefs. In order to function effectively, the narrative had to remain provocative, highly visible, and easily adaptable, to sustain its critical role as masking device. Miscegenation was the critical tool employed to carry out the sociopolitical masquerade constituted by the black–white binary. It was the multivalent discursive map on which the United States charted its racialized ideological, cultural, political, imperial, economic, and social paths. Whether it played the role of a symbolic emblem or provided a label for an actual event, the performative trope of miscegenation continued to ignite the regenerative flames of the black–white binary and the culturally powerful image of racial intermingling as a threat not only to U.S. nationhood but also to the progress of Western civilization. And, in doing so, it captured the mainstream cultural imagination and decentered ongoing antidemocratic acts and oppressive practices perpetrated by the U.S. government both domestically and globally, including brutal racialized violence against the black diaspora and indigenous nations. At the same time, however, the exaggerated spectacle of miscegenation also allowed

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for other types of cultural work that crossed racialized boundaries to remain less visible and therefore also under the protection of the “cover story.” Each miscegenation scene stages both the seen and the unseen, which were always interacting with each other to produce overdetermined blackversus-white structure and to sublimate unsettling counternarratives. These moments can be understood as incorporations of both the highly visible and sensational,23 as well as the invisible everyday structures of racialization and racism.24 The scenes and the accompanying “unseens” in this study play out the processes through which eroticized black–white unions were displayed to a variety of audiences in diverse sites and mediums, such as formal public performances, literary depictions, and casual private interactions. The diversity of settings and readings that they offer both attend to and account for the destabilizing social, racial, sexual, gendered, political, domestic and transnational relations and events that were evolving from the Civil War period up to the “Great” War. Examining racialization and nation formation through a critique that crosses genres, Imperfect Unions fills in gaps in our current understanding and introduces new perspectives by demonstrating how both fiction and drama employ theatrics and spectacle to foreground the familiar and reproduce the recognizable. These reductive and often melodramatic stagings also work to mask or erase other vital relations and aspects of identity. Accordingly, the juxtaposition of texts that have seemingly distinct or even opposing aesthetic and ideological concerns demonstrates how these presumed binarisms “cover up” the mutual occupation of a common and intersecting continuum of race relations and narratives of nation. Additionally, the racial and gender status of the authors themselves does not predetermine the location of their creations in the racial-national landscape. Instead, these cultural producers and their works can be read as crossing racialized, gendered, and even national boundaries between and among black and white, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual, domestic and alien, in a way that destabilizes the reductive structure that these oppositionally defined categories impose. This comparative and layered grouping invites inquiries that might have been overlooked or dismissed in viewing these works according to our standard historical perspectives — the same hypervisible and narrowly defined logic, for example, that classified the Civil War as solely a domestic North/South, abolitionist/proslavery conflict rather than a network of transnational, transregional, and transracial relations and conflicts.

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This critical intervention also allows for a serious scholarly discussion of how seemingly theatricalized fictions of black–white encounters attend to crucial concerns about the status of the nation and its relationship to the global and emergent transnational and post-national beliefs, rather than — as has been typically done — excluding this important historical material because it might not meet the criteria of a particular line of inquiry, genre, or disciplinary norm. It is imperative to our understanding of racial formation in the United States to consider the full range of the creative spectrum, and especially to examine the extremes — works that have been critically marginalized until now, from racist diatribes that we today find distasteful, to hopeful yearnings for an alternative society that have long been ignored. Only an honest examination of these outliers will enable us to interrogate how critical treatment of all texts echoes broader institutional and ideological concerns, such as the structural relations between the study of American literature and American racism.25 This logic applies to explorations of race, gender, and power relations around the world.26 Whether representations are dismissed because of their racial ideology, or because of their exclusion from the category of “high art” owing to their mass appeal, or because of the sheer zaniness of their visions, they compel readers and critics to reconsider how stagings of miscegenation participate in the orchestration of culture. They also illuminate the ways that other contemporaneous happenings, like the Civil War or the everyday atrocities of lynching, were also enacting race and identity in ways that helped constitute narratives of citizenship and nationhood that were continually being reconfigured in the face of domestic and transnational challenges. In this vein, Imperfect Unions also demonstrates how scholarly inquiry itself reinvents, performs, and reformulates the cultural and historical practices that it evaluates, like crossing racial borders and reimagining transnational affiliations, in order to make them more visible and available for critical assessment, discussion, and application in the present, as well as in the future. Distinct in its pairing of dramatic and literary genres, this study draws from the intersecting fields of literary and performance studies. For instance, the theatrical lens not only illuminates those moments in fiction when the interplay of performance and lived experience produce race, it also highlights how theatrical tropes and structures register this complex process on the page. Theatre and performance studies offer critical methodologies for examining how particular performances, bodies, and events

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come to make a messy narrative into a cohesive story, while simultaneously erasing and masking alternative stories and trajectories.27 The works included in this study recount the dramatic stories of race and miscegenation in “America.” Their deep investment in the reductive black–white binary exposes its cultural power but, as I contend, also masks important counternarratives that reframe the complex interracial, intercultural, and transnational implications of miscegenation. Imperfect Unions revises current understandings of the cultural and emblematic power of interracial entanglements both historically and contemporaneously. The critique that follows uncovers the provocative and sometimes surprising ways that dramas and fictions of miscegenous relations grappled with the complex and intersecting categories of race and class, gender and sexuality, and family and nation that characterized the tenuous cultural, political, and economic U.S. landscapes from the 1860s to the early 1900s. By also adding a critical understanding of the cultural processes of racial, gender, and sexual formation in these historical texts, we may succeed in that difficult process of disrupting and dismantling racial hierarchies and boundaries in ser vice of national and imperial projects and work toward meaningful social transformation.

· CHAPTER 1 ·

Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions as Surrogates That one black drop of blood burns in her veins and lights up her heart like a foggy sun. O, how I lapped up her words, like a thirsty bloodhound! I’ll have her if it costs me my life. —M’Closky describing Zoe in The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault

I sometimes tremble when I think of the strong effort that would be put forth to keep me from you, should my brothers know our arrangements. But my determination is taken and my decision fixed; and should the public or my friends ever see fit to lay their commands upon me again, they will find that although they have but a weak, defenceless woman to contend with, still that woman is one who will never passively yield her rights. They may mob me; yea, they may kill me; but they shall never crush me. —Mary King, letter to William G. Allen in The American Prejudice against Color

A

lmost two centuries before the term “miscegenation” was coined, in the earliest years of English settlement in North America, interracial marriages between black men and white women were permissible by law. Although interracial unions were not commonplace in the seventeenth century, they were allowed; black and white couples lived together openly, and raised children together, and at times were even accepted by the communities in which they lived. As historians have noted, as long as the institution of slavery remained legal, the racial structure as it existed remained relatively stable, which made certain types of black– white unions less threatening.1 These men and women may have been seen as peculiar, and they certainly inspired the hatred and antagonism of · 1 ·

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a few, but for the most part they lived quiet lives relatively free from open hostility or violence. All that changed when the institution of slavery was directly attacked in the early 1800s by black and white abolitionists in the United States and England in multiple arenas, including speeches and narratives by former slaves; abolitionist literature, music, and drama; radical abolitionist warfare incited by leaders like John Brown; and abolitionist newspapers and organizations, including religious groups like the Quakers. Interracial relations suddenly became a volatile issue with a palpable political charge, and the mere coupling of a man and woman, especially a black man and a white woman, seemed in the eyes of many white Americans the harbinger of America’s downfall. Emancipation and the Civil War helped to transform black–white intimacy and allegiances into direct threats to the rigid racial and gender categories institutionalized through the patriarchal system of slavery. As we shall see, both same-sex interracial friendships and interracial heterosexual couples caused anxiety and debate. Like all preoccupations of a given time and place, America’s growing obsession with intimate interracial relationships manifested itself in popular culture. As the nineteenth century progressed, and especially in the years just before and then after the Civil War, cultural producers reiterated and reproduced these relationships in a variety of forms and venues, from minstrel shows to poetry, from political caricatures to toys. These immensely popular, and familiar, reproductions of stereotyped figures were powerful cultural tools; they helped define and embody the complex intersection of racial, sexual, political, (trans)national, and ethical categories that informed the public sphere. These representations worked in concert with social, economic, and political policies that limited the agency and civil rights of those contained by these reductive and often overlapping stereotypes.2 Once introduced into the discursive landscape, they proliferated, embedding powerful symbols of racialized inequality and difference in the national and international imagination.3 It is in front of this cultural backdrop that Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, and Louisa May Alcott’s 1863 short stories “M.L.” and “My Contraband,” entered the scene. Boucicault and Alcott, like many other nineteenth-century artists, engaged the international slavery debate in their fictionalized dramatizations. They both located controversial concerns relating to the slavery question in romanticized

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and melodramatic interracial relations. In and through their enactment of these domestic interracial unions, they staged much more than illicit interracial desire and, as other scholars have emphasized, the contamination of bloodlines. These fictional performances of race, gender, and nation rehearsed the complex ways in which miscegenation threatened not only the “proper” family but also the potentially “contaminated” nation(s) for which it stood.4 My reading departs from scholarship that focuses more on the racially complex children produced by interracial sexualized relations. Instead, I foreground the literal and symbolic procreative power of interracial sexualized contact, in concert with its “troubling” progeny, to reconsider how fictionalized crossings of the black–white color line informed popular beliefs about what constituted family, race, and, by extension, nation in the mid-nineteenth century.5 In this way, the varied interracial couples in Boucicault’s and Alcott’s works can be read as provocative echoes, contestations, and interventions in the contemporaneous cultural and historical moments in which they were produced. More specifically, they invite us to reconsider how local interracial encounters might pose a threat to the state-endorsed racialized, gendered, and classed patriarchal structure. My critical reassessment also reveals how these enactments of interracial contact repeatedly demonstrated the consequences of contesting the nation’s racialized means of policing bodies. This reconceptualization of the role of Boucicault’s and Alcott’s work provides an illustrative model of the ways in which fictionalized reproductions of interracial unions exhibited national concerns through the process of surrogation.6 “Surrogacy” describes multiple levels of substitution and reformulation in culture that unsettle the identities, subjects, and events that these levels (re)present, as well as those they invoke indirectly, such as white bodies standing in for black ones, families standing in for nations, romantic encounters standing in for social relations, race standing in for gender, and the past standing in for the present.7 More specifically, surrogation here highlights the ensemble of substitutions that Alcott and Boucicault employed to rehearse the symbolic and material implications of interracial unions. Their scripted stagings of miscegenation invoke the interactivity of speech and gesture, and word and body, as well as other oral and written forms, in ways that highlight the different kinds of cultural work that these authors’ representations perform, such as mediating between the imagined world and the realities of everyday experiences. In

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this way, their work engages the myriad of localized and (trans)national concerns around race, gender, property, nation, freedom, and slavery that were embodied in their multivalent stagings of miscegenation.8 We will read Alcott’s and Boucicault’s works in terms of the specific ways in which their enactments of miscegenation both fall short of and exceed understandings of its symbolic and literal role in the formation of culture.9 This chapter employs surrogation to examine how these midnineteenth-century representations of black–white intimacies recalled the conflicted and unresolved history of race and imperial conquest in the United States and in other sites of transnational contact. In doing so, it identifies the ways in which literary and dramatic stagings of miscegenation functioned, and continue to function, as surrogates for the unresolved entanglements they conjure. These stagings can be read as deeply invested in history but also equally engaged in the ongoing production of the present and the unknowable future. This critical approach provides insight into how historical constructions and reproductions of interracial unions were part of the ongoing process of reconstructing and reinventing nationhood and citizenship in response to the challenges posed by increasingly variegated and diasporic populations before, during, and after the Civil War. Exoticizing a Drop of Blood

Dion Boucicault was born in 1820 in Dublin, Ireland.10 He learned his crafts as actor and playwright in London and Paris, apprenticing, composing, and translating plays for the London stage. He was known for his ability to translate plays quickly and had a reputation in certain circles as an opportunist. Some accused him of reinforcing stereotypes of the Irish, while others perceived a certain affinity with the colonial status of Ireland under British rule and an implicit critique of British empire. His slippery status — Irish-born, of French heritage, and with long-term residency in England and then the United States — reinforced his lack of a fully classifiable ethnic or national identity. After moving from London to New York in 1853 with his actress-wife, Agnes Robertson, he began the most “lucrative and successful” part of his career.11 Already known for his brand of spectacular melodrama and theatrical sensationalism, he wrote The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana in 1859.12 He composed it after living and working in New Orleans for several

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years, claiming to have “faithfully depicted” his observations of slavery and the South.13 The play opened on December 6, 1859, at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. It appeared in the midst of a mayorial election during which the local and national implications of the slavery question were part of the political debate, especially since pro-southern Democrat Fernando Wood was elected. The premiere also came a mere three days after radical abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his raid of an arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.14 Boucicault’s The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana offers a representative sample of the common tropes and themes used in narratives about interracial unions: forbidden love, the tragic death of the mulatta, and the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of black blood. It was based on the work of another Anglo-Irish writer, the 1856 novel The Quadroon; or, a Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana by Mayne Reid.15 Like many of Boucicault’s other dramas, it was a translation of a literary representation reformulated for a theatrical production. It also followed on the heels of the 1858 play The Slave’s Escape, or a Leap to Freedom, by black author, abolitionist, and orator William Wells Brown, which portrayed black characters of multiple hues who were educated and dedicated to emancipation and racial uplift. Both plays employed mixed-race characters who were quite familiar to nineteenth-century audiences because of their abundance in both antislavery and proslavery literature. The most common role of these characters was that of a tragic figure unable to live in the racially bifurcated world. The most frequent representation was that of a tragic mulatto or mulatta (half-white, half-black), but other racially mixed fractions were also employed to ascertain one’s classification, such as quadroon (one-quarter black), or even octoroon (oneeighth black). More frequently than not, the character is able to pass as white or as some other ethnic/racial identity, such as Italian, Indian, or Mexican. These characters were also familiar figures popularized in cities and nations known for concubinage of mixed-race quadroons and mulattos, like New Orleans, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands.16 Even though these characters were often portrayed as appealing because of a certain exoticism attributed to their racial mixture, ultimately they are alienated from both black and white communities. Most narratives conclude with such characters unable to survive in the racially divided society, which results in tragic death or exile. Reinforced by eugenics-inspired pseudoscience that attested to these figures’ innate inferiority, and by antiblack public

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discourse, these representative tropes were so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination that the tragic endings were practically a foregone conclusion, a terrible, unavoidable result of race mixing. Amid the social and political turmoil erupting around the issues of emancipation and southern independence, Boucicault claimed that his play merely represented slavery as a “social fact” rather than promoting either a specifically abolitionist or proslavery view; but reviews, both positive and negative, focused much more on the play’s political implications and the controversial slavery debate than on the work’s aesthetics.17 An 1859 New York Times article praised the Winter Garden’s manager, a Mr. Stuart, because “he has taken up bodily the great ‘sectional question’ which is now forcing itself steadily in upon the public mind throughout the United States, and set it before us in a concrete shape.” No doubt this reference to sectional differences referred, at least in part, to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850, which had heightened regional tensions by encouraging those in the “free” states to support slavery by legally enforcing and rewarding the return of escaped slaves to their owners. By declaring that runaway slaves be captured and returned to their masters, the Fugitive Slave Act made more explicit the northern states’ complicity in the institution of slavery and reinforced the conflation of black bodies, no matter how small the amount of “black” blood they contained, with property. Additionally, the Compromise of 1850 finessed Congress’s decision as to whether and how slavery would be allowed to expand into newly acquired territories, by admitting California as a free state and allowing residents of the southwestern territories of Utah and New Mexico to determine their own position on the institution of slavery, based on popular sovereignty. Both the Fugitive Slave Act and the 1850 compromise represented attempts to appease slave-state politicians and prevent a sectional split. In addition, the Times article claimed that the play’s success was based on its appeal to the “passions of the audience in their every-day capacity as men and citizens.”18 Referring to the play’s questions about citizenship, nationhood, and the embodiment of racial difference, this review speaks to the powerful reach of The Octoroon. The play, as the review indicates, is not just entertainment; it is about exercising one’s power as an enfranchised and involved citizen, a power that, at the time, belonged only to a select group of male, Anglo property owners. Even suggestions that Boucicault was merely recycling and repackaging old stories, like Uncle Tom’s

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Cabin, point to the play’s symbolic force and powerful impact.19 Moreover, it is no coincidence that the play’s indirect portrayal of the hierarchy of race, class, and gender came at the same time that Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection were gaining popularity. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was also published in 1859, escalating the debate about the inherent inferiority of blacks and indigenous people in the United States and elsewhere. Darwin’s work would soon give rise to the field of eugenics, a term established in 1888 by Darwin’s cousin, Sir  Francis Galton, which explicitly promoted social engineering and attempted to link degeneracy of the species to particular genetic and physical attributes, especially those based on race. Other responses suggested that Boucicault was merely pandering to an inflamed popular opinion, and that the play was designed so as not to offend anyone and attract the largest audience possible. Biographer Richard Fawkes affirms this perspective, asserting that although “there was no topic more discussed or more likely to arouse passions than the issue of slavery,” Boucicault “managed to keep a fine balance between antagonizing the South and alienating the North. He was also able to indulge his penchant for publicity” when his wife, Agnes, who played the lead character, Zoe, “received an anonymous letter saying that if she went ahead with the performance she would be shot.”20 The show was performed from December 6, 1859, to February 12, 1860, at the Winter Garden, where it drew large audiences. In its opening run Boucicault acted alongside his wife, playing the character Wahnotee. Although the play was filling the house to capacity, Boucicault and his wife refused to perform after one week, claiming that they were not receiving their fair share of profits or credit. Despite Boucicault’s failed attempt to have the play shut down, it continued its run with Mrs. John Allen playing Zoe and Harry Pearson playing Wahnotee.21 Meanwhile, Boucicault and his wife reappeared in a different production of The Octoroon at Laura Keene’s rival theater a few blocks away.22 Over the next year, the play was produced throughout the country, in such locales as Boston, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine, attesting to both its broad appeal and the relevance of the subject matter.23 In 1862, it even was produced in London, further demonstrating the transnational significance of slavery. Moreover, its transnational implications were reinforced by its production in London, which critics Jennifer Brody and Daphne Brooks have attributed to its aestheticization of the complex dynamic of historical imperial slaveholding nations, like England, whose viewers could focus on the eroticized

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appeal of the “white-skinned” “American” slave to her European-educated lover rather than on the political, economic, and cultural implications of the play’s representation of slavery as it related to the practices of empire, such as imperial conquests in Africa and India.24 This sentimentalized distance was reinforced by London audiences’ uproar over Zoe’s death at the end of the play. In order to appease them, Boucicault revised the American version for the English production of The Octoroon so that she lives and reunites with her lover — a testament to English audiences’ desire to escape their own implication in the institution of slavery. Appearing on the eve of the Civil War, The Octoroon would become Boucicault’s most heralded play — not surprising, as it suggests more liberating possibilities about the future of race relations in the United States than later narratives and, at the same time, reiterates the limitations imposed by a well-established racial hierarchy and by the institution of slavery.25 Set on the Terrebonne plantation in Louisiana, The Octoroon tells the story of Zoe, the illegitimate octoroon daughter of the recently deceased Judge Peyton. The term “octoroon” was used to describe someone who purportedly had one-eighth black blood and seven-eighths white blood. Although Zoe is considered a slave, because of her shared ancestry with the judge she is treated delicately by other slaves, educated, and given very light duties in the master’s house, more like a family member than a servant. After the judge’s death, his widow discovers that the plantation is in financial trouble. Mrs. Peyton’s efforts to save the plantation and its slaves are thwarted by M’Closky, one of her overseers. In the course of the drama he kills her slave Paul, in order to prevent him from delivering funds that would save her property. M’Closky’s actions are motivated in part by his desire to purchase the judge’s illegitimate daughter, so that he can make her his concubine. Meanwhile, the Peytons’ nephew, George, and another overseer, Salem Scudder, who both claim to love Zoe, uncover M’Closky’s scheme and save the plantation. At the conclusion of the play, M’Closky is found guilty of murder and is subsequently killed by Paul’s Native American friend, Wahnotee. Despite the hopeful turn of events, Zoe dies by her own hand during the final moments of the play in order to “spare” her suitor the pain of loving “the octoroon.” From the play’s beginning, multiple intersecting identities and histories are introduced through the play’s setting and its diverse characters. The cosmopolitanism of New Orleans as an urban gateway to the Caribbean and to the Spanish Americas, along with historical transfers of land

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between imperial powers and displacement through violent events, like the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the 1846–48 U.S.–Mexican War, reinforces the multilingual cultural landscape in which the interracial intimacies represented in the play take place.26 For instance, the setting just outside New Orleans invokes the aforementioned overlapping histories of Native Americans, African Americans, Caribbean islanders, Spanish, French, and other “creolized” identities, which makes it impossible to reduce race and nationality to static, monolithic categories.27 New Orleans was also deeply embedded in the southern slave-trade economy. Along with other coastal cities, like Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile, it had a reputation for housing large numbers of slave “cargo” transported from cities farther north, like Baltimore, Washington, and St. Louis. These slaves were then put on sale in New Orleans’s notorious “markets,” which attracted not only slave dealers and plantation owners but also tourists — a horrific production that furthered the policing of black bodies and supported the urban and regional economies in the lower South and in the expanding Southwest.28 Additionally, Boucicault’s inclusion of an octoroon woman, Zoe, as the central character in his play reiterates the liminality of her racial identity, inviting contradictory readings of her literal and symbolic body and her position in southern plantation culture.29 Her racially ambiguous identity creates space for multilayered readings of the play’s intersecting and contradictory formulations of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. His use of an octoron as a rhetorical device follows a long “tradition” in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the Americas of depicting mixed-race figures as emblems of racial and political ideology in various historical, national, and cultural contexts, in works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Lydia Maria Childs’s A Romance of the New Republic (1867). Although Zoe, along with other multivalent mixedrace characters in this play and in other works in this study, functions as a powerful literary device,30 it is only when these multivalent figures are put into “play,” literally and figuratively, in a particular miscegenation drama or fiction, that their specific and contextually contingent significations become visible, meaningful, and available for critique not only to viewing and reading audiences but also to critics. The indeterminacy of Zoe’s body is significant then because it enables her to perform as a surrogate for other characters’ desires and for the intersecting racial, gender, and (trans)national ideologies informing the play.

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She can be read as both enslaved chattel and valuable property, as both “black” and “white” simultaneously. At a crucial moment in the play, she is put up for sale and purchased at the slave auction, a scene that produces competing symbolic meanings.31 As she is about to be sold, Dora Sunnyside, the young white woman who also loves George Peyton, bursts onto the scene, abandoning all her gendered and classed decorum, as well as her jealousy, in order to rescue Zoe. As Joseph Roach describes, “Zoe stands at the apex of a compositional triangle. She is anchored on one side by the scene of gladiatorial male violence. . . . On the other side she is anchored by the neighboring plantation belle Dora Sunnyside’s heaving bosom.”32 This enactment of competitive bidding for Zoe demonstrates how she simultaneously embodies the commodification of other visibly black slaves, and white male desire for (and white female identification with) black women. Her surrogate role allows her body to perform dramatic and complex significations throughout the play, disrupting racial, gender, and sexual codes that govern those around her. Moreover, Zoe’s multivalence motivates others to violate their conventional roles: George, who is white, wants to marry her; Dora — the supposed damsel in distress — disrupts gender codes of behavior by attempting to rescue Zoe in the male arena of the slave market; Scudder risks his reputation by defending a nonwhite, Wahnotee, against the white man who purchased Zoe. They all act because of their “love,” or desire, for Zoe. Her position serves as a catalyst for their transgression of established societal rules around racialized difference. In effect, Zoe’s indeterminate status (re) generates miscegenation over and over again — all of these characters impose their own readings on her body to rationalize their transgressive acts. Miscegenous contact with Zoe unleashes some untapped rebellious nature that her marginalized and exotic position invokes. Similar to the ambiguity of Zoe’s role, contradictory responses to the play’s subjects suggest that its rehearsal of conflicts posed threats that extended beyond the staged boundaries and into the (trans)national imagination. Multiple contemporaneous responses to The Octoroon reemphasize the ways in which the entire production and the discourse surrounding it can be understood as a site of surrogation.33 The various readings that the play produced, and continues to produce, indicate that it offers inconclusive material onto which others can map and substitute competing discourses and ideologies. Newspaper columnists, academics, and politicians, to name a few, debated the play’s issues without necessarily addressing the

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specific communities that these problems impacted. Echoing the ambiguous critical responses, the play threads together a tenuous ending. So, rather than clarifying the controversial questions it summons — questions of transgressive interracial love, the morality of slavery, and the complexity of race relations in the United States and in potential sites of imperial conquest — the conclusion leaves most of them unanswered. Moreover, the fact that these questions could be relegated to the theatrical realm rather than applied to the world beyond the stage also produced a sense of “safe” distance from the lived realities that they invoked. As one New York Times review reiterated in 1859: “We have already uttered our critical verdict upon the drama as a drama — the work of one man. . . . It seemed and seems to us to be merely a cleverly-constructed, perfectly impartial, not to say non-committal, picture of life as it is in Louisiana.”34 On the other hand, despite reports of Boucicault’s even-handed negotiation of disputed conflicts, his portrait still incited fear in those who felt threatened by his play’s representation of slavery as both a domestic and transnational issue. In an 1859 preview editorial titled “Abolition on and off the Stage,” the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett lambasted the play, declaring that The Octoroon was an example of the “rise and progress of the negroworshipping mania in the United States” and that “the play will carry with it the abolition aroma, and must be classed with the sermons of Beecher and Cheever, and the novels of Mrs. Stowe. It will tend still further to excite the feeling which now threatens to destroy the Union of the United States and ruin the republic.” He went on to proclaim that “when the stage is prostituted to the work of disunion and treason, it will find us a bitter and determined enemy,” and that it was “disgraceful” that New Yorkers, “conservative and sound in their hearts,” could not enter the theater “without having the almighty nigger thrust under their noses.” In Bennett’s opinion, “abolition doctrines on or off the stage” should be denounced by “every citizen who has the good of the republic at heart” because such productions, like “every abolition book, sermon or play tend to add fuel to the fire.” “For these reasons,” Bennett proclaimed, “we wage war against The Octoroon and declare, in the name of good citizens of the metropolis, that neither that nor any other play of the same character should be performed.”35 Bennett raised the stakes of the play to the level of making or unmaking national policy. He invoked the powers and rights attributed to citizenship,

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indicating that those who possessed that status were compelled to act in response to any work that dared to play out the controversial issue of slavery, to threaten the nation’s stability, or undermine its potential as an emergent imperial power. He also suggested that it was not only an inappropriate play because of its subject, but it was also a “bad,” poorly crafted play that insulted the dramatic profession. Here, he used politics as well as aesthetics to discount the play and its distasteful subjects — “the almighty nigger” — because they did not merit representation, especially when the play potentially challenged “conservative” and “sound” (read white, male, propertied) republican values and concerns. Rather than maintaining the play’s “safe” status as a mere “picture” of Louisiana, this reading suggested that the play carried with it the potential to incite revolution and tear apart the fabric of the United States and the global economic and trade systems that supported its wealth — similar to the power attributed by Bennett and many others to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Such work was not merely a slice of local flavor, but was an inflammation of pertinent national concerns. Contrasting responses, like those who dismissed it because it was merely drama or waged war against it because it reeked of politics, reiterated the indeterminate readings of Boucicault’s play; they also indicate the ways in which it functioned as a symbolic site for negotiating competing arguments about the direction in which the nation was moving and how it might transform or be transformed by changes that were occurring within and outside its borders. After its premiere at the Winter Garden, the play was revised at least twice. Zoe’s controversial relationship with her white male lover, George, is defused in one version of the play when he carries her onstage in his arms and it is unclear whether she is alive or dead; in another English rendition, she is relegated to some unknown distant land; and in another, shortened four-act version, all the central characters are killed when the steam vessel on which they are riding explodes.36 No matter what steps were taken in order to appease various audiences, the play still produced conflicted and sometimes hostile responses like that of the Herald reviewer. The implication was clear: even conservative or, at least, uncertain endings were not enough to reduce the inflammatory potential of representing interracial transgression. Whenever there was any possibility of interpreting the play as subversive or offensive to the dominant position of whiteness, those whites in power raised objections.

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The play also fostered more pro- and antislavery productions, such as Mrs. J. C. Swayze’s abolitionist play Ossawattomie Brown, several “documentary tableaus,” in which live actors staged a historic scene without speaking or moving for the duration of the display to emphasize its dramatic significance, such as the depiction of John Brown’s famous raid, the Harper’s Ferry, and a pro-southern-planter play, Distant Relations.37 Even a racist farce of The Octoroon was produced in 1860, entitled Moctoroon. This comic version, which cast a person dressed as a gorilla in the main role, revealed the deep-seated racist anxieties that the play invoked.38 Another example of the violent reactions that the play produced was the aforementioned rumor that Agnes Robertson received a death threat because she planned to stand on the auction block when she played Zoe in the New York premiere.39 In another instance, a reviewer dismissed any possible threat that her role might present by reducing Zoe’s character to the product of fantasy, suggesting that such a virtuous black woman could exist only as an “imaginative concept.” However, more stereotypical roles, such as the old slave Pete, who speaks in black vernacular and submits to the authority of all whites who interact with him, were lauded because of the characters’ “exact vraisemblance to American life.”40 From these examples, it becomes evident that the play’s “subjects” were easily manipulated in order to promote or debunk competing ideological and political motives and to tap into particular preoccupations, depending on who was doing the interpreting. Zoe occupies a central position in this dramatization of interracial liaisons because she literally embodies interracial sex and all that this transgressive act signifies. Foregrounding her transnational status, Jennifer Brody attests to the symbolic significance of this figure, asserting that the “mulattaroon performs as an iconic sign of miscegenation” because “she serves as the supreme signifier of and for miscegenating nations.” The feminized American daughter is the result of an encounter between the African “mother” and European “father” that was rarely potrayed in Victorian culture, according to Brody. Instead, this “impossible” sexual act was suggested through “absences” and “gaps” in the embodied evidence of the progeny of this union. This familial and familiar metaphor highlights the role of family as a microcosm for nation and suggests the ways in which the miscegenated body served as a site for playing out the transnational networks that supported slavery and the racialization of labor and desire,

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echoing the earlier nineteenth-century “traffic of triangular trade.”41 Along these lines, Zoe’s multivalent role in The Octoroon places her on center stage of the (trans)national debate around slavery in the transatlantic setting of New Orleans.42 Additionally, she functions as both the mixed-race result of an interracial sexual encounter and as one of the participants in an interracial affair, simultaneously. And, although it could be argued that the subject of interracial unions or miscegenation is not the crucial issue in The Octoroon because, for all intents and purposes, Zoe functions as a “white” woman, her purported “one-eighth of black blood” produces the racial distinction and liminality that pose a threat to white-supremacist doctrines used to cohere nationhood in the United States and to exclude nonwhites. In contrast to those characters who seem to conform to the well-established racial hierarchy, Zoe’s mixed-race body unsettles the boundaries bolstered by the racist structure. Despite the fact that she looks white, constant reminders of her “taint” of black blood reinforce her difference and indicate that she is the source of instability. After all, Zoe is the product of the presumably unspeakable transgression that took place between Judge Peyton and Zoe’s unnamed quadroon mother. This illicit act remains an (open) secret relegated to the margins of the play; yet it informs the status of Zoe and the actions of those who surround her, as well as the transmission of property throughout the play. The behind-the-scenes act of miscegenation functions as the origin of all other misfortunes and corruption.43 Although her racially mixed body operates as the site of several conflicts, her “black” blood is repeatedly named as the source of all the chaos that erupts. This sentiment echoed earlier theories about the innate inferiority of nonAnglo- Saxons and prefigured the ascension of global white supremacy exhibited through colonization and world wars.44 It also recalls the emergent scientific and medical discourse that reinforced hierarchies of civilization based on racialized biology and phenotypes, such as Darwin’s work. Additionally, it is suggestive of the biblical imagery of original sin, suggesting that Zoe’s existence is the product of an immoral, unnatural act, echoing racist ideology and popular rhetoric about race mixing that circulated, especially in religious circles, across the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century. Because of her exotic difference, Zoe engenders responses that exceed “normative” codes of behavior for white members of society. For example, the deceased judge openly acknowledges Zoe as his “illegitimate” daughter,

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which echoed the complicated history of white men, often slave owners, fathering slave children. Certainly, the fact that interracial sex, concubinage, and rape occurred for both pleasure and for reproduction of the enslaved labor force functioned as both public knowledge and as an “open secret.” Popular slave markets, including those in New Orleans, publicized high-priced “fancy” girls, who were purchased for sex and/or companionship; their ultimate monetary value demonstrated what Walter Johnson describes as “a measure not only of desire but of dominance.”45 However, written documentation of these encounters and relationships were often circulated in the context of slave narratives; allusively with ellipses, in narrative autobiographies, like Louisa Picquet’s The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (1861) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); or by word of mouth.46 In contrast to the subterranean expressions of interracial desire both in literature and in the play, other central white male characters openly express desire for Zoe, which would have been considered illicit yet commonplace. Both overseers, Scudder and M’Closky, admit that their conflict and motivation for acquiring Terrebonne are fueled by their obsession with Zoe. In fact, M’Closky claims that their battle has nothing to do with property or with northern loyalties, as they are both “Yankees.” Instead, he attributes all of the deceit and corruption to Zoe’s appeal when he asserts: “With your [Scudder’s] New England hypocrisy, you would persuade yourself that it was this family alone you cared for; it ain’t — you know it ain’t — ’t is the ‘Octoroon’; and you love her as I do; and you hate me because I’m your rival — that’s where the tears come from, Salem Scudder, if you ever shed any — that’s where the shoe pinches.”47 By reducing Zoe to a nameless object, M’Closky inscribes his own class aspirations on her body. For the possibility or fact of possessing Zoe, or any slave for that matter, would increase the worth of both men in the context of the southern economy in which slaveholding meant property ownership. Possessing Zoe becomes the solution for M’Closky’s sense of displacement and inadequacy, feelings that are vital to understanding whiteness, masculinity, and class in the emerging nineteenth-century United States. His position as a non-propertied white man of Irish ancestry increases his outsider status, particularly since Irish immigrants were vying for citizenship as their numbers increased exponentially following the potato famine in Ireland from the 1840s to the early 1850s.48 The Irish also had a long history as colonial subjects under English authority where they were often

Zoe on sale at the slave market, where Dora attempts to rescue her. The Octoroon, Dion Boucicault. Courtesy of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent, England.

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described in racialized terms akin to the discourse about black inferiority in the United States, something with which Boucicault would have also been familiar. M’Closky’s character also contributes to the complicated representation of whiteness because of his uncertain economic and cultural status in relation to aristocratic characters who are considered more cosmopolitan, like George Peyton. M’Closky also rejuvenates the racialized stereotype of the “stage Irish” that represented the colonized national “Other” on the British stage and which was imported to the popular stage in the United States by playwrights like Boucicault. Similar to minstrel shows that characterized blacks as comic figures in need of supervision, the “black” Irish were cast as “politically incompetent” and racially liminal.49 In some ways, it could be argued that M’Closky shares an uncertain status with other liminal characters because of his “alien” Irish ancestry and shaky class position. This seeming affinity with Zoe’s racial difference and inferior status is counterbalanced by his position as a white male. M’Closky has access to her but also considers her an ally against the established white aristocracy that the Peyton and Sunnyside families represent. He wants to make Zoe his mistress so that he can prove himself worthy of that class of “Virginia transplant[s]” and “stingy old Creole[s]” from which he is excluded. In this case, Zoe functions as a mediating figure between white marginalized workers and/or immigrant labor and the landed classes. Her proximity to the educated elite, because of her upbringing, provides her with the qualities that M’Closky wants to own. However, the illegitimacy of her position — her invisible blackness — undermines the superior status of the landed class that M’Closky both desires and detests. If he succeeds in making Zoe his spouse and taking over the Peytons’ property, he will have violated the unspoken codes of the southern aristocracy by assuming the status of the landed white elite for himself and for a nonwhite woman, illegitimately.50 However, once M’Closky has been killed and the plantation is no longer in financial danger, George and Zoe’s union has its greatest potential. At this moment, George insists that Zoe fully own the status of a “white” woman by becoming his wife. Momentarily her slave condition and racial identity fade into the background. In response, however, Zoe hastily reminds her audience of her “inferior” position and prevents their union from occurring by taking her own life. She takes on the imposed burden of the conflicts that she embodies, claiming that once she has expired, “no

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laws will stand between” her and George and he will be able to “confess [his] love for the Octoroon” without shame.51 By destroying her own body, Zoe removes the threat of actualized interracial love and marriage. With death, Zoe literally turns “white,”52 reiterating the multiple performances of racial identity that she plays — and that audiences must imagine rather than see as her status shifts onstage. Without a body, their relationship exists only in the cerebral realm of George’s mind and, by extension, in the imaginative space of the play. Although Zoe’s death was the most explicit disavowal of her illicit affair with George, other versions of the play that seemed more hopeful still relegate Zoe’s body to some other locale beyond the boundaries of the stage, the plot, the community, and even the nation in which the play is performed. It is as if removal of any bodily evidence of interracial contact will render it inoffensive and nonthreatening. This gesture also recalls bodily metaphors used to characterize the political health of a nation or the body politic in which diseased or contaminated bodies are representative of political, cultural, or social corruption (as in Hamlet’s “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”). In the rendition where George enters the stage during the final scene of the play and holds Zoe in his arms, she professes her love for him publicly while she is still alive.53 And in a London production, George Peyton shoots M’Closky and frees Zoe so that “in another land” they “will solemnise a lawful union, and live for the happiness of each other.”54 Whether Zoe is dead or alive, the interracial union is not enacted within the visible space of the stage or narrative. In fact, it is moved “elsewhere.” However, even with these revisions that seem to dilute or detract from the play’s provocative aspects, its threatening associations remain intact. Whether or not Zoe relocates or even dies, her existence serves as an indelible reminder of the interracial sex between her property-owning white elite father and her enslaved black mother that cannot be excised or erased by any spectacular grand finale. Thus, we can see the sustained and powerful presence of miscegenation in the popular imagination. The various versions and unresolved endings also suggest, implicitly, that alternatives exist that challenge the conventionally tragic conclusions. That begs the question as to what sort of nation, beyond the imagination, can accommodate this relationship. The expiration or expulsion of Zoe stages the removals and deaths that are required to maintain a coherent

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national identity and an imperial project invested in white supremacy. However, Boucicault’s play also gestures toward potential sites of resistance. It serves as a reminder of those who were struggling for a legitimate place and space in the unsettled transnational landscape of New Orleans because of ongoing conflicts over domestic and international boundaries. Historically resonant practices and events like the displacement, murder, removal, and enslavement of indigenous nations during the “Indian Wars,” including the 1855–58 Seminole War in Florida, informed Boucicault’s passionate characterization of Wahnotee, who uses emphatic pantomimic gestures to express his emotions. Additonally, the contested ownership of property and the distorted execution of justice represented in the play spoke to violent struggles over (inter)national boundaries that were taking place, like the 1846–48 Mexican War, which resulted in the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, confirmed Texas statehood, followed soon by that of California, and triggered the armed resistance of the Apache in 1850 to white settlers and miners who violated treaties in New Mexico. Equally significant to the play’s representation were ongoing questions as to who was able to attain citizenship and the subsequent reconfiguration of the category of whiteness in the United States and abroad in response to the explosion of new immigrants between 1846 and 1855. For example, German and Irish immigrants were not immediately folded into the category of white; unlike non-Irish white Anglos, they had to legitimize themselves, as well as distance themselves from the category of black. This exclusion of whites unfit for citizenship recalls M’Closky’s inferior position in the play. Additionally, various assaults on humanity dramatized in the play resonated with legal and cultural sanctions of violence against blacks and other people of color that simultaneously elevated the status of exclusionary whiteness. For example, in the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney stated that slaves were not citizens and did not have rights that white men were bound to respect.55 This case explicitly excluded even blacks who were not enslaved (free people of color) from any rights to citizenship, which helped accelerate the processes of delineating white and black and of intensifying the need for the consolidation of whiteness for access to citizenship — an issue that impacted many immigrants settling in the United States in the nineteenth century. Zoe’s fate was directly linked to this decision because it solidified the property rights of slave owners, reified the inhuman status of blacks,

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and extended slavery’s reach to territories and states that had not yet legalized slavery. . . . As we have seen, The Octoroon is dominated by Zoe and the many unsettling meanings ascribed to her body; but her relationships with the other characters are not the only destabilizing elements. In fact, there is another vital interracial alliance — between the quadroon slave Paul and the Indian Wahnotee — which also destabilizes the racialized hierarchy. And although there is no explicitly sexual element associated with Paul and Wahnotee’s relationship, their presence as an interracial couple creates disorder similar to that caused by Zoe’s “dangerous” contact with the white men who vie for her. At one point, Zoe claims that Wahnotee loves Paul “with the tenderness of a woman,”56 suggesting that the bond they share is more like marriage than friendship. This intimate interracial union lies somewhere on the spectrum between the homosocial and the homoerotic.57 It stages an uncategorizable coupling that incorporates male bonding and interracial intimacy simultaneously. This disorderly alliance plays out the possibility of both same-sex and heterosocial interracial cooperation that challenged white racism. For example, the Spanish and the Seminole nation in Florida harbored runaway slaves who joined forces with them to combat U.S. military encroachment. Their alliance also prefigured interracial educational institutes that taught both Native and African Americans.58 Additionally, in viewing Paul and Wahnotee’s staged relationship, audiences would have been required to suspend disbelief as they witnessed these performances of race and gender. In the majority of productions, white actresses played the role of Paul, presumably because of the intimacy of the interracial relationship and the original casting of Boucicault and his wife in these roles. The actress playing Paul would have been performing a breeches role (a woman acting in a man’s part) and a nonwhite role simultaneously. Moreover, it seems that by casting a woman as Paul, she could have emphasized his youth and feminized his character, distancing his role from threatening stereotypes about black men that might have disturbed audiences.59 Additionally, the white actor playing Wahnotee would have been made up to look like a stereotypical Indian and would have had to imagine (along with viewers) that his female partner was actually male. And even when a white male actor played the role of Paul, he also wore makeup in order to represent his racial difference, as quadroon,

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from the white actor playing Wahnotee. These racialized and gendered performances would have enhanced Paul’s liminal position, as well as his unconventional, intimate partnering with Wahnotee. Add to this performance the minstrelized role of Wahnotee, who was first played by Irishborn Boucicault as a “dumb” role in which he used only gestures and grunts, and both representations become highly spectacularized even in the context of an already sensational melodrama. The audience would have been compelled to imagine racial and gender difference in this same-sex interracial union. At the same time, they would have been either increasingly unsettled — or reassured — by the fact that the actual performers enacting these roles were a “white” (Irish) man and a white woman. Although these roles may have been worn each evening like costumes and discarded after the performance, they still rehearsed complex questions around race, nation, imperialism, and gender that were percolating throughout the Americas and across the United States — including the increase in Irish and other white-European immigration invoked by Boucicault’s own presence. The play’s caricatured depiction of an Indian was also timely, as Wahnotee took the stage amid the government’s vast removal of Indians from their native lands, alongside the dismantling of Indian “nations” and the disenfranchisement of their citizenry. The grunts of Wahnotee — a character who is rendered “speechless,” just as voices of countless Native Americans were being silenced — supported, or at least did not directly challenge, U.S. government Indian removal policies. In addition, westward expansion and the place of the indigenous population in this process certainly came into play as the states debated if, where, and how slavery would be extended into newly acquired territories. By representing African Americans as property and Native Americans as “aliens,” the play aligns both communities because neither group could claim U.S. citizenship, nor would either be protected by the laws of the nation. The overseer Scudder reminds his peers and the audience of this fact when he argues that neither Paul nor Wahnotee has been wronged, because they don’t possess any legal rights. However, he also argues that the Irishman, M’Closky, is the real criminal because he has violated laws that pertain to “the white man.”60 Here, Scudder reproduces the historical amnesia that disregards the violent appropriation of native land and enforcement of slave labor.61 In the context of white landowning citizens and enslaved blacks, quadroon Paul and Indian Wahnotee are uncategorizable aliens.

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Disorderly characters like Wahnotee and Paul foreground, once again, the need to define and solidify the equation of citizenship with masculinized whiteness. At first, Wahnotee, deemed inarticulate by the white men of authority, appears less threatening than the actual resistance of indigenous people, who for centuries before Boucicault’s play had actively repelled attempts to remove and eradicate their communities in North America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas. However, unlike his partner Paul, whose fate follows the more common plot associated with mixed-race figures, especially women, Wahnotee not only survives but also avenges his friend’s murder, refusing to adhere to the legal practices designed to subdue bodies like his. After his murderous rebellion, he flees New Orleans and heads “into the wilderness.” His refusal to remain in the community reinforces fears that even domesticated Indians could “go native” at any time and prefigures later attempts to civilize Native Americans through Christian doctrines and state-sponsored educational facilities that removed indigenous children from reservations in order to reform and educate them.62 This portrait of Indianness as akin to blackness and to other populations in need of control, foreshadows the government’s shift to a more aggressive paternalistic and imperial attitude toward both populations after the Civil War. For example, a review in the New York Herald Tribune of an 1893 revival of The Octoroon lauded the portrayal of Wahnotee, declaring that “Mr. Maffit is much to be praised for showing the Indian as the uncouth, unwashed and peculiarly unattractive personage he undoubtedly was, rather than as the more popular Cooper-ized creation.”63 This editorial suggests that the representation of “Indianness” in the play is strategic, a necessary reinforcement of their “undoubted” savagery and a counter to other romanticized portraits in circulation (that were, no doubt, equally phantasmagoric). To some extent, both Paul and Wahnotee, like Zoe, also act as mediating figures because they are less clearly categorizable. They are treated not quite like the other slaves, but they are certainly not treated as though they were white men or even white boys. Paul’s quadroon body and “yellow skin” indicate that he is racially mixed and not definitively black or white. Similarly, Wahnotee is undoubtedly foreign — despite being a “native” — a fact emphasized in the production by his stereotyped Indian garb. Their speech also sets them outside of clear categories. Paul communicates with Wahnotee in an “unknown” language that no one else can understand,

Wahnotee chasing M’Closky to avenge Paul’s murder. The Octoroon, Dion Boucicault. Courtesy of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent.

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presumably some creolized form or combination of Spanish, French, or a local indigenous dialect (such as Choctaw or Natchez). In a similar vein, some reviewers described Wahnotee’s “grunting” noises as a “mash-up of Indian and Mexican.”64 This characterization of his untranslatable linguistic cultural heritage reinforces his national, racial, and cultural differences from the slaves, as well as from the free whites. This dismissal of his language as a combination of two “foreign” nations conflates the complicated histories of indigenous peoples’ relations with Europeans and blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas into an incomprehensible problem, a “mash-up” of history that is tangled and messy. It imagines a relationship that conflicts with the more mainstream tensions among and between these communities. For example, although blacks and indigenous people sometimes joined forces to combat white settlers, there were also explicit antimiscegenation laws passed in 1824, 1839, and 1858 within American Indian nations, like the Cherokee and the Creek, that banned interracial marriage. As with the landowning white male population, part of this prohibition was linked directly to the fear of legal reassignment or the loss of property; however, these bans were also informed by white doctrines, both scientific and religious, that deemed interracial unions “unnatural.”65 Although Wahnotee and Paul do not pose the threat of sexual reproduction or property inheritance across racial lines, when read through the lens of surrogation, they stand in for some of the anxieties produced by miscegenation. First, their same-sex, black–native intimacy invokes the potential alliances between people of color that resisted the implicit whitesupremist implications of antimiscegenation discourse. Their inability to reproduce suggests the common belief that racially corrupted bodies (those of mulattas and mulattoes) were sterile and unable to reproduce, thus making them undesirable members of the idyllic family that typically stood in as a microcosm for nation. Finally, the transgression of their interracial union and its murderous results gesture toward miscegenation’s symbolic power to disrupt the rights, privileges, and exclusivity of white, male, landowning citizens. None of the other characters in Boucicault’s narrative directly address the complexities of Paul and Wahnotee — indeed, such discussion would be impossible within the world of the play. These two curiosities exist in  the margins of the community and govern much of their own lives without direct interference from others. They function as almost a nation

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within a nation, invoking both the indigenous nations that fought to survive in the face of westward and southern expansion and the black nationalist movements that emerged after emancipation. These movements, not unlike Paul and Wahnotee, were perceived as threatening to discourse that conflated U.S. nationhood with white Anglo civilization. It is no surprise then that Paul ends up dead and Wahnotee disappears. The only other solution — and their sure fate if they had stayed on the plantation — would have been the rhetoric used throughout the nineteenth century againt disenfranchised groups: that they were second-class citizens, who did not merit full citizenship, and instead needed management and policing. Such rhetoric was also exported internationally to justify the expanding reach of U.S. imperialism and colonialism, including ongoing attempts to annex the Asian Pacific Hawaiian islands. In the context of the play, Boucicault’s representation of the affinity between Paul and Wahnotee seems logical, given their shared exclusion from ongoing reconfigurations of nation and empire that excluded slaves, free people of color, and indigenous populations, both domestically and globally. As long as Paul and Wahnotee remained in the margins, they were allowed to “run over the swamps and woods, hunting and fishing [their] lives away,” which distinguished them from blacks on the plantation who were required to work. In the end though, because they pose a threat to white-propertied law and order, their uncontained bodies are marked and eliminated in order to remove their disruptive influence. Similar to Zoe’s disembodiment, Paul’s uncategorizable body is sacrificed midway through the play when M’Closky murders him. However, Paul’s death at the hands of his white Irish foe, M’Closky, is violent, in contrast to Zoe’s sacrificial, sentimentalized, and almost genteel suicide. The distinction here suggests that even though both mixed-race figures confound the color line, Paul has the potential to become a threat to the white male working class, whereas Zoe literally fades into the background by following the conventions of the aristocrats who socialized her. For M’Closky, Paul represents an obstacle to his own acquisition of money, property, and status — something denied to white working-class men by the white gentry in the antebellum South — so he extinguishes Paul to protect himself; the act prefigures the hostility and violence of white laborers directed at free black men after emancipation because, theoretically, they were able to compete with whites for jobs. However, Wahnotee, whose body reads as racially unclassifiable, eludes neat placement into black or white categories and remains outside of white

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society and the law. Here, this uncertainty about where he belongs echoes the ongoing struggle to negotiate mythology around American Indians as both noble savages representative of the spirit of masculine freedom and as uncivilized foes in need of moral conversion and domestication. Both Paul and Wahnotee introduce difficult problems to the dramatic narrative. But rather than solve the complex issues that they introduce, they are eradicated and elided. Their status echoes the fact that the strict black–white binary could not account for the variation inherent in multiracial, multinational communities. American history is embedded with such variation; the “melungeons” are one of many examples, who created “tri-racial communities” in east Tenessee and descended from African, Portuguese, Indian, and English ancestry.66 Such stories are omnipresent, but all too often ignored — or suffocated — by the black–white binary, and so we must investigate this variation in the crevices of our national narratives. Although the mixed-race, destabilizing bodies of The Octoroon appear to be disposed of, they still function as surrogates for relationships and desires that undermine the very laws that attempt to police them. Consequently, their deaths are not decisive; nor is the narrative’s end conclusive. Zoe dies, but she nevertheless inspires white desire for a sanctioned union with a racially mixed woman. She enables a desire for something outside of the constrained racial, class, and gender system that prevailed in the nineteenth century. More than just invoking anxieties, this play challenges the mutually informing histories of nationhood, citizenship, and racialized subjects by reproducing them onstage. By giving voice to the conflicts at the root of American identity—literally by embodying these conflicts—The Octoroon reveals our national contradictions, such as the discrepancy between slavery and transnationally espoused doctrines of democracy, freedom, and due process,67 or the contested meanings of race employed to support competing formations of nationhood in the Confederacy, in the Union, and among the Indian nations. The play reenacts events in a way that not only reemphasizes the global and local history of slavery in the South but also provides space for reading different possibilities into that history, such as the potential alliances that were formed among colonized and enslaved communities and that linked domestic and transnational conditions. In fact, the variety of conflicting responses and interpretations, as well as the subsequent revivals and contemporary rereadings of The Octoroon, suggests that the play rehearses a host of intersecting

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concerns — race, sexual, gender, imperial, and class relations —that connected it not only to the Civil War but also to the historical entanglements that preceded and followed the war.68 The play also demonstrates how a seemingly local struggle was part of a matrix of relations that were refiguring nationhood in the intersecting domestic and transnational arenas that the play invokes. In addition, the play helps open up static readings of the Civil War itself by illuminating its multiple dimensions and setting the stage, as we shall see, for subsequent imaginings of potentially volatile yet provocative and multivalent interracial encounters. Transforming the Page

Published in 1863, four years after The Octoroon and at the height of the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband” also leverage the representative power of miscegenation. Alcott is best known for her 1868 novel Little Women, which introduced her writing to a larger audience and helped establish her reputation as a skilled author of “domestic” fiction, with progressive ideas about women’s equality and abolition. During her lifetime, she published seven novels, dozens of short stories, a series of pseudonymous romantic thrillers, parlor dramas, stage dramas, and reviews, poems, and articles for various periodicals.69 Her exposure to larger audiences was also aided by her publication in mass-produced forms, such as newspapers, illustrated story papers, and dime novels.70 Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to transcendentalist parents Bronson and Abigail Alcott in 1832, a year after Nat Turner’s failed slave rebellion and in the midst of radical abolitionists, she was exposed to the theories and lived experiences of a wide range of intellectuals, philosophers, and social and moral reformers, such as Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott’s skilled interrogation of Victorian gender and race codes emerges throughout her written work, including her memoirs and diaries, and in her career choices, as a writer, actress, suffragrette, abolitionist, and Civil War nurse. Alcott reconfigures and, in some cases, inverts sex and gender relations.71 By reconstructing “the body politic into the shape of a woman” in her fiction, Alcott’s female characters instruct men and serve as role models for idealized citizenship and behavior.72 Additionally, Alcott yokes the private and public spheres, demonstrating their interconnectedness and refusing to remain solely in the conventionally private feminized sphere of the home. Amy Kaplan and Shelley Streeby, along with other

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critics, have linked her work to imperial projects extending well beyond the reach of the domestic hearth to sites of conquest both in the United States and globally. The civilizing role assigned to women in society, which also excluded them from the political and economic arenas, still intersects with imperial projects at home and abroad, reinforcing the importance of the types of service-oriented work considered appropriate and morally upstanding for women, such as missionary work and other “instructional” positions in education and religion. And, although professional acting was considered morally suspect for women, other types of cultural performance, including literary readings, parlor dramas, and lectures, also opened up avenues for women’s participation in the political, social, and economic arenas. Alcott’s domestic parlor and staged dramas extended the sites in which she could play out her conflicted relationship to the limited roles for women and the expected moral piety imposed on her by her parents. Accordingly, as some critics contend, theatrics played vital roles both in Alcott’s fiction and drama because they enabled her to negotiate the artificial divides between private and public, the page and the stage, and identity and performance. Despite Alcott’s resistance to roles assigned to women in the domestic sphere, utimately her domestic drama and fiction often bow to the pull of more conventional women’s roles, albeit without complete capitulation.73 And it is this tension that opens up readings of her work as intervening in the racial, gendered, and patriarchal structures that not only informed her work and life but that also compelled her to take up performative representational strategies, like surrogacy and the trope of miscegenation.74 In 1863, in addition to suffering from pneumonia, Alcott witnessed radical changes in the nation, including the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent draft riots in New York City, two events that highlighted the competing notions of freedom and citizenship that fueled the Civil War and its potential consequences. Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband” both responded to the turbulent social and political scene that characterized the final years of the Civil War. In addition to adding her voice to the discourse around slavery, race, and the nation’s fate, these published works sold very well and increased Alcott’s visibility as a successful popular writer. Continuing to tap into the many roles that she was required to play and her ongoing commitment to reform, Alcott employed miscegenation to stage the contested public and private discourse around black–white inti-

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macy. Her engagement with this controversial subject in her antislavery fiction symbolically rehearsed the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, race, nationhood, and class that overlapped in her drama, fiction, and lived experiences. As we shall see, Alcott employed performative strategies in her everday life and fiction, and critical writing and reading practices in her publicly staged and domestic dramas. In doing so, she not only blurred the line separating these artifically distinct arenas, but also demonstrated how these genres build on each other, as well as on the cultural practices in which they were produced. Writers like Alcott in the mid- to late nineteenth century, as James Ackerman argues in his study of “portable” nineteenth-century theatre, considered dramatic form equally important to literature.75 In neither form can language alone fully encapsulate meaning. Instead, dramatic language, whether on the page or stage, live or written, must also gesture toward embodied lives — each genre playing a mutually constitutive role in the representation of miscegenation. Written in Concord, Massachusetts, in the wake of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid—a historic antislavery rebellion that also framed Boucicault’s New York premiere of The Octoroon, Alcott’s “M.L.” was first declined publication in 1860 by the Atlantic Monthly because it was too controversial for the magazine’s southern readership.76 Sensitivities were high during the tense period right before the start of the Civil War. Although Alcott was part of a radical abolitionist community, she imagined possibilities that were deemed premature and potentially volatile in the North as well as in the South. Three years later, the story was published as a serial in The Commonwealth, Boston’s antislavery weekly paper.77 By then, the Civil War was well under way, and the cultural climate had shifted; the Atlantic Monthly published another of her antislavery interracial stories, “My Contraband,” later that year. They are among dozens of short stories published in Alcott’s lifetime, along with a series of pseudonymous short works, and they engage with questions of race in ways unique yet inextricably linked to her larger body of work. Most of her work engaged with the social and political concerns of both her private and public realms, such as the restrictive roles imposed on women because of gender or on blacks because of slavery and racism. These two stories represent some of her most explicit attention to the radical possibilities of enacting the miscegenation trope. They attend to the historically significant crisis over slavery that informed them but do so by employing black–white intimacy to explore overlapping

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performances of gender, citizenship, domesticity, and sexuality. Although her other works also take on these issues directly or implicitly, these stories highlight the power of love and sex to transform lives most explicitly. Alcott biographer Sarah Elbert claims that two sources for “M.L.” were two “popular plays prompted by the 1842 fugitive slave cases involving George Latimer,” The Branded Hand, by Sophia L. Little, written in 1842, and Warren, A Tragedy, written by David S. Whitney in 1850.78 Elbert’s excavational research has also revealed another inspiration for “M.L.”: the real-life drama of interracial love and marriage as retold by William G. Allen in The American Prejudice against Color (1853). In this narrative Allen details his life as a freeman in the North and the violent uproar that occurred because of his proposal and eventual marriage to his white fiancée, Mary King.79 Elbert surmises that Alcott knew about this couple and had access to this narrative before she wrote her fictional pieces. Additionally, Allen’s story was circulated in the United States and in England and cited by many abolitionists, like the Alcotts, as an example of the racial intolerance and savagery that the institution of slavery bred. Its existence provides a sobering reminder of the ways that fictionalized miscegenation narratives interacted with the material realities of those who put their bodies on the line by challenging doctrines of racial purity and segregation. Both “M.L.” and “My Contraband,” like much of Alcott’s work, explore contemporaneous national concerns in and through the intimate domestic settings of the characters whose lives she depicts. Echoing parlor drama and theatrical roles in which Alcott rehearsed unconventional formulations of race and gender in a somewhat contained yet productive performative arena, her abolitionist short fiction can be understood as provocative performances of miscegenation. Like Boucicault’s play, her representations of interracial intimacies create space for reframing the diachronic discourse of the black–white, slave–free, male–female, domestic– foreign divides into a more contoured set of relations concerned with gender, citizenship, sexuality, and race.80 Although Alcott’s miscegenation texts and abolitionist impulses are formulated differently from Boucicault’s, her work can also be read as engaged in the process of surrogation. These short stories stage a dynamic interplay between localized questions of individual agency, racial/gender equality, and freedom with more broadly construed formations of nationhood, transnationalism, and democracy through representations of intimate interracial relations. Like the performances enacted in The Octoroon,

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Alcott’s characters transgress racialized, national, and gendered boundaries and, in effect, perform roles outside of those prescribed for them by nineteenth-century elite codes of morality. As we shall see, the female protagonist in each of these stories breaks the rules in many ways. Most obvious is the protagonist’s violation of the “cult of true womanhood,” the moral decree that held white women responsible for upholding civilization and the republic through the feminized private domestic arena in which they were expected to remain. The four virtues “true” women were meant to uphold, according to historian Barbara Welter, were “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.” Nineteenth-century women were judged and judged themselves according to these attributes.81 Alcott’s stories suggest multiple readings of how certain characters and relationships challenged conventional codes of behavior and stood in for other relations that didn’t fit into any clearly dileneated or contained category, such as same-sex desire or transracial or transnational unions. Like The Octoroon, “M.L.” and “My Contraband” do not provide conclusive endings that resolve the contradictions raised in the narratives. However, Alcott’s representations do negotiate contemporaneous race, gender, sexuality, and class codes, while they also provide space for rereadings that challenge and reformulate those same conventions. In fact, it can be said that Alcott appeased her readers by seemingly capitulating to pressure — both from mainstream culture and her family’s mores — to restrain her passions and serve her nation, race, and civilization through gendered roles, like that of missionary or domestic peacemaker. At the same time, she also challenged those prescribed roles by choosing careers and representational strategies that were suggestive of antiracist, proto-feminist, and antiimperialist critiques. Despite its overlap with The Octoroon, Alcott’s work departs from it and from the standard model of contemporaneous interracial couplings—which were almost exclusively between white men and black women — by representing unions between white women and “black” men. Here it is also worth noting that the term “black” refers not necessarily to pigmentation, since her male characters were racially mixed, but to the conflation of their status as slaves with the category of “black.” Her inclusion of a central male mixed-race figure (a mulatto as opposed to a mulatta) seems a radical departure from the conventional antislave narratives not only because of his gender but also because of his choice to align himself with a white woman rather than maintaining or adopting a black nationalist identification.

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Additionally, this configuration of black male–white female intimacy and commitment was particularly threatening because the institution of marriage was so closely aligned with manhood, freedom, and patriarchal power. Part of the resistance to miscegenation, then, was generated by white male property holders who were invested in denying the civil rights of full citizenry to African American (men) because of its implicit and explicit challenge to their own supremacy, both domestically and globally.82 In contrast to The Octoroon, as well as to the vast majority of literature between the Civil War and World War I, Alcott’s stories dared to articulate a white woman’s desire for a black man. Such desire epitomized transgression in the nineteenth century and was literally unspeakable, given that the patriarchal structure defined citizenship, freedom, and agency in terms of one’s status as white and male, and was reinforced and reproduced through a man’s ability to establish, provide for, and preside over his family — a microcosm of nationhood and, by extension, empire building.83 These white female–black male unions were particularly threatening because any children would share the free status of their white mothers and would be entitled by law to property inheritance, as was the case in several lawsuits that ruled in favor of the children. However, white male–black female sexual relations, although frowned upon, were not considered all bad by slave owners, because they reproduced the slave population, according to the law that states that the child follows the condition of the mother, partus sequitir ventrum.84 These sexual encounters between white men and their black slaves were considered one of the “dirty little secrets” — as well as one of the purchasable prizes — of slavery; there was no such exception for intimate relations between white women and black men. It is also significant that Alcott’s work, like Boucicault’s, appeared before southern Reconstruction. For some whites, abolitionism and the Civil War were radicalizing forces in which they invested and, in some cases, sacrificed their lives, as was the case with John Brown, whose heroism Alcott admired.85 Both pro- and antislavery advocates were struggling to do no less than articulate the nation’s present and future, as well as restructure its interrelations with the rest of the world. The chronology of Alcott’s work lends a particular and historically specific valence to her representations because they were written during a time more uncertain and, in some ways, more hopeful and more imaginative than the postwar period, when racial tensions and violence heightened and segregation

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gained momentum.86 These stories also indicate a certain optimism, if only temporary, about the future of the nation, as articulated in historian Edward Blum’s encapsulation of the national sentiment among black communities at the end of the divisive Civil War: Unlike any other time in black America, the spring and summer of 1865 was a time of boundless confidence. They believed that white racism and exclusion from the nation’s grace and bounty were things of the past. A new United States seemed to be emerging, one that privileged loyalty to the Union over skin color or racial classification. The white republic appeared to be crumbling, and people of color now felt that the United States was their country as much as anyone else’s.87 Although neither Alcott’s nor Boucicault’s work necessarily generated this type of “elation” about the future, their work registered the high stakes invested in this transitional moment in which race, nationhood, citizenship, and democracy were being reconfigured throughout the world, across the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, and in the tenuously “united” states (the Confederacy and Union, the West, and recently annexed territories). These competing and intersecting global and domestic arenas, formerly aligned because of their interdependence on the African slave trade, labor, and colonialism, now seemed on the brink of new principles of alignment. As we shall see in later chapters, such optimism was short-lived. Like Zoe in Boucicault’s play, the male mulatto figures in Alcott’s fiction introduce many of the same concerns around race, citizenship, and freedom. However, because of gendered differences, they also stand in for the popularized representations of the specifically “black” male body that was conflated with slavery and property. As with the mulatta in other texts, Alcott replaces an explicitly black male character with a racially liminal mulatto figure as a way of accessing prohibited intimacies and alliances. His body — ambiguous with regard to race, gender, and, in some ways, sexuality — provides an opportunity for the central white female characters to inscribe their own desires on him so that their relationship cannot be clearly categorized as illicit. At the same time that Alcott’s stories stage white female–black male unions in a multivalent way, they also create space for reconfiguring white

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middle-class women’s identity, which would have been increasingly relevant as women’s movements continued to gain support in the late nineteenth century. Her efforts are particularly relevant given the increasing public visibility of white women as they ventured out of the private domestic realm in order to work for moral and Christian reform after the Civil War. Her work also speaks to the complex racialized and gendered discourse that accompanied civilizing missions in potentially colonized populations, in which men of color were alternately characterized as savage and out of control or feminized and subordinate, depending on the particular location and population. Her symbolic black–white marriages also depart from the political shifts that occurred after the Civil War and Reconstruction, when white women’s organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), distanced themselves from African American civil rights struggles, even though many suffragettes had previously employed slavery metaphors to describe their “inferior” status as women.88 Similarities between slavery and marriage were easily drawn because both slavery and marriage were unequal domestic relations based on systems of subordination and domination. Slaveholding patriarchs often used familial metaphors to justify their powerful positions as head of the household.89 This rationale was easily extended to colonial sites that were considered “ripe” for annexation and occupation, like Guam and Mexico. An interracial union was the vehicle through which Alcott’s white women veered from their destined cultural path and avoided losing their civic presence. With these unions, they not only enacted nonnormative white womanhood, but also created space for rereadings of the public, interdependent, gendered, and transnational implications of their representations. The dramatic rupture of racial categories created by the central black–white unions enabled Alcott to produce a story built on the conventional “tragic mulatta” narrative tropes but reconstituting them so that they potentially exceed the limits of those preestablished roles.90 . . . Both “My Contraband” and “M.L.” describe the experiences of independent white women whose platonic relationships with mulatto men develop into meaningful life-transforming engagements. Although both men are recently liberated slaves, they continue to provide ser vices for white patrons. “My Contraband” is the story of nurse Faith Dane, who is put in

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charge of a wounded Confederate officer and assigned the help of Bob, a freed mulatto slave, who turns out to be the officer’s illegitimate half brother. “M.L.” is the story of an independently wealthy white woman, Claudia Tate, who shocks her community by falling in love with and marrying her music teacher, Paul Frere, who is also a freed mulatto slave. For both Nurse Dane and Claudia, these men represent something passionate, exotic, and admirable that neither woman seems to have access to in her own life. Nurse Dane, aware from the beginning of the story of Bob’s racial identity and former enslavement, expresses her curiosity about black men: Feeling decidedly more interest in the black man than in the white . . . I glanced furtively at him as I scattered chloride of lime about the room to purify the air. . . . I had seen many contrabands, but never one so attractive as this. All colored men are called “boys,” even if their heads are white; this boy was five-and-twenty at least, strong-limbed and manly. . . . I wanted to know and comfort him; and, following the impulse of the moment, I went in and touched him on the shoulder.91 Intrigue, compassion, and desire fuel Nurse Dane’s initial attraction to Bob. He functions for her as an object of both pity and awe. Although she valorizes his charming appearance and pride, she also imposes her authority over him by reducing him to a “boy.” However, it is this infantilization that provides her with the opportunity to interact with him more intimately as a caretaker. And, by attributing his intense expression to his past suffering and embattlement, she also justifies her compassionate approach. Similarly, Claudia, though ignorant of Paul’s racial background — AfroCuban — until the middle of “M.L.,” responds to his mysterious magnetism. His music stirs “her blood like martial music or heroic speech,”92 and his dark features appeal to her: Claudia saw a face that satisfied her eye as the voice had done her ear, and yet its comeliness was not its charm. Black locks streaked an ample forehead, black brows arched finely over southern eyes as full of softness as of fire. No color marred the bronze of the cheek, no beard hid the firm contour of the lips, no unmeaning smile destroyed the dignity of the countenance, on which nature’s hand

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had set the seal wherewith she stamps the manhood that no art can counterfeit.93 For Claudia, part of Paul’s allure lies in his stoic exoticism. She views him as a piece of art, just as her friend, Jessie Snowden, refers to him as a “great ornament.” Even before Paul’s secret “black” heritage is discovered and disclosed by Jessie, he represents a dark “other” in contrast to their (Claudia’s and Jessie’s) unmarked whiteness. But, instead of fearing his mysterious origins, Claudia and her friend attribute his difference to blue-blooded Spanish ancestry and elevate him to the level of a noble prince.94 Her presumption of Latin ancestry is not so far off, since Paul is the illegitimate son of a Cuban planter and his quadroon slave. He remained enslaved until adulthood, when his white half-sister, Nathalie, inherited her Cuban father’s fortune, purchased Paul, freed him, and gave him money to leave the country. Unaware of his former enslavement, Claudia locates the source of Paul’s “exceptional” manhood in the “dark” uncharted territory of his body, once again invoking imperialist discourse and echoing Nurse Dane’s admiration of Bob in “My Contraband.” Her responses recall M’Closky’s claim in The Octoroon that his desire for Zoe can be attributed to her “drop” of black blood. Both women identify this racial “otherness” as an integral component of masculinity and beauty that is both illicit yet desirable. This racialized sex appeal both invokes and refutes the stereotypical associations of the black male body with the oversexed sexual predator. Bob and Paul are characterized as both manly and lovely, attributes usually assigned to masculine and feminine subjects, respectively. By blurring conventional notions of gender and race in her depictions of these black-identified men,95 Alcott distances them from stereotypical figures, which allows the two to take on multiple roles in her narratives. Alcott’s representations of “black” men also avoid the conventional formulations — from comic “darky” to dangerous predator — that would clearly categorize these men as black and, by extension, mark their interracial intimacies as transgressive and criminal. In addition to their exoticism, these “black” men represent a certain nobility of character that helps to subvert their racial difference. And, in order for either of these “black” men to become a hero, his blackness must be separated from the traits that were used to signify bodily revulsion in conventional sentimental fiction.96 In the case of “My Contraband,” Bob

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distinguishes himself from other black people by calling them “niggers” and refusing to associate with them. And Nurse Dane reinforces his superiority by attributing his “comeliness” to “his mixed race” ancestry and by lamenting that “he belonged to neither race.” In fact, Nurse Dane eventually raises Bob to the level of aristocracy when she compares him to the wounded Confederate soldier she is also caring for: “The captain was the gentleman in the world’s eye, but the contraband was the gentleman in mine.”97 This elevation echoes the superior status attributed to Zoe in The Octoroon, because she also transcends other slaves on the plantation and frequently receives the same respect and honor given to white elite women. Ironically, Bob shares the same blood as the captain, for he is the son as well as the ex-slave of the captain’s father. By foregrounding the primacy of Bob’s “aristocratic” blood, Nurse Dane relegates his blackness to the margins. Later on, when Nurse Dane discovers that the captain raped Bob’s wife, she transforms Bob into a martyr: “He was no longer a slave or contraband, no drop of black blood marred him in my sight, but an infinite passion yearned to save, to help, to comfort him.”98 By transforming him into a vulnerable and virtuous figure, she legitimizes their intimate interactions — reminiscent of the sentimentalized interracial domesticity employed by Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the same way, Claudia’s emphasis on Paul’s honorable qualities elevates him to hero status that renders his “black” ancestry invisible. Even before Paul reveals his history, Claudia considers him saintly because he shows “no bitterness of spirit,” lives “to some high end unseen by human eyes,” and possesses a “valiant spirit.”99 Since Paul can do no wrong in Claudia’s eyes, his confession of his hidden Afro-Cuban ancestry and fugitive slave status only increases his value; she considers his endurance of slavery another marker of his strength and moral fortitude. Similar to Bob in “My Contraband” and Zoe in The Octoroon, Paul’s superior character mutes his racial identity and the stereotypical attributes associated with blackness. In fact, although Paul is referred to as a minstrel several times in “M.L.,” this role does not remove any of his nobility in Claudia’s eyes. However, this obvious reference to his musical talent also highlights his ability to perform and to entertain, traits associated with black people and blackface minstrelsy since at least the 1830s.100 Key to both Bob and Paul is the indeterminacy of their blackness. This ambiguity emerges in several ways in these two stories. Their racial liminality helps maintain the performative aspect of their relationships with

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white women. For example, one of the roles that Paul plays for Claudia is that of a mysterious “white” man. Part of his narrative funtion in the story, then, is to expose the arbitrariness of racial categorization. Paul’s performance depends on his audience, since he does not claim any explicit racial identity until he is forced to do so. Instead, those around him, including Claudia, impose their own racialized expectations that he seems to embody. Like Zoe, his “black” blood imbues him with the danger associated with African ancestry, but his “white” blood places him in a safe position. It is also no accident that both Paul and Bob closely resemble white men and that white women identify them as exotic dark Europeans, commenting on the fact that their (Bob’s and Paul’s) skin is only a few shades darker than “authentic” white. Similar to Zoe’s racially liminal position in The Octoroon as both nearly “white” yet still representative of blackness, their simultaneous proximity to and distance from whiteness enables these characters, and those who come into contact with them, either to recognize or to deny their blackness. As long as Alcott’s male characters cannot be unquestionably classified as black, then her representations of interracial love assume multiple meanings, enabling them to function as surrogates for other issues, such as the emergent proto-feminism that ushered women from the private to the public spheres, the power of homosocial spaces and relations for women, and the incorporation of nonwhites and immigrants as equals into Alcott’s model of morally upright and progressive communities. Despite gestures of displacement or erasure, Bob’s and Paul’s African ancestry does not fully disappear. In the course of each narrative, Nurse Dane and Claudia gaze at the exposed dark bodies of Bob and Paul, marked by their experiences as slaves. Whenever Nurse Dane sees the lash marks that cover one side of Bob’s face, she must confront her own prejudices about black men: In an instant the man vanished and the slave appeared . . . any romance that had gathered around him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me. . . . My purpose was suddenly changed; and, though I went in to offer comfort as a friend, I merely gave an order as a mistress.101

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Nurse Dane acknowledges her earlier romanticization and eroticization of the “beautiful side” of Bob by responding with repulsion to his pain. Here, Alcott seems to chart an ongoing shift from idealized romanticism to realism and social reform, perhaps a reference to the trajectory of her own life and work — as a creative cultural producer, the main breadwinner for her family, and as an activist. The nurse, like Alcott, resists her desire to romanticize Bob when she is forced to view the scars of slavery inscribed on his body. In fact, she literally transforms him from a man to a thing by invoking his slave status, like Zoe’s shift from alluring woman to purchasable slave. This objectification enables Nurse Dane to reassert her authority and to interact with Bob in a distanced and impersonal manner. But the emphasis on his body also disrupts this role playing by reasserting the materiality of his slave status. Moreover, as Nurse Dane and Bob continue to interact, this distance breaks down, and, in order to maintain their intimacy without entering into a sexualized union, she assumes a more sanctioned maternal role. In this position of power and compassion Nurse Dane can behold his marked black body as though it belongs to a child, or a “boy,” in need of her ministration.102 In this way, she redefines her “inappropriate” relationship with Bob so that she does not have to sever her ties with him, once again echoing the intimacies created by “contact zones” in local, regional, and global spaces. For example, this patronizing stance was typical of nurses and caregivers deployed to hospital wards in urban centers and on rural battlefields during and after the Civil War. Intense interracial and intercultural contact also occurred in southern and southwestern regions of the United States, particularly for those white settlers who traveled through “Indian country” and relocated to sites as diverse as Texas and points farther south in Central America. Finally, from the Civil War up to World War I, missionaries, government representatives, and military personnel assigned to areas across the nation and to international sites as diverse as the post-Reconstruction South, “Indian country,” and newly acquired territories such as Hawaii formed intimate but often unequal relationships with their charges. Although Claudia idealizes Paul’s dark body, Alcott does not evacuate it from the story.103 She employs narrative devices that were commonly used as the symbols and signs of blackness so that Paul is already racially marked from the moment he enters the scene. Alcott uses surrogation

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both to ground her staging of this interracial union in the bodily realities of his position and to generate multiple readings of his presence and relationship with Claudia. In fact, her sympathetic engagement with Paul is embedded in her understanding of Paul’s identity as an embodied history from which she has been excluded. Claudia characterizes the “shadow of some past despair” that she perceives as a sign of Paul’s strength and nobility. And when she discovers that the “wide purple scar” on Paul’s hand represents the initials of his former slave owner, Maurice Lacroix, she openly embraces his pain. Even when Paul expresses his anguish by striking “his scarred hand on the chimney piece with a force that left it bruised and bleeding,”104 Claudia does not withdraw from this dramatic yet bodily emblem of “tainted” and mixed blood. Instead, she releases her “purer passion” and adopts Paul’s suffering as part of her own. She, like the white male characters who transgress established racial and class boundaries in order to possess/help Zoe in The Octoroon, is motivated to act on his behalf because of his tragic difference. For Claudia, his racial identity, as well as the scars of slavery, reinforce his humanity and moral superiority. Here, Alcott’s story can be read in terms of surrogacy. Her staging of miscegenation enacts competing narratives about the role of Cuba, for example, with its own history of Spanish imperialism and the African slave trade. Her “liberation” and “sanitation” of Paul recalls the imperial Confederacy’s claims that their incorporation of Cuba to their national cause would bring freedom to the Cuban people and maintain the manifest destiny of white supremacy. However, unlike the Confederacy, Claudia attempts to incorporate Paul into her powerful vision of purity and equality not in terms of white supremacy but rather in terms of their shared humanity. In this way, her perspective offers a counterargument to the Confederate rhetoric around the absorption of Cuba. Claudia’s perspective seems more aligned with Cuban nationalists who attempted to transcend racial tension by calling for “colorblind” national independence in the face of U.S. and Spanish imperial encroachment.105 Like Cuba’s ongoing, unequal, and unresolved relationship with the United States, neither of Alcott’s “black” male characters attain their sacrificial hero status independently of the white female characters. In fact, Nurse Dane and Claudia define Bob’s and Paul’s roles, respectively, in relation to their own subjectivity, similar to the way that the United States resisted Cuban and Mexican voices of anti-imperialism and equality in favor of a more familiar racial and imperial logic that supported U.S.

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interests.106 Here we see one of the fault lines in Alcott’s imaginative process: though these “black” men are complex, they are complex only because white women have deemed it so. But what is remarkable about Alcott’s texts, we must not forget, is that women are the ones doing the judging. Because Nurse Dane and Claudia function as self-motivated, educated, and strong moral characters, they possess the independence to judge Bob and Paul according to their merits, rather than blindly defining them according to a reductive racial hierarchy. In contrast to depictions of white women whose positions in the established patriarchal structure remain subservient and fixed, Nurse Dane and Claudia assert their mobility and their agency by acting as independent subjects. Unfettered by white male authority, they make their own choices about love and friendship in a way that most white women at that time experienced vicariously or partially. In contrast to other white women in antislavery fiction, who lived out their “forbidden desire” for black men through “vicarious reading[s] of the body of ” the mulatta or the slave, Nurse Dane and Claudia enact white female self-ownership by choosing to align their (white) bodies with the bodies of black men.107 Their choice to position their bodies “elsewhere” — alongside black rather than white men — reemphasizes their self-empowerment.108 Their assertion of authority and agency, read along with the somewhat feminized characterizations of Paul and Bob, indicates that Claudia and Nurse Dane also perform traditionally masculine roles. They, like stage performers, play breeches roles and symbolically engage in gender crossdressing.109 The inverse is also true; as we shall see, Bob and Paul become the dependent partners of these women, and thus perform feminized conventions. This performance of gender would have resonated with theatrical conventions in which men played women and women played men, a  nod toward the idea that gender roles were socially constructed and, therefore, mutable. This subtle gender inversion helps to distinguish Alcott’s representation from Boucicault’s even further because it challenges the same normative gender roles that Zoe’s and George’s parts reinforced. Rather than presenting white women as pawns whose lives are controlled by men, Alcott depicts her women as self-governing agents.110 At the same time, her mulatto characters share many of Zoe’s characteristics — they are dependent, self-sacrificing, and objectified. By attributing feminized traits to her “black” male figures, Alcott challenges stereotypes of black men as hypermasculine while also reinforcing racist notions that mixed black

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men are somehow less manly because of their contaminated blood, or that they stand in for all conquerable “dark” peoples who are unable to govern themselves. She offers white women a more active role but one that is valid only in relation to these complex black-identified men. These miscegenous relationships lead to fascinating plot twists in both stories. From her atypical position, Nurse Dane — like Alcott — wields an interesting power. In the story’s dramatic apex, Bob locks the captain, Nurse Dane, and himself in the hospital room in order to kill the captain; Nurse Dane uses her facility with language and her persuasive powers to subdue Bob. Once again, Alcott’s work references her own persuasive role as a writer, performer, and speaker who relies on language — written, spoken, and gestural—to persuade and educate her audiences. Nurse Dane stages, through her intimacy with Bob, the potency of discourse; it can produce—or limit—action, and it offers power and agency over oneself and over others. It also points to the cultural work that language does in the making, transmission, and production of cultural and political ideologies, like the abolitionist and social reform movements of which Alcott was a vital member. Those who control or shape the discourse play a powerful role. Along those lines, Nurse Dane takes on what would be considered a white patriarchal role by authoritatively compelling Bob to submit to her. She explains that “he let me take from him the key, let me draw him gently away, and lead him to the solitude which was now the most healing balm I could bestow.”111 While responding forcefully, Nurse Dane also slips in and out of her role as a caretaker. This odd juxtaposition — of feminized maternal behavior and masculinized fortitude — enables Nurse Dane to occupy an unconventional position, not only for a white woman but also for a white woman involved in an intimate relationship with a “black” man. Similarly, in “M.L.,” Claudia charts her own daring path. Contrary to gender conventions of her time, Claudia initiates her love relationship with Paul. Though her forthrightness is unusual, it is also inevitable: because of the class and race system that was in place, it would not have been acceptable for Paul to play a proactive role. As the two become close confidants, Claudia realizes that her initial fascination with Paul’s exoticism has blossomed into love. She decides that she must propose to Paul. Unlike many men and women who were persecuted for interracial unions and intimacy, the wealthy and property-owning Claudia is represented by Alcott as courageous for facing social condemnation and legal punishment for marrying an Afro-Cuban ex-slave. And, even though Claudia has

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previously refused to marry because her “master had not [yet] come,” she defies racial and class codes of behavior and legal prohibition to marry the black man whom she loves.112 After undergoing public ostracism, which is represented as more horrific than Paul’s experiences as a slave, Claudia reassures Paul that “there is no anguish in that brand [his scar], no humiliation in that claim,” and that she accepts “the bondage of the master who rules all the world.”113 And, for a disturbing inverted moment, it is Paul who looks like “a happier, more contented slave, than those fabulous captives the South boasts of, but finds it hard to show.”114 Surpassing southern slave owners, Claudia becomes the most benevolent mistress of them all. (Her strange new position of power recalls the belief that historically some slaveholders, like the Spanish and the Seminoles, were more benevolent masters than southerners, so slaves often escaped to better conditions and eventually to relative freedom in Florida and across the Mexican border.115) However, Claudia goes one step further, dropping “down on her knee before” Paul, as if proposing, in order to convince him of her own moral strength and loyalty to him. Paul accepts Claudia’s offer. In the same way that Nurse Dane assumes a masculinized and dominant position as she ministers to and influences Bob, Claudia assumes a conventionally male role as she “rescues” Paul and carries him off into the sunset. Seen from a slightly different vantage point, Claudia’s relationship with the feminized Paul also functions as a surrogate for same-sex desire. After becoming more familiar with Paul, Claudia and Jessie express new and formerly inarticulable passions in response to their triangulated relationship with him. They vie for Paul and declare their attraction to him, placing him in a conventionally female role of a damsel in distress who must be won over by a victorious suitor. Moreover, since same-sex unions were not clearly defined or labled in the nineteenth century, Alcott would have been tapping into the Victorian era’s “continuum” of homosocial relations and homoerotic desire.116 Alcott negotiates sex and gender codes by invoking them indirectly through the eroticized entanglements of Paul, Claudia, and Jessie. In this way Alcott’s staging of miscegenation can also be read as a surrogate for same-sex relations. It articulates a type of passion and intimacy that disturbs “normative” (read: white, heterosexual, bourgeois) class models.117 Both Claudia and Jessie project their own inventive possibilities of what and whom Paul represents onto his unclaimed body. The two women engage in an intellectual sparring match as they attempt to woo Paul and

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incorporate him into their erotic fantasies. Their efforts echo the legitimization and romanticization of imperialist exploits, all in the name of “domesticating” untamed peoples and “harnessing” untapped natural resources and labor forces. Their competitive exchanges are also suggestive of a competing same-sex desire that is being negotiated or even extinguished in and through their battle over Paul’s often feminized body and subordinate status. Ultimately Claudia triumphs over Jessie and wins her prize: Paul. Her role as the heroic savior of Paul can function as a sort of allegory for white women’s participation in the abolitionist movement, and more broadly for white civilizing missionary projects domestically and transnationally.118 Jessie Snowden’s anger and jealousy about the relationship can also be read as part of the performance of abolitionism and interracial intimacy represented in this story. Once the private interracial union becomes public information, similar to Jessie’s outing of Paul’s Afro-Cuban ancestry, it then becomes politicized and more vulnerable to opposition. Jessie, in fact, could be viewed as a surrogate for public censure, although her motives are questionable. Furthermore, in contrast to Jessie, both Nurse Dane and Claudia are depicted as morally superior and liberal-minded white women who undergo terrible hardships in order to liberate powerless “black” men rather than acting purely for self-interest or in order to maintain the status quo. Through the dramatic turns of Alcott’s stories, a curious emphasis emerges: although Bob and Paul are the ones who are literally emancipated from slavery, the center of both narratives is actually Nurse Dane’s and Claudia’s liberatory experience. For them, Paul and Bob function as ser viceable black bodies employed to produce transformation and discovery in their own lives.119 They serve as the literary (and literal) bodies on which competing discourses about race, freedom, gender, sexuality, and nationhood are inscribed. Although placing whiteness on center stage is not unique to Alcott’s fiction, her juxtaposition of white women and black men creates space for a complicated and unconventional formulation of white womanhood in particular, quite distinct, as we shall see, from those formulations that emerge after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Presumably, the great uncertainty of the Civil War era and the wide variations in imaginings of the future provided space for these black male–white female stagings of miscegenation. Such imaginings, however, had their limits. In “My Contraband,” Nurse Dane describes Bob as her possession, her contraband; in the final scene, he completely submits both to her

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and to the sentimental fictional and dramatic solution to racism and slavery — death.120 During the final scene, Bob resurfaces after he reencounters his half brother in battle. He attempts to kill him, but he fails. Instead, while fighting bravely alongside Union soldiers, he himself is dealt the fatal blow that kills him. Despite the Union’s tactical defeat, the Battle of Fort Wagner was noted as clear evidence of the capabilities of black soldiers fighting for the Union, echoing Bob’s assertion of his own agency and manhood. Here Alcott’s conclusion reiterates the tragic mulatto narrative, which is also used in The Octoroon, by killing off Bob just at the point when his slave status is no longer valid and he is free to stay in the North. While on his deathbed, he reconnects with Nurse Dane in a hospital ward, where he insists on solidifying his relationship with her. Similar to slaves who took their master’s names, Bob literally adopts Nurse Dane’s name, becoming Bob Dane.121 In contrast to the master/slave relationship and to traditional nineteenth-century matrimony, this symbolic marriage inverts marital conventions and reasserts Nurse Dane’s position of “male” power. At his dying moment, Bob gives Nurse Dane one final look, “one murmur of submission,” and finds “wife and home, eternal liberty and God.”122 Indirectly, this finale suggests that the only “home” for Bob is the afterlife, avoiding the contemporaneous debates about repatriation versus citizenship for freed blacks. The meaning of “wife” also carries several possibilities. It could reference a reunification with his enslaved wife who was killed by his half brother before the story begins, indicating once again that there is no place in the U.S. nation for a legal black marriage. Or it could signify his ascension into full manhood through marriage. Another reading that this moment of “submission” might generate is Bob’s symbolic marriage to Nurse Dane, where he surrenders to her authority and power, similar to women who entrusted their property and status to their husbands through marriage. As in other sentimental abolitionist fiction, Bob’s death is described as a tragic but necessary result of the horrible institution of slavery. His imminent end also echoes conventional conclusions of miscegenation narratives — those involved must suffer horrible consequences because of their transgressions. However, rather than suffering, Nurse Dane transforms her story into something heroic by describing Bob’s death as a romantic attainment of freedom. In this story’s conclusion, as is also the case in “M.L.,” Alcott highlights the transformation and self-discoveries of her central female characters, rather than those of the men or even of the relationships themselves.

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Bob’s death also avoids the messy complications of the post-marriage life. Would Bob and Nurse Dane be required to relocate, and if so, to where? Would they have children? If the Union was victorious, should it then extend equal rights to black men and white women? Alcott was certainly concerned about these issues — in the postwar years, for example, she was involved in the ongoing conflict as to whether black male voting rights should be privileged over those of white females — but she circumvents such debates here. Though she created a fictional world, which in theory is limited only by the reach of her imagination, we see how Alcott’s emotional and intellectual daring can only go so far, and her narrative remains tethered by the conventions of the day. Similarly, in “M.L.,” Claudia’s betrothal transports her from her old world of comfort and property and culture; as she reflects back on her past life, we learn that “she cared little for its censure or praise.”123 Her emotional departure is also a physical one: soon after their marriage, Claudia and Paul leave town and join the Samaritans, an ancient and international religious community that “welcomed all humanity to its broad church” and which was dedicated to loving “their neighbor better than themselves” and upholding “Truth,” “Justice,” and “universal right.” Quite distinct from the concrete work of the Samaritans, however, Claudia’s escape is described as “like a child in a fairyland”124 — not unlike Zoe, who dies and goes where no laws can touch her. Once she and Paul enter this world of spiritual “equality,” his race no longer matters, enabling Claudia to transcend those whom she leaves behind.125 This idealized conclusion also differs starkly from the very real challenges faced by actual interracial couples, for whom there was no fairyland. Instead, many of them were socially ostracized, run out of town, or even worse.126 Like Nurse Dane, Claudia reinscribes the final moment of liberation in terms of her own subjectivity as she “leaves the shores of ‘Vanity Fair,’ travels through the ‘Valley of Humiliation’ and climbs toward the ‘Celestial City,’ accompanied by her husband Paul: ‘I cannot give the substance for the shadow, — cannot leave my world for yours. Put off the old delusions that blind you to the light, and come up here to me.’ ”127 Claudia surpasses earthly matters so that slavery and racism no longer provide an obstacle to her happiness; her vision of the relationship — and their vague future with the Samaritans — also seems to shield her from the persecutions suffered by white women who were intimate with black men. Her relationship is simply part of her spiritual mission.128 The story ends with Claudia and Paul’s ascendance toward a

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more holy future. The absence of any details suggests that they ride off into the sunset with their fellow Samaritans. This sentimental conclusion creates an idealized world where Paul’s blackness is literally erased and the beneficence and integrity of white womanhood are reaffirmed—once again reinforcing the centrality and power of her position as a white woman. However, while both women’s romanticized roles place them at the center of the narratives, they also suggest that despite white women’s desire and agency to transform relationships between blacks and whites, such relationships can only be articulated fully in the imaginative realm. For although both women take charge of their individual narratives, their agency seems to transport them to an alternative arena that separates them from their communities, and from the realities of mid-nineteenth-century race relations. Perhaps this evacuation is an indication of Alcott’s own negotiation between romanticism and realism, between the world she lived in and the world she wanted to live in. Still, Alcott’s work suggests that these private, domestic, intimate relations are surrogates for highly public and politicized stagings of transnational concerns, similar to the very visible debates that surrounded the few public interracial unions. In addition, the mixed-race bodies of Bob and Paul serve as highly visible stagings of interracial sex — just like Zoe on the auction platform, available for public scrutiny and consumption. These interracial unions were not, and could not be, private, just as they could not be sanctioned by the state, because of the threat they posed to structures of power. In her tellings, Alcott links the logic of one type of subordination, slavery, to another, women’s secondclass status, in an effort to challenge white-supremacist patriarchal ideology, and its insistence on deciding who was a citizen and who was a subject, who was capable of self-rule and who required intervention. Ultimately, Alcott’s exploration reasserts whiteness at the center of the social and political imagination and relegates “blackness” to the margins. However, the ways in which her whiteness is juxtaposed with her “black” male figures complicate Alcott’s representation of white female subjectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Alcott’s “black” male characters provide the impetus for the articulation of white female agency and transformation.129 Similar to the white male characters in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, who go to great lengths to own Zoe because of her irresistible exotic appeal, contact with these marginalized black men unleashes each white woman’s own agency. The interracial relationship remains “safe” as long as the “black” male character occupies a nonthreatening position.

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Their relationships are possible because the black male characters are placed in a role that transcends race or reinscribes the inferiority of blackness. As the black male characters fade into the background of the narratives, the white women assert themselves as fully developed subjects. In contrast to Zoe’s position in The Octoroon, which sustains the already established power of white upper-class patriarchy and citizenship, Alcott’s mixed-race men contribute to the development of an alternative position for white women — they help white women to disrupt the era’s rigid racial and gender hierarchies, and both women get the last word. Alcott’s texts transform the conventions that Boucicault uses in his play, and represent the trope of miscegenation as generative of a reformulated model for white women’s subjectivity. Like Zoe, who represents both white and black womanhood simultaneously, Bob and Paul stand in for and invoke the prohibited behaviors and desires of white women. They are symbolic figures, surrogates who allow for a playing out of roles denied to white women. The narratives also enabled Alcott to rehearse that agency that was denied to white women in real life. At the same time, the inbetweenness of Bob and Paul reduces the threat typically posed by black male bodies; in certain moments we can read her men as “white” and therefore nonthreatening, and in other moments as “black” and therefore dangerous. Though Alcott’s indeterminacy can be frustrating, and limits the boldness of her fictional worlds, these stories enable multiple readings of interracial unions, which enhances their power as surrogates for other unsettling issues, such as the expression of same-sex desire, the involvement of white women in transnational antislavery/antiracist movements, U.S. imperial concerns, “civilizing” missionary work, and civil rights in general. . . . Both Boucicault’s and Alcott’s works enable us to reconsider miscegenation as a representative trope employed to intervene in the racial, gender, national, and class codes during the Civil War period, when idealistic possibilities for a more egalitarian society were still being considered. Similar to the uncertainty of the times, their representations remain multivalent. For example, Alcott’s images of romantic interracial alliances could suggest the possibility of a political coalition both domestically and transnationally. And although Alcott seems to circumvent the issue of children, Claudia “touches the little heads” and looks up at her husband at the end of her story. This inexplicit gesture might be suggestive of the presence of

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Paul and Claudia’s children. This possibility certainly raises the controversial issue of unclassifiable mixed-race children, as well as the debate over whose legacy they will inherit (the freedom and wealth of their white mother or the slave status of their “black” father). In addition, these children transform and complicate the hue of the white-supremacist vision of nationhood and imperialism embodied in progeny (future citizens) and reproduced by familial constellations. The characters created by Boucicault and Alcott perform multiple roles, and their lives and their stories intersect with competing positions outside the imaginative realm of the stage and the page. Both authors introduced controversial and debated issues, such as the fate of the free black population, and through these surrogate representations they invited rereadings of the segregated race-gender-nation discursive systems that defined and polarized black/white, citizen/“alien,” male/female, and local/global. In their ambiguity, these mid-nineteenth-century representations of interracial entanglements prefigured later formulations that, despite their negotiation of more-conservative racist ideologies, still suggest nuanced readings. By our reframing of Boucicault’s play and Alcott’s dramatic stories as vital cultural enactments of the miscegenation trope, the surrogation of history and culture that these writers negotiated in their work becomes more visible. Despite generic differences, the discourse of the body complicates and permeates the various couplings that emerge in all three pieces. Written around the beginning of the Civil War, they anticipate, with care, the local and (trans)national concerns around property, slavery, economics, race, gender, and nation that were exploding into violent conflict. These texts betray a particular uncertainty and circumspection about how their various communities, invested in the local and global future, would emerge from these struggles — an uncertainty, and thus a flexibility, that becomes harder to locate in the years after the Civil War.

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· CHAPTER 2 ·

Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy Columbia has bidden the civilized world to join with her in celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. . . . Why are not the colored people, who constitute so large an element of the American population, and who have contributed so large a share to American greatness, more visibly present and better represented in this World’s Exposition? . . . Are they so dull and stupid as to feel no interest in this great event? It is to answer this question and supply as far as possible our lack of representation at the Exposition that the Afro-American has published this volume. —Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition

But after seeing the World’s Fair City here [Chicago], I feel as if I had caught a glimpse of the glorious capitals which will whiten the hills and shores of the east and the borderless plains of the west. —William Dean Howells, “Letters of an Altrurian Traveler”

T

he 1893 world’s columbian exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was a fascinating display of the United States’ sense of self, the country’s dreams and fears, and the ways it wanted to project itself, just before the turn of the twentieth century. As both a domestic and global event, the World’s Fair ushered the United States onto the international stage as a (re)unified, and emergent, political and economic global power at the very moment when it was reconstituting its racial, political, and economic policies internally to absorb and anticipate dramatic shifts in population. It also illustrated just how much the country · 51 ·

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had changed since the Civil War, and the myriad ways that the black– white color line had been reactivated and restructured following the war and the catastrophic failures of Reconstruction. Appearing in the midst of these efforts—which, in part, sought to conflate U.S. citizenry with a narrow definition of Anglicized whiteness—Bartley Campbell’s and William Dean Howells’s works added to the unsettled cultural dimensions of this turn-of-the-century moment. Our discussion will focus specifically on Campbell’s 1882 play The White Slave and Howells’s 1892 novel An Imperative Duty. These two works, like so many postwar creations, emerged in the context of racial terror, broader narratives of economic progress, and state-sponsored racial uplift at home and abroad. As the century came to a close, these artists confronted a bleaker racial and (trans)national landscape than those who wrote about and imagined the future during the Civil War period. Unlike Howells’s and Campbell’s pieces, Boucicault’s and Alcott’s earlier Civil War–period representations of miscegenation negotiated a seemingly open-ended future of racial relations; Boucicault and Alcott could, at the very least, gesture toward the possibility of more inclusive “democratic” ideals. Campbell’s play and Howells’s novel, by contrast, suggest a fundamental shift toward more conservative racial ideologies that characterized post-Reconstruction United States, reinforced by ideological justifications for the dismantling of civil rights for free blacks with insidious forms of racism that served to widen the gap between patriarchal, “white” civilization and “degenerate,” declining populations. In his influential 1896 book The Race Traits and the Tendencies of the Negro, for example, Germanborn insurance technician Frederick L. Hoffman argued that blacks should be denied insurance because of their “natural” propensity for corrupt and unsanitary practices, which he believed would ultimately lead to their extinction. Similar arguments supported claims for aggressive U.S. expansionist policies that required suppression and domination of resistant populations domestically and globally, like the Indian uprising at Sugar Point, Minnesota, in 1896 and U.S. intervention throughout the late 1890s and 1900s in the Philippines.1 Rather than exploring the uncertain symbolic and material possibilities of miscegenation in the Civil War period, these later works reframe black–white unions so that they speak to particularities of the three decades following the Civil War. Black–white unions, in these works, stage a response to the turbulence that accompanied U.S. attempts at expansion

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and consolidation. On the one hand, continued violence and social upheaval characterized regions across the country, including antiblack, anti– labor union, and anti-immigrant sentiment. On the other hand, the continuation of “manifest destiny” and the “open” frontier refocused attention to westward expansion and the need for “new” sites of production and raw materials in foreign markets, as well as diverse labor pools. Responses to these issues varied. In 1881, the Boston Herald offered a series of commentaries decrying the unused potential of South America, epitomizing the vein of pro-expansion narratives. On the other end of the spectrum we can find Mark Twain’s 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, awash in anxiety over the instability of race and sexuality in the United States in the 1900s.2 At the same time, his novel also suggests that racial hybridity is inevitable and that racial binarisms are unsustainable. In both instances, whether domestic or transnational, U.S. nation formation was tied into racialized sites occupied by intermixed populations rather than by any exclusive white Western civilization that was positioned as in need of bolstering and protection at the end of the nineteenth century. Along these lines, ongoing challenges to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and cohesion increased as the nineteenth century headed toward its end. Believers in the superiority of whites saw everywhere the writing on the wall. Advances in technology aided in the circulation of “black” and Spanishlanguage newspapers and their attendant arguments for race pride and economic uplift. Advances in transportation aided regional migration to urban centers, while millions landed at Ellis Island and elsewhere from “darker” shores around the world. In turn, instances of violent labor disputes became more frequent, not only because of the calls for labor reform but also because of the competition from “cheap,” black, and immigrant labor. These increasing tensions gave rise to antiblack, anti-Chinese, and, in some cases anti-Italian and anti-Irish violence and lynchings. Although the Chicago World’s Fair was only one of many world expositions in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was a particularly influential lodestar of mainstream American values. More than twenty million people walked through the 686 acres of Jackson Park, eating foods and witnessing spectacles from around the world, and throughout confronting evolutionary ideas about race and progress. The exposition was its own self-sufficient city, which its upper- and middle-class white organizers centered on the Court of Honor or the “White City.” Surrounding a formal lagoon, these neoclassically styled “uniform” structures, including

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the Administration Building and the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, constituted the five principal buildings of the fair, all painted bright white. Two huge statues were erected in the lagoon: the Statue of the Republic, “a classical allegory of the United States,” and the Columbian Fountain, with a statue in homage to Christopher Columbus. Organized around the Court of Honor were other smaller buildings and state and foreign pavilions, including the Fine Arts, Anthropology, and Women’s buildings. In supposed contrast to these pedagogical and scientific exhibits were the “entertainments” offered in the Midway Plaisance, the location farthest away from the central Court of Honor. Although this part of the fair was designed for amusement and profit, it also served as an instructional and anthropological display of the nonwhite world that blurred the boundaries between the exhibits.3 In one building, visitors could see ethnological displays of cultural artifacts gathered by anthropologists from races and cultures considered lower on the chain of human progress than western Europeans and Anglo-Saxons, such as Africans and Asians. In ethnic villages arranged throughout the midway, cultures deemed primitive, such as the Africans of the Dahomey village, were continually on display; they wore costumes that exposed large portions of their bodies, and performed various rituals and dances for the gaping spectators.4 However, even these racialized displays were arranged according to a hiearchy of prejudices and beliefs about the “darker,” non-Western world. For example, Japan was given what some considered one of the choicer spots on the fairgrounds — the Wooded Isle — that was separate from the midway and the White City. Unlike the other structures built by American workers, the Japanese buildings were designed by a Japanese architect and decorated by members of the Tokyo Art Academy. This preferential treatment contrasted with the relegation of China to the midway; the Chinese government had refused to send a commissioner to Chicago because of the 1882 exclusionary acts directed specifically at Chinese immigrants. Still, despite the heralding of Japan as the “Great Britain” of Asia and as a potential ally of the United States, this acceptance was qualified and predicated on the racist belief that, regardless of its progress and potential, Japan should remain subordinate to United States’ economic and political interests. It is also telling that Japan’s exhibit was still not included in the White City, even though Japan was considered more advanced than most non-Western nations.5

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As Robert Rydell illuminates in his study of expositions and empire, the 1893 fair set the standard for subsequent smaller international fairs in the South and Midwest, which “attempted to improve on one or more aspects of the Chicago venture in order to clarify and hasten the national and international realization of utopia.”6 For example, the nuanced distinctions of Asian nations in Chicago became more explicit at the San Francisco Midwinter Exposition of 1893–94, where the Japanese were considered “cousins” of the Chinese and unlikely to attain the superiority associated with the fair’s counterpart to Chicago’s White City, “the City Beautiful.”7 And the 1898 International Exposition in Omaha not only coincided with the U.S. victory over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay during the Spanish–American War, it also provided a site to celebrate the U.S. government’s expanding imperial policies and westward expansion. Bringing together a gathering of Indians, along with clergy, businessmen, and politicians, this fair helped reinforce the ideology of manifest destiny and U.S. empire.8 Linking these elaborate stagings of race, progress, social struggle, and imperial adventure, Rydell aptly concludes that world’s fairs blurred class lines as people observed the “racialized basis of equality and inequality”9 that supported two of the country’s most critical enterprises: the ongoing consolidation of whiteness and the project of imperial expansion. As the opposing condemnation and adulation articulated by African American activist and writer Ida B. Wells and “progressive” writer and culture and literary critic William Dean Howells cited above suggest, the underlying promotion of white supremacy and U.S. empire was not lost on visitors to the fair, even though such promotion was in no way monolithic or uncontested. Among the diverse groups of spectator-participants were cultural producers like Howells and Kate Chopin, who were seduced by the complex displays of utopian ideals of nationhood, progress, and empire, as well as by the sheer entertaiment and consumer value of performances of identity, race, sexuality, and primitivism in so many of the “living” exhibits.10 This fascination with the “other” as it informs one’s own status certainly emerged in Howells’s and Campbell’s work, as well as in the work of many of their contemporaries who helped shape popular and often contradictory understandings of the intersecting roles of race, class, gender, and nation in identity formation, both collectively and individually in the late nineteenth century. Displays of race, staged throughout the 1893 World’s

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Fair and in so many other aspects of postbellum culture, influenced everything from Mark Twain’s construction of an Americanized “self,” enacted in and through his imperial encounter with Hawaii, to Thomas Nelson Page’s romanticization of the antebellum South; the racialized hierarchy in his writing attempted to recuperate the nobility of the white southern planter class despite the decades that had elapsed since the Confederacy’s defeat by the Union.11 Equally cognizant of the symbolic, and problematic, power of these representations were those who challenged the fair’s white-supremacist and imperialist leanings. Some, including a group of Chinese American businessmen, and Frederick Douglass, a former leading abolitionist and subsequently U.S. minister to Haiti, did so by participating and using the spaces allotted to them as platforms to advocate for equality and recognition of the important roles of peoples of all skin colors in the progress of “civilization.” Others boycotted the Chicago exposition because of racist antiblack and anti-Chinese legislation, propaganda, and violence that surrounded the fair.12 In the pamphlet cited above, prominent African Americans in the fields of journalism, political activism, business, and education criticized the Chicago World’s Fair for excluding those citizens whose enslaved and indentured bodies had constituted a large percent of the labor force that produced the raw materials for the nation’s wealth and achievements that were now exhibited so proudly. Deliberately scheduled to commemorate the four-hundred-year anniversary of that foundational colonial encounter, Columbus’s “discovery” of America, the fair in its performance of narratives of U.S. progress and civilization highlighted the erasure and apparent amnesia required for this collective cultural celebration — one that even public school children across the country participated in by simultaneously reciting the “salute to the flag” (Pledge of Allegiance) for the ceremonial dedication of the Chicago World’s Fair.13 In addition to disregarding slavery, this moment, like so many others, circumvented the historical removal and genocide of indigenous populations in the United States that transformed the “savage” Indian into a romanticized relic. Staged as a monument to progress and luxury, the fair was structured in terms of racial and national hierarchies in which the United States, along with other imperial powers like England and France, occupied the central position. African Americans were deliberately excluded, while other nonEuropeans, including Asians, Pacific Islanders, indigenous tribes, and subSaharan Africans, were located along the peripheries as living exhibits of

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the “primitive” world — ripe for takeover and cultivation by the West. As we shall see, this blatant invisibility and marginalization of “colored people” echoed the United States’ rich and destructive recent history, including the violent and systemic removal of civil rights granted to emancipated slaves; other legal forms of terror and subjection aimed at non-AngloSaxons, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1888 Scott Act,14 which restricted and subsequently banned Chinese labor migration; the ongoing genocide and removal of the indigenous population, such as the conflicts with the Sioux over land rights during the Black Hills Gold Rush; and the conflation of “new” (non–northern European) immigrants to the inferior status of not-white-enough. Miscegenation’s Persistent Pull in the Popular Imagination

As my discussion of other works indicates, a key means to understand our nation’s prejudices, as with any of our other faults, is by examining the popular manifestations of these issues. Just as during the Civil War period interracial relationships remained a common preoccupation of writers, playwrights, artists, and creators of all types, including those who created new laws and regulations, during the postwar years we see a range of representations that focus in one way or another on this same taboo: miscegenation. Some works strove to confirm the most despicable stereotypes of blacks and painted absurd and damaging portraits of the evils of any sexual or intimate intermingling; other depictions had the potential to challenge the racist ideology of white supremacy. However, as race relations worsened, it became more difficult to find fictional representations of miscegenation that did not explicitly condemn interracial contact;15 within these works, however, we can find intriguing strategies of surrogacy. By staging miscegenation in subtle and somewhat contradictory ways, they served multiple purposes that extended beyond the era’s central prohibition of black–white contact. Campbell and Howells could not avoid interacting with the provocative trope of miscegenation. In Campbell’s case, his drama The White Slave served as a platform to address the moral urgency associated with the redemption of whiteness. Like the fairs, designed for the “average” white American consumer, Campbell marginalized blackness and glorified the past greatness of white society, as well as its future. By consolidating the variegated white populations in his play, he was able to reactivate

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their power and legitimize white superiority by emphasizing its oppositionality to blackness. Similarly, Howells, who was one of the millions of spectators who visited the “exotic” exhibits at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, articulated this binarism in an even broader framework in Imperative Duty. In his literary production of miscegenation, he offered readers a spectacular enactment of competing domestic and transnational narratives about progress and primitivism as they related to social reform, race, gender, class, and citizenship in the United States. By employing strategies that echoed Campbell’s, Howells produced an ambiguous formulation of miscegenation that played out many of the conflicting and troubling discourses around interracial entanglements and nation formation that were circulating at the end of the nineteenth century. Howells’s novel also demonstrated how a written text engages in social and cultural performance, once again demonstrating the permeable boundaries of creative genres, as well as those that separate imagined and lived experience. This comparative reading of both texts helps illuminate the complex, complementary, and inconsistent ways that each work limned the cultural dimensions of the miscegenation trope as it related to real and imagined reformation of the U.S. brand of “American” identity at the turn of the century. Just as the Civil War exposed the bloody rift between the North and South, the years following the war witnessed great and contradictory visions of what the United States would become next. For some the end of the Civil War presaged a great new hope — a reunited country, the end of slavery, the emergence of powerful movements for women’s rights. But for others, these years brought quite the opposite — an increase in anxiety, a growing fear that a sacred, “American” way of life was being destroyed. The legal abolition of slavery in 1865 and the liberation of approximately four million black Americans was a stunning event, which seemed to epitomize the greatest hopes and fears of the age. The decades after the Civil War were also marked by heightened tensions around increased eastern European and Asian immigration in the United States. The numbers of non-Anglo men and women immigrating to the United States grew by leaps and bounds; while only 8,385 people entered the United States in 1820 from all sending countries, by 1860 that number had jumped to more than four million. It continued to grow over the next several decades so that by 1920, the “white” immigrant population was more than 13.5 million.16 Add to these figures the four million men and women pronounced “free” upon slavery’s end, and we can glimpse

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the fundamental changes that restructured the national landscape. The growing numbers of free black and foreign-born men in urban centers caused much consternation among the white upper classes, and the frontier buzzed with heightened hysteria about the protection of white Anglo women. Working-class “whites,” too, felt more hostile toward these growing populations, who often competed with poorer whites for jobs. Any man who was suspected of non-Anglo-Saxon ancestry or even “one drop” of “black” blood could be deemed a rival for wage labor or a potential sexual predator. During the long post-emancipation period, from the Civil War through Reconstruction, in the minds of many whites — from southern white supremacists to genteel northern liberals — African Americans seemed to be “free” to do whatever they wanted. Not surprisingly, relationships between blacks and whites quickly intensified, with a preeminent anxiety among white Americans now that the rigid restrictions were lifted and the mobility of blacks increased. Interracial unions, while always a compelling topic, took on a new emphasis in these postwar years, since they became the symbol of one of the worst fears after slavery: that black freedom would not only provide blacks with access to equal rights but that their elevation to citizen status would also welcome them into the intimate social spaces previously reserved for bourgeois whites, such as their parlors and bedrooms. Fears about interracial unions were deepened by political shifts. Following President Lincoln’s assassination, the reluctant President Andrew Johnson was compelled by the Republican-dominated Congress to implement the radical transformation of the Confederacy in 1865, inaugurating the period we now know as Reconstruction. This federal program was two-pronged: it punished the Confederacy by establishing military rule and disenfranchised former Confederate officials. At the same time, it accelerated reform by protecting freed slaves’ voting rights and establishing new Republican-run state governments. Under Johnson’s successor and former Union general President Ulysses S. Grant, the federal government continued to invest money into Reconstruction, such as the establishment of new public schools and massive aid to railroads. However, Republican efforts and seeming alignment with blacks over whites were met with intense opposition and violence, such as the local resistance of the Ku Klux Klan. The cultural tide shifted after a deep national recession in 1873, during which funding for Reconstruction lost popularity in both the North and the South. This uncertainty about the nation’s economic health,

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along with the successful Democratic takeover of Republican seats through electoral wins, frequent intimidation, and sometimes violent coercion, led to the eventual collapse of Reconstruction in 1877. The so-called Compromise of 1877 settled the disputed 1876 election results by awarding Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes the White House over his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, in exchange for the removal of the remaining federal troops in the former Confederate states. This decision cemented Democratic control of the South and ushered in a reign of terror as “payback” for black freedom. The whitesupremacist Redeemer governments instituted an intense period of antiblack practices, including disenfranchisement, the implementation of segregation through legal and violent means, and the resuscitation of white supremacy as a legitimate political and social platform for progress. Both radical and moderate white southerners during this post-Reconstruction period refused to recognize gains made by blacks, and northerners averted their eyes from the violent backlash experienced by blacks, effectively abandoning the Republican cause. In their own version of the whitesupremacist brand of antiblack segregationist thinking in the South, northerners expressed hostility and anxiety about the immigrant hordes landing on the shores of the fractured nation. Uncertainty about the roles that the multitude of disenfranchised blacks and new immigrants would play as the nation reconstituted itself fueled efforts to create some order out of the apparent chaos and upheaval in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This post–Civil War view — of the United States as a nation and emergent world power, which must be governed by “white” male citizens — was not new, but required ongoing maintenance as the definition of “whiteness” became more variegated, in the midst of the ongoing migration of various labor pools, including free blacks and imported labor forces, and shifts in economic systems and markets due to industrialization and territorial expansion.17 This association of nonwhites with the potential to contaminate through sexual and intimate channels was not limited to stereotypes about men. It also informed representations of nonwhite women that were reinforced by segregation domestically and by limits on immigration transnationally, such as the 1875 Page Law that restricted Chinese and other “Mongolian” “prostitutes” from entering the United States. As Susan Koshy argues in Sexual Naturalization, this law reinforced narratives of degeneracy associated with Asians and other nonwhites and further distinguished Asian and

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other nonwhite women from the “purity” associated with whites domestically. Such laws sought to limit the possibility of unsanctioned, nonwhite, or even “mongrel” children who would further complicate racial classifications in the United States. The specter of the unclassifiable person became even more significant in 1890, when the U.S. Census focused more explicitly than earlier attempts to count and categorize the population based on racial classification, demonstrated by the increased number of categories used to describe people of African descent. And, as Martha Hodes highlights in her historical account of this process, the 1890 census was the first and only time the categories of “black,” “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” were used to differentiate degrees of African ancestry. Though these terms had been in the common parlance for decades, their adoption by the U.S. government demonstrates the extent to which the offspring of interracial unions had become a dilemma that needed to be fixed. Lawmakers would later use the results of the census to support immigration restrictions, like the 1924 National Origins Act; to determine Native American land retention; to racialize statistics on reproduction, mental health, and hygeine; and to systemize the inherent abitrariness and instability of racial categories. Although the census failed to solve the problem of race, it did reinforce “the authority of the state to divide, count, marke, and erase” and in doing so fostered “the intertwined national projects of subjugation, assimilation, and extinction at the turn of the century, in the interest of white purity and supremacy.”18 At the same time, the focus on preserving white womanhood by policing nonwhite male bodies overshadowed “extraterritorial” interracial encounters in colonial sites, such as those between white men and Asian women in Hawaii,19 or white men and Latino/Afro-Caribbean women in South and Central America and the Caribbean. As the imperial reach of the United States grew after the Civil War, so too did the sexual manifestation of such power grabs. In these relations, miscegenation represents the complex interplay of mutually constituting formations of nation and empire in which simultaneous enablement and prohibition of interracial encounters reinforce narratives of white supremacy and imperial domination. In places where imperial domination was visible, these relations seem to have symbolized that powerful presence and control, similar to white male–“black” female slave relations in the antebellum United States, or white male–native female couples (real and mythologized) in the colonial

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United States and throughout the Americas. Alternatively, in visibly contested spaces like Cuba, where there was a complex struggle for control between imperial and indigenous forces, ideas about miscegenation echoed the unresolved possibility of such alliances and the uncertainty of how they would play out. As we have seen, these years witnessed a huge push by the United States to consolidate whiteness, establish the United States as a cohesive national entity, and secure its imperial interests. The complexities of the years before the Civil War, even with the foment of abolition and the growing economic and social conflict between North and South, seem quaint by comparison. The work of Howells and Campbell, like all cultural productions, thus reflected concerns that seemed quite removed from the plots themselves. Their representations of miscegenation had to negotiate discourse about progress and the expansion of U.S. brands of democracy and freedom with patriarchal narratives of racial, moral, political, and economic supremacy and self-sufficiency. In the midst of these Herculean efforts to redeem white supremacy, interracial unions remained symbolic and literal targets of violence and fear about the nation’s ability to excel both domestically and transnationally. Represented as degenerate and unnatural, interracial intimacy was considered the root/route of corruption that had to be cut off quickly and efficiently in order to prevent further contamination. Segregation and racialized hierarchies in which whites of Anglo or western European ancestry occupied the highest rank and blacks were once again relegated to the lowest reinforced antimiscegenation rhetoric and the need to identify and classify differences. These theories circulated in a variety of overlapping cultural arenas, ranging from science and law to entertainment and literature, similar to the types of displays popularized at world expositions that captured so much of the public’s imagination. The national/transnational proliferation of antiblack sentiment echoed the symbolic erasure of black people and the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation, emblematized by the “Colored People’s Day” at the Chicago World’s Fair. For all intents and purposes, blacks were excluded from the 1893 World’s Fair unless they performed in one of the anthropological displays. The designation of one day, Colored People’s Day, was devised as a response to black protests over being excluded from the exhibition’s tributes to the progress of the United States, since blacks, both enslaved and free, helped construct so much of the nation that was exhibited so proudly for

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the world to see. The message transmitted by the allotment of this one day for blacks reinforced segregationist policies that were prevalent throughout the South. Additionally, it suggested that blacks needed to be kept separate from the rest of the general population and that it was actually possible to do so. However, this attempt to contain and displace African Americans contrasted directly with the northern, southwestern, and western migration of members of the emancipated black populations. African Americans, unlike the colonized populations that were exhibited at the exposition and later returned to their “home” lands, posed a problem for the civilizing white-supremacist imperial discourse both domestically and transnationally. From the 1860s to the late 1890s, intersecting discourse about the imminent disappearance of the black population — some whites believed that black survival depended on white domination and that free blacks were destined for extention, while other whites were more proactive by participating directly or indirectly in antiblack violence and persecution — versus the increasing visibility of the black population created hysteria and hypotheses about the most effective way to deal with the “race” problem. This anxiety generated legislative and cultural reinforcement of the urgent need to protect “white” people, and especially white women, from procreative contaminating contact with blacks and other non-“white” undesirables.20 This heightened tension between “white” and non-“white” populations also gave rise to increased numbers of lynchings, predominantly of black men and women. Despite the beginnings of Progressive Era social reforms, like Jane Addams’s settlement houses, the institution of child-labor laws, and the beginning of antitrust regulation, the United States continued to consolidate its role as an imperial power. Between 1897 and 1901, for example, President McKinley annexed numerous surrounding territories, including the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. Each of the U.S. government’s forays into transnational waters was in one way or another an effort to increase the reach of its economic and military might, and also to enhance its national identity. Additionally, contemporaneous writers, intellectuals, and other public figures noted the parallels between racialized imperial policies abroad and domestic practices, like those detailed in the antilynching writings of Ida B. Wells or legitimized by new schools of thought like eugenics, established by Francis Galton in 1883. This pseudoscientific field, inspired by Darwin’s evolutionary theories, provided evidence to

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support the hierarchization of races, ethnicities, and cultures in the United States and around the globe. Eugenics was inseparable from social engineering, including the use of birth control, adding a biological rationale to the belief that white Anglo and western European ideals and supremacy must be reproduced through “pure” progeny. This social engineering was promoted to eliminate any undesireable traits, such as developmental delays or inferiorities associated with “impure” blood. Alongside this aggressive segregation and attempts to reform and contain nonwhite races and communities, many believed that darker and primitive races, like blacks, were so degenerate that, if left to their own devices, they would eventually disappear because of poor living conditions, poverty, ignorance, the rapid spread of disease, and endemic violence. The broad spectrum of racist arguments was essential to narratives of progress that were displayed at world’s fairs, and also to the innumerable narratives circulated in newspaper articles, political rhetoric, and popular culture to justify imperial pursuits and civilizing missions. At the same time that U.S. reformers attempted to educate and uplift those races and cultures deemed inferior, white supremacists promoted the superiority and exclusivity of white Anglo and western European ancestry. Building on earlier arguments posed by racist imperialists, such as Senator John Calhoun — who opposed Mexican acquisition because he had “never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race — the free white race,” and who could not imagine Mexico because of its “Indian” and “mixed tribes” — courts on the local, state, and federal levels redoubled efforts to deny petitions for U.S. citizenship by nonwhites well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.21 Rejecting the petitioners’ self-proclaimed “white” status, authorities excluded the majority of applicants between the Civil War and World War I from the category of “white” and thus denied citizenship. In 1880, a man named Camille was denied citizenship by an Oregon judge because he was half white and half Native American; Kanaka Nian was excluded in 1889 because he was Hawaiian; and Hong Yen Chang’s petition was rejected a year later because he was Chinese. These are a random sampling of the thousands of such cases.22 The authorities’ rationale for accepting or rejecting a particular applicant as “white” was inconsistent and contingent on different factors, everything from scientific beliefs, legal precedent, skin color, to “common knowledge.” Regardless of the variability of the reasoning behind each de-

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cision, these cases demonstrate how legal, and sometimes extralegal, discourse not only shaped racial definitions but also legally constructed them in ways that influenced other interrelated (often unmarked) ideological, political, economic, and cultural objectives and beliefs. For example, as Ian Haney López elucidates in his study of early race and citizenship cases, “popular” sentiment and racial prejudices fed many of these decisions. However, they were also informed by political expediency and potentially beneficial transnational concerns, such as the Rodriguez case, decided in federal court in Texas in 1897. Although the court admitted this former Mexican as a U.S. citizen, the decision was based on a series of treaties conferring citizenship on Spaniards and Mexicans following U.S. expansion into Florida and the Southwest, rather than on his inclusion in the category of “white.”23 Other decisions, whether or not they were based on the presumption that race is a construct or that it is something essentially immutable, still echoed the overall post-Reconstruction unease with racial, class, gender, and transnational entanglements that threatened to dislodge the supremacy of the narrowly defined category of “white.” As indicated by this historical review, the United States was immersed in enormous efforts of nation building, as well as figuring out what to do with a population of approximately four million freed slaves who were trying to make lives for themselves. Anxiety was high. It was easy to imagine, as some scholars have argued, that during these years the creative and intellectual output of U.S. artists would shy away from addressing such concerns explicitly; however, issues such as white supremacy, southern and northern reconciliation, the maintenance of racial “purity” at home and abroad, and the entrenchment and imposition of Jim Crow segregation (on increasingly transient and expansive populations) remained popular topics for exploration and debate. Cultural producers incorporated these concerns in their works, as they negotiated the contemporaneous socioeconomic conditions that informed them. Arenas as diverse as the press, literary and critical circles, the business community, and political organizations threw their hats into the ring, expressing contested ideological beliefs about the impact of U.S. economic, imperial, labor, and racial policies. For example, African American activist Anna Julia Cooper used writing and public speaking engagements as platforms to critique the racialized and gendered policies and practices that denied the humanity and value of black women’s and men’s lives, regardless of what portion of African ancestry they contained or how “white”

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their skin looked. Others vocalized opposition to injustices suffered by populations of all hues and participated in the increasingly visible and vocal resistance to white supremacy in the decades following the Civil War and leading up to the twentieth century, in areas such as labor organization, women’s groups, and black presses. Activist organizations circulated their own, far-from-uniform positions on contemporaneous concerns that they saw as directly or indirectly impacting their particular constituencies, everything from local court rulings to U.S. global policies. For example, the Indianapolis Freeman addressed the issue of lynching at home with its condemnation of U.S. imperial designs on Hawaii in 1893, asserting that the United States “stands like a cur and a coward, a spectacle among nations, while thousands and thousands of her faithful fellow-citizens . . . are shot down and burned amid ribald jeers at the stake”; the editorial goes on to say that a nation should first “protect and provide for its own citizens, before concerning itself over those of other lands.”24 Outspoken activists attested to the inextricable link between race and the discourses of humanity, civilization, and progress, evidenced by popularization of the phrase “white man’s burden” adopted from the title of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem. This notion promoted the belief that colonialism placed a great burden on white civilization to govern its newly acquired imperial wards; however, others saw U.S. expansion as nothing new; it was merely the global application of U.S. policies already in place at home. In fact, African American antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells exposed in her writings and speeches the great contradictions in U.S. humanitarian policies. She contended that domestic antiblack violence provided conclusive proof of the hypocrisy of U.S. narratives of liberty and “civilization” supporting interventions on behalf of Russian Jews, Armenian Christians, the laboring poor of Europe, Siberian exiles, and native women of India. Like her contemporaries, regardless of their opinions, Wells capitalized on the mounting hope and fear surrounding the future of the United States.25 The cultural fascination with these issues was not lost on Howells or Campbell. They joined this cacophony and proliferation of diverse opinions with their literary and dramatic stagings of miscegenation. Taking up the powerful subject of miscegenation where Boucicault and Alcott left off, Howells and Campbell also employ surrogacy to invoke the symbolic and historically embedded status of interracial unions, while they simultaneously attempt to evacuate them of their disruptive power. On the face of it, both Howells and Campbell seem to create resolutely,

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even adamantly, safe pieces, which do not challenge much of anything. In their late nineteenth-century articulations of miscegenation, Campbell and Howells bow to the status quo. They contend with, but often bend to the contemporaneous impulse to reemphasize Anglicized whiteness as a central component of U.S. identity and, by extension, world civilization. In various ways, their works reinforce the reconfiguration and transformation of national and global populations, driven by the ideological and political promotion of western European and Anglo-Saxon supremacy. However, the ostensibly “progressive” ideologies about race and interracial relations in The White Slave and Imperative Duty mask more-entrenched racist anxieties about the intermingling of black and white communities and the uncertainty of the social, political, and cultural direction in which the United States was moving. Campbell’s and Howells’s stagings of miscegenation represent their subjects’ (and, by extension, their own) status in relation to mutually contingent formulations of race, citizenship, and class that were in flux because of the shifting power dynamics between and among imperial and colonized nations in the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. But as we look more closely, we find multivalent spaces within these works that recall not only Boucicault’s play and Alcott’s fiction but also other contemporaneous post-Reconstruction stagings of miscegenation, like Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraide” and George Washington Cable’s “Madame Delphine.” These “local color” short fictions are notable, as Susan Gillman contends in her work on race melodrama, because they “bear only the most oblique relation to the present” except through implication, or at best, allegory. In other words, because they appear to be anchored to a regionally specific past, rather than to the large-scale national concerns of the day, they seem removed from contemporaneous realities. From this distanced position, their works are ultimately able to make powerful, albeit indirect, claims about what haunts the late nineteenth-century cultural imagination. As is the case with Howells and Campbell, their allegedly safe perspective masks deeper critiques. Here, the productive critical frame of surrogacy provides more direct access to the “unbridged” gaps between past and present.26 When read as critical enactments of the miscegenation trope, Howells’s and Campbell’s works can be understood as rehearsing and reenacting the intersecting past, present, and future, thus illuminating, rather than shadowing, subterranean allusions to contemporaneous culture. For example, even as they

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reinforce the increasingly conservative and racist ideology circulating at the end of the nineteenth century, The White Slave and Imperative Duty also redeploy tragic mulatta/octoroon conventions in ways that do not simply foreclose the possibility of miscegenation.27 Instead, they explore its contours and implications. For example, mixed-race figures function as racial mediators because their racially liminal bodies play multiple roles — a surprising concept in an era in which much of white America didn’t want anyone of a darker hue to be mediating anything. As we shall discuss, both Campbell and Howells deploy the tragicmulatta trope in their stagings of miscegenation that echo the unresolved challenges posed by race, citizenship, interracial relations, gender, and class. In addition, both texts’ use of black-identified or octoroon women, who are able to pass as “white,” rather than visibly identifiable black women or men, complicates their depictions even further. But unlike Civil War– era respresentations, Campbell’s and Howells’s works offer white-skinned “black” women as surrogates for other subjectivities invoked in and by their depictions. This racially ambiguous figure adds another layer of complexity to each portrayal of interracial love; their white-looking skin places these women in a performative role because it enables them to occupy various positions, as mediators, surrogates, and representatives of different racial/national categories at different points in each narrative. Because of this apparent slippage, these unions can be read simultaneously as both interracial and mono-racial, reinforcing their ambiguity and inviting readings that challenge normative assumptions about race, nation, and the meanings of miscegenation. In doing so, they also blur the binarisms registered by their enactments of miscegenation, such as “subject”–citizen, alien–“native,” civilized–primitive.28 Consolidating Whiteness, Sanitizing Miscegenation

Bartley Campbell, the son of Irish-born immigrants, was born in Pittsburgh on August 12, 1843. He had little formal education and worked for his father, the proprietor of a brickyard. At the time of his birth and through his adulthood, Campbell would have been exposed to, if not embroiled in, the ongoing tensions and violence between the large numbers of Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia) and free blacks who had settled in the state. Its proximity to Delaware and Maryland, both slaveholding states, seemed to contribute to a more sympathetic view of

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slavery than in states farther north. Moreover, the Irish and free blacks were competing for jobs and recognition as full citizens simultaneously, which increased conflicts. Campbell and other members of the Irish community might have taken advantage of their intersecting struggles with African Americans and other non-Anglo- Saxons to define themselves not only as capable laborers and citizens but also as equal members of society who merited the same access to economic, material, and political resources that were available to men legally categorized as “white.” Instead, however, the majority of Irish aligned themselves with the white-supremacist movement in order to protect their economic and political gains rather than question the gendered and racialized restrictions on financial, personal, and even sexual autonomy.29 Their identification with white-supremacist proslavery and expansion movements is particularly curious, considering their own relocation from their colonized nation of origin (Ireland). Unlike blacks, who were mostly barred from the military, Irish immigrants were allowed to join, thus providing them legitimate access to arms during the Mexican War and the Civil War. This militarization of Irish immigrants was then also used to intimidate blacks and bar them from certain trades, like firefighting. In addition to such ongoing forms of racial discrimination, Pennsylvania Irish politicians were also instrumental in the aforementioned Compromise of 1877 and thus helped to usher in some of the most lasting impediments to black equality. At the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Campbell helped to found the Pittsburgh Leader and became its drama critic. Presumably to support his wife, Elizabeth Woodhouse, and three children, he continued work for the next several years as a journalist, writer, critic, and editor for newspapers and magazines in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Before he began writing plays, he was known for his publication of “popular” tales and verse, in addition to at least two novels. He began writing drama in 1871 but found little success until his “frontier melodrama,” My Partner, was produced in 1879. His fortune shifted, and according to Napier Wilt’s biographical sketch, “from 1879 to 1885 Bartley Campbell was not only the most popular American dramatist, but he was regarded by most critics as one of the best.”30 It was during this period that he wrote, directed, and produced the acclaimed drama The White Slave. At least two of his plays were successful in Germany, and almost all his later plays were performed in England, Australia, and Canada. After he assumed

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financial and directorial control of the Fourteenth Street Theater in New York and renamed it after himself, his mental condition deteriorated. He was committed to the State Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, New York, in 1886, where he remained until his death on July 30, 1888.31 The White Slave, considered Campbell’s most popular play, opened at Haverly’s Theatre in New York on April 3, 1882, and ran until May 6. It then toured across the country and continued to play annually for the next several years, drawing large audiences. It reopened at minor theaters in New York and continued to play one week each year in Chicago until 1901. In addition, a White Slave company revived the play in 1912 and toured the country for the next six years; its last official performance was at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on February 23, 1918,32 nine months before the end of World War I. Although reviews were mixed in terms of the literary merit of the play, all critics conceded that it was extremely popular and well attended. One Chicago Tribune reviewer asserted that “Mr. Campbell, consequently, abstains from giving them [the audience] anything that might by any chance be provocative of thought, or make any intellectual demand upon the audience”;33 a Chicago Daily News reviewer charged Campbell with theft, declaring that “Bits of Uncle Tom, The Octoroon, Kit and The World, and other sensational dramas have been kidnapped, uglified, attenuated, and melted in the Campbellian stewpan and warmed up with the gentle heat of the Bartlean genius. . . . so that its popularity will exceed that of many a better play.”34 Regardless of such judgments of its artistic value, the play was consumed ravenously by the public and demonstrated what one New York Illustrated Times reviewer described as Campbell’s ability to tickle “the public taste for the spectacular” and in doing so fill his pockets with “shekels — evidently his aim and object.”35 Set on the antebellum Big Bend plantation in Kentucky, The White Slave opens with plantation owner Judge Hardin on his deathbed, saying his last good-byes to his family, friends, and slaves. We soon discover that while the judge was vacationing in Italy with his daughter, Grace, and his female quadroon slave, Nance, Grace had had an illicit affair with the Marquis De Bernaugre. Abandoned by the marquis, Grace died in Italy, just after giving birth to a daughter, Lisa. Because Judge Hardin did not want to sully his family name by admitting that his daughter had given birth to a child out of wedlock (fathered by a European, no less), he and Nance had brought Lisa back to Big Bend and passed her off as Nance’s octoroon daughter. Despite Nance’s pleas for the judge to tell Lisa that she

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is a “free born white woman,”36 he remains silent and threatens to haunt Nance from the grave if she does not keep his secret. Soon after the judge’s death, his adopted son, Clay Britton, bankrupts the estate by gambling. It turns out that his devious “friend,” Bill Lacy, has encouraged Clay to place bets above his means so that he will be forced to sell Hardin’s property. Lacy convinces Clay that the only way to save the land is to sell the slaves to him. Because of a legal technicality, Lisa’s and Nance’s free papers are nullified, enabling Lacy to claim the two of them along with the other slaves. Once Clay signs over the slaves, Lacy reveals his plan to make Lisa his concubine on his plantation in Mississippi. He also plans to cast aside his current enslaved quadroon concubine, Daphne, and replace her with Lisa, whom he considers more refined and therefore more desirable. Clay, who loves Lisa even though he cannot marry her because of her octoroon status, is imprisoned for trying to stop Lacy from taking her away. Clay then escapes from jail and helps Lisa run away from Lacy’s plantation. At the climax of the play, Lacy discovers Lisa’s whereabouts just as the steamer on which she and Clay are escaping conveniently catches fire. Miraculously, Clay and Lisa avoid harm by floating off on a burning piece of the ship. In the final scene, Lisa learns that she is actually white. She and Clay can therefore get married, repossess their slaves, and return to Big Bend plantation. Besides presenting his viewers with an intricate plot and melodramatic surprises, Campbell’s play offers a revised version of the “tragic mulatta” trope; by 1882, with contemporaneous works like Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or, the Slave Bride, and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes, this trope was even more established in the country’s consciousness than it had been two decades earlier when The Octoroon was produced. In fact, Lisa’s tragic octoroon role not only recalls the “tragic mulatta” trope, but also prefigures other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deployments of the same figure on the page and on the stage. Written fictions, such as Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” and Frances Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, employed the mulatta, as did staged performances by light-skinned black women in The Creole Show (performed concurrently with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair), Oriental America, and The Octoroons.37 These performances by mixed-race women, as Jayna Brown suggests in her study on black women performers, intersected with ongoing projects to domesticate colonized women of color in annexed territories, like the Philippines;

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they also heightened the imperial eroticization of colonized women of color and feminization of men of color, at the same time that the U.S. government continued to simultaneously disenfranchise black people and other nonwhites by reinvigorating the color line and reinforcing racist anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation.38 One of the more obvious issues that the play invokes lies in the title. The notion of white slavery was not a new one. It had been used by laborers in the early nineteenth century to characterize their difficult working conditions, and by white women suffragettes as a metaphor for their status as second-class citizens. In some ways these comparisons deemphasized the enslavement of blacks by focusing on the horrors of white “servitude.” The term was also used by the social movement that worked to prevent the trafficking of women both domestically and transnationally for the purpose of prostitution. The 1875 Page Act was the first legislation designed to prevent white slavery, soon followed by other, problematic efforts, including the exclusion of female Asian immigrants — allegedly designed to prevent the sale and transportation of Asian women into slavery in the United States, but intricately linked to the racialization of idealized Anglo womanhood.39 Other social reformers, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and anti-vice activists, advocated the image of “purity” and morality as embodied by the Anglo-Saxon family by pitting it against images of white slavery that undermined Anglo-Saxon masculine and feminine models of propriety, both in terms of the white women who were enslaved and the men who procured them. For example, Frances Willard, a president of the WCTU, forged alliances with labor and populist movements, but she simultaneously denigrated non-Anglos by linking sexual immorality and vice to African Americans, new immigrants, and other “foreign” identities and sites, like the Middle East and France. In this way, Willard’s and her cohorts’ progressive views were cloaked in white supremacy that framed “civilization” in terms of its location in and through families, communities, and nations that reproduced and protected “white” purity.40 Working in conjunction with moves for cultural and political reform was an abundant white slavery genre of fiction and drama, in which the perils of white slavery were mythologized, one of many dangers from which “white” — which often meant “native-born” — women had to be protected or rescued. These threats ranged from vice of urban centers, the corrupting influence of “new” immigrants from southern and eastern

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Europe and Asia, economic compulsion, kidnapping, and illegal border crossings. They also intersected with real-life dramas, such as the notorious 1844 case of Sally Miller, who sued her owner Louis Belmonti, claiming that she was not black but German and had been kidnapped and sold against her will. By enacting her genteel “whiteness” and vulnerability in court, and gaining the support of affluent witnesses and popular opinion, Miller won her freedom. Her story circulated widely and was depicted in fictional form, such as in William Wells Brown’s abolitionist novel Clotel, or the President’s Daughter and George Washington Cable’s short story “Salome Muller, the White Slave.”41 The story’s popularity in the public sphere persisted, as is evident by its reproduction in fictional forms that spanned not only the nineteenth but also the twentieth century. Late nineteenth-century fascination with this subject highlights the ongoing cultural struggle to clearly see and classify race when the consolidation of whiteness formed the locus and impetus for U.S. solidarity, expansion, and progress; at the same time, it was also being used to justify the exclusionary practices of anti-immigration statutes and Jim Crow legislation. Campbell’s staging of miscegenation as the story of a white slave invokes the inherent contradictions between the contested, but always intersecting, categories of whiteness, ascendancy, and freedom that are so often opposed to blackness, enslavement, and inferiority. The romantic liaison between Clay and Lisa drives the narrative while allowing these and other interrelated issues to surface, including the performance of whiteness as inherent to citizenship, and the post-Reconstruction policing of non-Anglo racialized and gendered bodies through practices such as lynching and sexual assault. Moreover, Campbell’s play refuses to present a clearly identifiable stance on issues such as racial purity and the future of the United States after “failed” Reconstruction. Instead of providing a definite resolution, the play entices its audiences with references to these explosive issues and reproduces them from the imaginative space of the stage. Campbell indirectly addresses the issue of the visibility of racial identity, and the notion of performing race, with his use of a “white” character, Lisa, to play the role of an octoroon. Not only does he reshape the tragicmulatta trope, but he also implies that both whiteness and blackness are positions that can be inhabited temporarily and performed in certain situations. Complicating this performance even further, the actress who plays the role of the white-looking and white-acting octoroon is actually

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white. Despite their knowledge of Lisa’s undiscovered whiteness, spectators would have had to engage in her temporary status as octoroon. These multiple layers of performance help to produce complex readings of race represented by the character Lisa and by the actress who plays her; audiences would be compelled to read and to recognize the different signs and markers of blackness and whiteness at different points throughout the performance. Campbell also deflates the threat of an actual miscegenated (octoroon) body — which is actual, physical “evidence” of interracial sex — by indicating that Lisa’s underlying, “pure,” white womanhood is the source of her appeal to white men. In fact, Lisa’s and Clay’s counterfeit interracial relationship replicates and replaces Bill and Daphne’s genuine interracial union, suggesting that Lisa’s and Clay’s enactment of interracial love was a performance rather than an actualization of transgressive desire; here the play recalls the Sally Miller case, in which her white supporters claimed that her honorable behavior was “proof ” of the inherent power of her “white” traits.42 This characterization suggests that the octoroon’s white appearance and aristocratic behavior are more significant than any of the stereotypical characteristics, such as indelicacy and licentiousness, associated with black blood. The elevation of Lisa’s white-identified attributes recalls the transcendent roles that Boucicault’s and Alcott’s central mixed-race characters play because of their close proximity to whiteness. At the same time, her hint of racial otherness also links her to the variegated, not-quite-white population of the United States; Lisa, like so many new immigrants, was perceived to be inferior due to markers of difference, such as class status and national origins. Lisa’s depiction also coincided with stories about non-Anglo whites who were more susceptible to corruption and white slavery because of their inferior racial and ethnic traits. Lisa’s liminal position is made recognizable through other characters’ words and gestures, as well as through the racial hierarchy that the play reestablishes. Lisa looks white, behaves like an educated white “lady,” and, more important, is treated with the same courtesy as most of the other elite white characters. Other characters, for example, don’t fight in front of “Miss Lisa,” and Lacy claims that he has always tried to treat her “like a lady.” The fact that the other characters recognize her special status reemphasizes the persuasiveness of her performance of whiteness. However, her legitimacy in this position remains unstable until the end of the play. The juxtaposition of those who treat Lisa with special courtesy, like Clay and Lacy, with those who treat her as inferior, like Mrs. Lee — the aristo-

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cratic relative of the late judge — reinforces the indeterminacy of her social and racial status. Lisa’s disruptive presence also prompts other characters to reassert the rigid hierarchical structure that her behavior and appearance continually undermine. For example, Mrs. Lee reminds Lisa that her supposed drop of black blood marks her as inferior: “You forget who you are,” Mrs. Lee reminds Lisa. “Your white skin and dainty rearing cannot obliterate the fact that you belong to a race of slaves.”43 Mrs. Lee’s efforts to contrast her established position as a genteel white woman with Lisa’s ambiguous and racially subordinate position reveal her own insecurity about the stability of her own status. The more she feels threatened by Lisa, the more important it becomes for her to contain and police her. (We cannot resist the parallels here between Mrs. Lee and Bartley Campbell’s own working Irish community, whose long-standing antagonism toward blacks was surely motivated, at least in part, by anxiety about its own marginal status on the outskirts of acceptance/employment/citizenship.) Still, Lisa’s multivalent role refuses easy interpretation. On the one hand, Lisa can be characterized as a surrogate for both black and white womanhood. She takes on the position of property usually assigned to black slaves, but she simultaneously demonstrates the “delicacy” attributed to white nineteenth-century women. Her character moves in between these polarized definitions of womanhood. She also invokes some of the  nineteenth-century proto-feminist discourse that, as we have seen, frequently conflated the position of white women with the position of slaves.44 On the other hand, Lisa’s mobility and her reenactment of these historical representations of feminized whiteness and blackness challenge these positions altogether. Lisa embodies the role of the tragic octoroon temporarily, only to emerge as something entirely different at the end of the play, when her “authentic” whiteness is unveiled. However, far from establishing the certainty of her white racial ancestry, her misidentification as an octoroon places both her blackness and her whiteness in the realm of the performative. Neither category, black or white, fully contains or confirms Lisa’s race. Whether Lisa is placed into the position of slavery by her grandfather because, for him, blackness masks her illegitimacy, or whether she is reclassified as white because of her mother’s white status, her ability to pass in both situations provides a subtle critique of biologically based racial definitions.45 The fact that Judge Hardin uses his power to place her in the

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category of black, rather than producing some indisputable “evidence” of blackness indicates that her racial identity is performed rather than genetic. Moreover, since his uncontested words hold more authority than the actual circumstances of Lisa’s birth, he compels her to play out the only role that he grants her. In other words, once he declares that she is black, she becomes black, juridically and socially; in fact, his declaration offers a compelling example of what philosopher J. L. Austin terms a “performative utterance.”46 Austin argues that “by saying . . . something, we are doing something.” His notion has particular relevance for theatre, where dialogue is what drives the plots of human life; but the “perfomative utterance” is equally revealing of the ambiguity of racial identity. Though white supremacists desperately wanted to believe that race was as innate as your eye color or the measurements of your skull, race was just as often determined by what other people told you — like the innumerable judges and other authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who accepted or denied citizenship applications, and thus categorized applicants as “white” or “nonwhite.” In addition, Lisa does not have the knowledge or authority to contest her slave status — a forceful reminder of the unbalanced power relations that sustain her grandfather’s rights while simultaneously diminishing Lisa’s. The confirmation of Lisa’s whiteness at the end of the play allows her to transcend the traditional boundaries of the representational trope that she inhabits. Unlike the archetypal tragic octoroon who dies at the end of the narrative, Lisa lives. By characterizing her role as naturally superior to more conventional representations of fragile octoroons, Campbell prefigures her transcendent whiteness. In contrast to Nance and the octoroon Daphne, who are abused and condescended to by white men, Lisa remains defiant and self-assured in her interactions with whites and blacks. Despite their visible proximity to whiteness, Nance and Daphne suffer abuse and humiliation that Lisa avoids. Nance is forced into silence by the judge’s violent threats; Daphne, unlike Lisa, is compelled to serve as Lacy’s mistress, endure his constant abuse, and bear his child. In contrast to Lisa’s unique and lofty position in the play, their roles exhibit the fates of most enslaved black women, no matter how “white” they looked. Whether octoroons or quadroons, they were still classified as property and were expected to adhere to that inferior status. Even Lisa’s romantic advances toward her lover, Clay, are presented as signs of her independence and strength, in contrast to the frequent man-

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handling of other quadroon/octoroon women. Moreover, when the same independent behavior is attributed to an identifiably black woman, it is characterized as comic or brutish. Lisa also refuses to become the concubine of a man she does not love, distinguishing herself from many black women who were forced into sexually exploitative relations with white men in the slave system. This stance of resistance recalls mixed-race Harriet Jacobs’s refusal to submit to her white master’s endless sexual advances in Linda Brent’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Similar to Lisa, she exhibits agency over her own body, despite her limited options, by choosing to repel the advances of her master and to enter an interracial union voluntarily with another powerful white man.47 Echoing Brent’s desire to maintain her dignity in the face of real-life trauma, Lisa states: “A woman cannot fall lower than to live with a man she does not love — cannot even respect.”48 Here, she asserts a high moral standard that many black — and even many white — women were not usually in a position to meet. Reiterating the instability of white women’s status during this period in their discussions of Kate Chopin’s work, both Laura Wexler and Sandra Gunning argue that although white-skinned women were often complicit in the reproduction of Anglo-Saxon power and the civilizing mission of empire, they were also subject to the patriarchal doctrines that relegated them to subordinate and often vulnerable positions.49 However, because of her whiteness, unlike her subjugated “sisters,” who are forced to inhabit their black status permanently, Lisa’s temporary and liminal position enables Campbell to characterize her differently. Lisa’s shift from illegitimate blackness to transcendent whiteness not only recalls Alcott’s and Boucicault’s earlier use of similar strategies, but also plays out the resilient process of surrogacy in an explicit and recognizable manner. In short, Lisa’s surrogate role as octoroon enables Campbell to conclude the narrative. For if she does not really have black blood, then her love for Clay is not really transgressive. And yet, without the latent threat of Lisa’s contaminated blood, Campbell’s play cannot work: though everything is “solved” by the end, it is only Lisa’s identification as octoroon that makes possible the alleged interracial union, and fuels Clay’s passion for her, and titillates the audience. The “white” category that Lisa eventually occupies is also complex. Like her blackness, her underlying whiteness can be read as performative, since she enacts a multivalent role rather than adhering to any essentialized or static definition of whiteness. Furthermore, since Lisa is considered part

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of the black community throughout most of the play, her convincing enactment of white-identified behavior suggests that she may have mastered this role with the same facility with which she inhabited the octoroon position imposed on her by her grandfather. Her convincing performance as white suggests that her performance is either ontological or expertly executed. She performs the role of a white southern aristocratic woman through her mannerisms, gestures, speech, and general behavior, thereby invoking the privileges assigned to genteel white women, without gaining full access to those advantages and property until the end of the play when her whiteness is confirmed. Moreover, from the beginning of the play whiteness, like blackness, emerges as a complicated and sometimes ambiguous category. For example, when Judge Hardin worries about the secret surrounding Lisa’s birth, it becomes evident that her legitimacy is in question. Because of her Italian ancestry and because of her father’s dishonorable behavior, Lisa’s position starts off as already unstable. Her grandfather equates her out-of-wedlock birth in Italy — a geographical site sometimes associated with unrestricted morals and fallen civilization — with inferiority, and insists that her European father does not share his (Hardin’s) self-appointed authority. Moreover, immigrants from Italy were just beginning to secure their position as whites, a tenuous role that did not necesssarily extend to southern Italians. Underlying Hardin’s condescension is the implication that in addition to lacking virtue, her unnamed European father’s non-Anglo status places him in an inferior position. He is not part of the landed gentry in the southern plantation economy of the United States and thus is on a (much) lower rung of the established hierarchy. Like poor whites who were considered inferior to the landowning aristocrats in the South, Lisa’s foreign father is considered an outsider; and, since the judge equates his own embodiment of whiteness with authority and righteousness, then, by extension, the marquis is excluded from this category. Here, the play enacts the ways that biological and cultural arguments, used to distinguish blacks from whites, were also employed to segment and hierarchize the white populations. As a counterpart to blackness, whiteness is also multifaceted. Although Lisa seems to embody characteristics associated with whiteness, her tenuous occupation of this racial category unsettles what it means to be a white woman in the first place. She looks as though she is white and is often treated as though she is white. At the same time she

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is expected to perform duties that only a nonwhite woman would be expected to fulfill, such as serving as Lacy’s concubine. Her unconventional roles threaten the rigid boundaries established for white aristocratic women. In fact, she and Miss Letty (Mrs. Lee’s daughter) share some of the same assertive characteristics, indicating that the new generation of southern white women is not so different from the model of womanhood that Lisa represents. Rather than voicing a contemporary proto-feminist agenda directly through Miss Letty — the only other white female character of the same generation — Campbell positions Lisa as a surrogate for that reformist and threatening ideology. Lisa’s progressive manner, when read as a surrogate for the burgeoning “new” white woman’s movement, invites a compelling connection with Alcott’s earlier characterization of progressive white females. In both cases, intimate associations with blackness provide the impetus for rebellious behavior in white or white-identified characters. In Alcott’s fiction, the women are able to articulate their own passions through their sympathy for formerly enslaved black men; in Campbell’s play, Lisa’s ostensible black ancestry motivates her and others to transgress conventional boundaries, which destabilizes the category of whiteness. Both representations complicate whiteness and, to some extent, produce subtle formulations of early feminist ideologies. However, as in Campbell’s play, in which white womanhood ultimately transcends blackness, the potential for interracial cooperation never materialized in any significant way. Many of the white women who initially worked for social improvement in the South ultimately unified around other issues, such as suffrage, at the expense of their fellow black female activists in particular and the black population’s uplift in general.50 Resistance to this new disruptive force is evidenced by Mrs. Lee’s attempts to silence and police Lisa because she views her as a threat; the more sympathetic and liberal-minded Miss Letty, by contrast, scolds her mother for mistreating Lisa and tries to comfort Lisa. Her supposed “drop” of black blood frees Lisa from the limitations imposed on white women, while her white skin reclassifies everything that she does (appropriate or inappropriate) as white women’s behavior. Simultaneously threatening and liberating, Lisa’s body functions as a mobile surrogate site for mutually constitutive traits associated with black and white womanhood. This liminality enables her to occupy multiple positionalities and to take on different significations throughout the play.

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While Mrs. Lee’s condescending treatment reemphasizes Lisa’s inferior position as a “black” woman, other characters—who treat her as they would treat a propertied white woman — elevate Lisa’s circumstances and status. Black characters are more concerned with Lisa’s suffering than their own. The production contains a “blackface chorus” of slaves who throughout the show break into song and dance for her or engage in comic dialogues with her — thus invoking the type of entertaining role associated with black people and often reproduced in blackface minstrel shows that would have been familiar to contemporary audiences. Moreover, since these moments are associated with blackface minstrelsy, the play again indicates that certain aspects of black conduct and mannerisms are performative. Lisa is present at these spectacles, but she does not actively participate in them. She is distinguished from this black-identified behavior, and this separation places her into a transcendent role, simultaneously reinforcing her difference from and recalling her association with blackness. In effect, the blackface chorus provides the entertainment and emotional background for Lisa’s drama. As one nineteenth-century Chicago Tribune reviewer recalls: “The action, plots, and counterplots, characters, serious and humorous passages, crowd the scenes of the play. . . . There are plantation scenes and songs, and banjo-playing and dances and the African of every age and shade.”51 This juxtaposition of blackness as spectacle with Lisa’s understated noble characterization works not only to distinguish her from the other slaves but also to naturalize her performance of whiteness. At the same time, however, because of her legal classification as a slave, she cannot sever her link with the rest of the black community, nor can she remove all suspicion that her role is merely a dramatic display. This minstrelization of the “real” black characters reduces them to comic and subordinate backdrops, which deemphasizes the increasing cultural anxiety about the contaminating impact of free blacks. This collapse of black people into the role of pure entertainment also functions as a form of surrogacy because it replaces the possibility of a well-developed and humanized black community with stereotypical (and less threatening) black figures. Moreover, none of the black male characters — the main objects of alarmist antimiscegenation attacks — ever expresses any desire for Lisa; they are safely paired off with black women in the play. Their subservient roles indicate that ordinary blacks were eager to maintain their servant status and would not challenge the racial hierarchy, once again a nod to contemporary imperialist discourse that deemed nonwhites, both

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domestically and transnationally, as still “primitive” and governable (even after the “outrage” of Radical Reconstruction). Even the music—sad hymns or happy banjo strumming — that frames the narrative and interrupts the dialogue widens the gap between the amusement provided by the “happy darkies” and the “tragic” drama experienced by the “almost” white Lisa. This juxtaposition of “black” amusement and white honor was reproduced in the organizational structures of the popular world’s fairs, which offered “proof ” of the triumph of white civilization and progress. Lisa’s movement in between both the juridical and social constructions of her racial identity is clearly demonstrated by the steamboat captain. After a superficial once-over at her white-looking appearance, her attire, her white male companion, and her carriage, he states confidently: “This lady is a genuine white woman!”52 According to the cultural markings of whiteness, Lisa fits into that category; however, her performance as white does not change the fact that she is still considered a slave. This moment of uncertainty recalls the tenuous position of those excluded from citizenship, like recent immigrants, Asian laborers, disenfranchised African Americans and Native Americans, and certain non-property-holding whites. Still, because Lisa looks white, “acts” white, and eventually occupies that category officially, she has a certain mobility denied to others. First, she and Clay take on the role of counterfeit fugitives. Then they reoccupy their positions as sanctioned white people. With the legitimacy of their alliance restored, the moral outrage of Lisa’s mistreatment is foregrounded rather than the morally reprehensible inequality of the legal system or the racist ideology that endorses slavery and prohibits interracial unions. The authentication of Lisa’s “genuine whiteness” at the end of the play and the restoration of her family property provide a conciliatory resolution that conventional “tragic octoroon” discourse did not produce. The removal of the contaminating “drop” of black blood from her body enables Lisa to enter the “safe” realm of whiteness. She and Clay occupy their positions as the benevolent masters of the idyllic plantation almost effortlessly. By reclaiming their authority and positions as part of the landed elite, their status recalls the sentimentalization represented by the “New South” movement, which advocated the theory that the South was rising again to its great glory of the past after the destructive impact of the Civil War, black freedom, and Reconstruction. Like the romanticized recollections of the South represented in literature of reconciliation and the restoration of pastoral beauty, such as the “Uncle Remus” stories by Joel Chandler

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The ship’s captain claims that Lisa is a “genuine white woman.” The White Slave, Bartley Campbell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Harris, Clay and Lisa’s reclamation of the plantation represents a return to the status quo of the past in which whiteness reigned supreme and blacks remained loyal.53 Despite the apparent consensus of southerners, views still differed as to how the South should proceed in order to rebuild its

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economic and cultural power and to reestablish its position as a force to be reckoned with. Some southeners felt energized by the ousting of Reconstructionists; reinvigorated by this political shift, they opted to promote white supremacy through southern expansion into Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the exportation of southern Jim Crow practices and white supremacy into other regions of the country, including the North. Others wanted to demonstrate their ability to maintain order and power by exhibiting their ability to coexist peacefully — and separately — with African Americans and other immigrants to the South, such as Chinese laborers, as long as they remained on the lower rungs of the racialized hiearchical ladder. Moreover, Campbell’s play conflates Lisa’s miraculous shift from the status of owned object to property holder with her reclassification as white. The conclusion supports the popular southern belief that all possessions confiscated from white landowners during and after the war should be returned to their “rightful” owners. It also suggests that only a select group of (Anglo-Saxon) whites, those who have demonstrated their legitimacy, deserve the rights associated with the position of property owner. The other implication is that blacks, so recently emancipated from slavery, are not yet ready to assume the responsibility of citizenship, especially self-governance. Rather than challenging the inherent racism of these patronizing justifications for slavery, this ending reestablishes the legitimacy of the slave system’s racial hierarchy and idealizes the benevolent masters of the not-so-distant past. Blackness is the foil against which whiteness is reasserted. The represention of the black population as immature and irresponsible serves as the literal and symbolic justification for maintaining white hegemony. The play concludes with the trope of miscegenation as a relic of the past that reinforces the need to maintain the black–white opposition and all that it symbolizes. As the performance demonstrates, order is restored when all the members of the community return to their rightful places in the racialized/classed/gendered structure. This staged interpretation of the past also gestures toward the future. The drama of miscegenation that Campbell stages reinforces the continued need to restore and maintain historic structures of race, empire, and civilization domestically and globally through imperialistic practices and the reinvigoration of racialized order. Critical responses, such as the following excerpt from a nineteenthcentury review, emphasized the romanticizing effect and “collective amnesia” that Campbell’s play produced: “Campbell has gathered up and put in

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its construction all that is worth saving of the old Southern society and the conditions of plantation life and property in the past and gone slavery system.”54 All that is not worth saving — the actual octoroon character (Daphne), the threat of interracial desire, the lecherous white male, the immorality of slavery — seems to fade into the background of the play and into the irretrievable memory of the reviewer. In fact, Daphne’s and Bill’s fates represent the typical punishment for engaging in interracial sex — they both die. This ending clearly extends back to the suicide of Zoe in The Octoroon and the self-sacrifice of Bob in “My Contraband.” Bill Lacy murders Daphne because she stops him from preventing Lisa’s escape from his plantation. Soon after, the sheriff kills Bill Lacy for interfering with Lisa’s rescue and for attempting to defile Lisa when she was held captive on his plantation. Lacy’s punishment punctuates the force behind racial categorization by demonstrating the material impact of Lisa’s shift from octoroon to white. When she occupies the position of octoroon, the law supports Lacy’s exploitation of her, but when she moves into the category of white, his sexual advances become criminal. Still, Lisa’s status depends on her classification, whereas Lacy’s is “always already”55 tainted by his alliance with a black woman and his overall characterization as morally weak. It is no coincidence that Bill’s surname, Lacy, carries with it the potential ancestral link to the Irish, another colonized site from which large numbers were virtually driven to the United States because of their alleged inferiority to their Anglo counterparts in England. Unlike Lisa, Bill and Daphne represent contaminated bodies that cannot be cleansed or recuperated. In fact, they function as foils to Lisa and Clay because they engage and fulfill the desires that Lisa and Clay merely act out. Bill’s ability to express his white male desire for Daphne contrasts with the denial and unfulfilled fantasy that his attempted sexual liaison with Lisa represents. Bill’s and Daphne’s bodies are irreversibly contaminated because they engage in interracial sex and produce a “miscegenated” child. Their literal and symbolic deaths in the play help maintain Lisa’s purity and eliminate interracial desire and its attendant threats. The unsettled space between Campbell’s safe solution to transgressive interracial desire and the explosive responses surrounding the issue of miscegenation point to a heightened anxiety about the status of whiteness as it became increasingly diverse and unsettled. Additionally, the visibility of nonwhites, like the Chinese and the recently emancipated black population, lurks at the edges of Campbell’s staging of “miscegenation” in which

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issues like racial uplift are dismissed and relegated to the margins. The Herculean efforts to recenter whiteness, and to clarify the boundaries between the morally upright bourgeois class and everyone else, are at the heart of Campbell’s play, linking his performance of interracial intimacies to broader concerns about the direction in which the United States was moving, given the repercussions of failed Reconstruction, westward and imperial expansion, civil unrest due to efforts at labor and social reform, and ongoing attempts to contain and isolate not-quite-white labor forces, like Bartley Campbell’s own Irish community. Howells’s Impossible Imperative: Eradicating Black–White Entanglements

Born in Ohio in 1837, raised in the midwest, and dying shortly after World War I, in 1920, William Dean Howells, like Louisa May Alcott, had an abolitionist parent associated with radical religion and politics. Howells started writing early in his life and gained favor from a pre-election biography of Lincoln, after which he was awarded a consulship in Venice, Italy, where he resided during the Civil War. In 1862 he married Elinor Mead in Paris, and they had two children. After returning to the United States, he worked as assistant editor and then editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly, where he advanced the careers of many writers, including Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was also a promoter of European writers, such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Ibsen. Later in life he converted to socialism and protested social injustices during the 1880s and 1890s, like the execution of the anarchists in the Haymarket riots, and the Spanish–American War. His transnational living and work seemed to have provided him with a comparatist’s perspective of the powerful role of culture in shaping national identities. He was particularly eager to participate in the formulation of a distinctly “American” national theatre. Similar to ongoing debates about progress in scientific and political circles, Howells explored these questions in literary and dramatic art. As symbolic gauges of the nation’s “true” state of being, like the Court of Honor and the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Fair, Howells considered drama a useful venue for representing the most “indigenous of our citizens” with “excellent fidelity and refined perception” — he called for character studies of the “histrionic” “Darky,” the “Yankee, the low-down New Yorker in his various phases,” together

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with the “German, the Irishman, the Chinaman, the Italian of our streets.” For Howells, these “stock” characters represented the “authentic,” “native American” fabric out of which U.S. “civilization” was built and against which its success would be measured by the rest of the world.56 Despite his commitment to class, gender, anti-imperial, and racial struggles against exploitation, Howells’s influential role as arbiter of “good” and “bad” art and of the proper role of “civilization” revealed his entangled relationship with the racialized, gendered, imperial, and class structures that positioned him as an elite powerful authority figure. Although he wrote in many genres, including fiction, poetry, plays, essays, travel narratives, biography, autobiography, and literary criticism, most critical attention has focused on his contribution to American literary realism. His fiction has been read as an attempt to represent the everyday through dramatic interactions of ordinary but complex characters, providing an unromanticized view of commonplace American experience.57 However, Howells’s work in playwriting and dramatic criticism strongly informed his narrative representations and, as he attested, demonstrated the mutually constitutive roles that uttered and written language play in order to grant public access to the private, domestic, and interior “realities” of everyday life. An Imperative Duty adds another level of complexity to Howells’s literary and dramatic representations of the “real” in its staging of miscegenation and race. Despite Howells’s privileging of the “private aesthetic space of reading over public drama,” his novel presses against generic boundaries by relying heavily on the spectacular trappings of dramatic performance, such as masks, sets, and gestural “histrionics.” Moreover, the interiority to which readers gain access is framed through the anthropologic “rational” paternalistic lens of the scientist-doctornarrator, whose legitimacy is based on visual and gestural performances rather than on any concrete evidence or inherent “truth.” As we shall see, the “performative utterance” can be a vital aspect of the written, as well as the spoken, word — and within Howells’s utterance, a complex vision of how race is created as it is lived. Set in contemporary industrial Boston (which was known as a center for feminism, as it had been for abolitionism), Imperative Duty opens with the return of Dr. Edward Olney to the New England city after a five-year stint in Italy, where he had made the acquaintance of fellow Americans Mrs. Caroline Meredith and her niece, Rhoda Aldgate. Mrs. Meredith renews their acquaintance by requesting his assistance with a ner vous condition. When Dr. Olney visits Mrs. Meredith, she explains that while

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she and Rhoda were in Italy, a wealthy American, Mr. Bloomingdale, fell in love with Rhoda and asked for her hand in marriage. The problem is that although Mrs. Meredith has been taking care of Rhoda since her biological father died, she has never told Rhoda that her mother was an octoroon. Mrs. Meredith took Rhoda to Italy in the hopes that a foreigner would marry her, and she would never have to find out about about her African ancestry. But now that Bloomingdale wants to marry Rhoda, Mrs. Meredith fears discovery of her secret. Finally, out of irrepressible guilt, Mrs. Meredith tells Rhoda about her parents. Rhoda refuses to forgive her. In her exasperated state, Mrs. Meredith overdoses on sleeping pills and dies. In order to spare herself anguish, Rhoda breaks off her engagement with Mr. Bloomingdale. Despite Bloomingdale’s apparent open-mindedness, Rhoda refuses to marry him, especially since she overheard his family members express antiblack prejudices and assumes that they will reject her. By this time, Dr. Olney has also fallen in love with Rhoda. Both Bloomingdale and Olney want her. She then decides that she should either search for her family or move to the South to work for black racial uplift. As Rhoda frets over her decision, Olney confesses his love for her and she reveals her “secret.” At the end, Olney persuades Rhoda to abandon her own plans, marry him, and renounce her past by emigrating with him to Italy. The initial introduction of the ostensibly “detached” Dr. Olney establishes a third-person point of view that provides readers with a somewhat omniscient lens for viewing all other characters and events that occur within the narrative. Since he has just returned from a long stay in Italy, Olney’s perspective is “foreign,” which defamiliarizes the domestic space that would have been recognizable to many of Howells’s readers and reinforces Olney’s “objective” viewpoint. Olney operates as both the narrator and central figure who advances the plot. Since there is no clearly identifiable audience, Olney also fills the role of surrogate audience, because his views and interpretations frame the narrative’s meanings. This interventionist role enables him to provide readers with an “immediate” response, which he filters through his “rationalized” medical perspective — one that would have been familiar to audiences because of contemporaneous theories of racial degeneracy, primitivism, and disease associated with African Americans and immigrants.58 Moreover, Olney also represents the difficulty of maintaining Howells’s realist approach to his subject, by simultaneously offering objective reason and subjective involvement in the plot. In the same way that an audience responds to the here and now of a staged

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performance, Olney becomes romantically engaged with Rhoda, who was at first merely an object of study (literally and figuratively), as he propels the novel’s plot. Olney’s “liberal” politics remain ambiguous and contradictory throughout the novel. On the one hand, his observations and actions suggest that he possesses a progressive view about race relations. On the other, his paternalistic response to blacks, juxtaposed with his vitriolic prejudice toward recently immigrated Irish, reveal the contradictions of his perspective. In his view, the hierarchy of race should be maintained; the only question is where each group should be located. Similar to Judge Hardin in The White Slave, Olney believes that those from outside the United States do not share his status. With a minstrelizing gesture, Olney reduces others to caricatures: Irish immigrants are bestial, aggressive laborers, and black servants are servile relics of the past. These characterizations, needless to say, reinforce the racist hierarchy that places Olney at the top. Although his own extended contact with the Old World seems to broaden his perspective, it also reinforces his tendency to equate a certain type of whiteness with Americanness — the kind that excludes most non-Anglo ethnic groups, including Irish, Italian, and eastern European immigrants. As with the complex formulation of whiteness presented in The White Slave, this position complicates whiteness by identifying an intraracial hierarchy — one that (re)produces and demarcates white-supremacist ideology. The complexity of whiteness is reinforced by Rhoda’s unmarked blackness. Like the character Lisa (as well as Zoe, Paul, and Bob), she inhabits the realm of whiteness but represents the intersection of black and white identities. In contrast, however, Rhoda is “always already” performing whiteness in a way that enables her to take advantage of the privileges of that status. For, as Olney reminds Rhoda after she has consented to marry him, she “belong[s] incomparably more to the oppressors than to the oppressed.”59 Here, Olney raises the status of white womanhood in a way that erases the complicated gendered, classed, and patriarchal structures of white supremacy, in which white women’s power was often subordinate or tenuous.60 Olney considers Rhoda’s “whiteface” performance complete, in that she can occupy the role of white woman without being detected. He also suggests that her upbringing and her ignorance of her racial ancestry reinforce her tendency to embrace the racial hierarchy that places her in a superior position. At one point, for example, she reveals her unexamined adherence to this racist ideology when she voices her desire

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to purchase a black waiter: “I should like to own him, and keep him as long as he lived.”61 Recalling Lisa’s repurchase of her slaves at the end of The White Slave, Rhoda readily appropriates and reproduces the commodification and exploitation of black people. In this way, she participates in the reproduction of white supremacy despite her own indeterminate and vulnerable status. These white-identified characteristics are, in part, what make her appealing to Dr. Olney. Like Clay in The White Slave and Nurse Dane in “My Contraband,” Olney is attracted to something that he cannot identify specifically. He sees her as an almost perfect approximation of white womanhood. Yet his knowledge of her black ancestry also informs his evaluation of and responses to her. His ambivalence echoes the literal arbitrariness of legal cases that determined one’s racial status. Despite the subjectivity and seeming randomness of these decisions, they were vital because one’s exclusion from or inclusion in the category of “white” during the postReconstruction period determined whether or not one had access to certain rights, like the inheritance of property and citizenship. Even before Mrs. Meredith tells him the truth about Rhoda’s octoroon mother, he describes Rhoda’s appearance in performative terms. Referring to her face, “Olney recalled it as a mask, and he recalled his sense of her wearing this family face, with its somewhat tragic beauty, over a personality that was at once gentle and gay. The mask, he felt, was inherited, but the character seemed to be of Miss Aldgate’s own invention, and expressed itself in the sunny sparkle of her looks.”62 For Olney, Rhoda’s racial identity is staged for him. Like the witnesses who attested to the authentic whiteness of a white-looking plaintiff, because of qualities that were ultimately immeasurable, Olney bases his characterization on how Rhoda looks and acts. A key advantage of viewing her identity as a racial performance is that those glimpses of her African ancestry and “tragic” vulnerability enable him to maintain and affirm his own legitimacy as white and male. Here, Olney also identifies the mystery often associated with black women who passed as white. His comments suggest that she possesses an inherent racialized difference that occasionally reveals itself as distinct from his own, reinforcing the unsubstantiated but widespread “scientific” claims that degeneracy and supremacy were inherited traits gentically predetermined by race and national origins. At the same time, however, Rhoda’s unique “white” persona magnetizes him. The “tragic” quality of the mask recalls both the tragic-mulatta trope and the strategic use of the mask

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as a performative strategy, a necessary device for many blacks during and after slavery who showed one face to their masters/employers and another to their own communities.63 Before her death, Mrs. Meredith reveals her own reductive misconceptions about black identity. Invoking the racist pseudoscientific theory of atavism and primitivism, she fears that despite Rhoda’s white skin and behavior, her niece’s essential blackness may emerge, asserting, “It might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in her voice at times — it’s a black voice! I can see it in her looks! I can feel it in her character — so easy, so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant! . . . It’s her race calling her.”64 Again, Rhoda’s invisible blackness poses a threat to the “purity” of whiteness. Mrs. Meredith’s hysterical vision of a polluting blackness intersects with antimiscegenation claims that interracial sex produced degenerate, unproductive “offspring,” as well as with civilizing “missionary” and imperialist discourse that argued for the colonization, education, and control of “natives” because their inherent savagery must always be kept in check. For Mrs. Meredith and Olney, Rhoda’s racially liminal body serves as material evidence of contamination that cannot be erased or forgotten. (In a sense, the same essentialist ideology that Olney and Mrs. Meredith use to identify aspects of Rhoda’s underlying black ancestry are used to mark Lisa’s underlying white status in The White Slave.) Howells’s minstrelization of his black (and Irish) characters is also comparable to those performative moments in The White Slave when “authentic” blackness is relegated to static stereotypes. Olney reiterates this nostalgic characterization of blackness when he claims that he would rather return to a past when there were no Irish immigrants and when blacks, at least, performed their subservience effectively: “He would not have been ready to say that one of the negro waiters . . . would not have been just as greedy [as the Irish] of money; but he would have clothed his greed in such a smiling courtesy and such a childish simpleheartedness that it would have been graceful and winning.”65 Admitting that the pleasant demeanor of black servants is part of a performance staged for the benefit of their audiences, Olney reinforces the notion that blacks function most effectively in the role of entertainment and ser vice. His nostalgic view recalls, once again, the “exotic” and “primitive” exhibits at the world’s fairs that reinforced the inferiority of certain “foreign” and nonwhite bodies, in contrast to the superiority of the paying white spectators. It also references the desire to remember the past in a romanticized and isolated manner

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rather than acknowledging the contemporaneous reconfiguration of the national body that included not only Irish immigrants but also many other populations from around the globe who did not seamlessly blend or disappear into the landscape — much to the consternation of many late nineteenth-century whites like Olney. Olney’s categorizations also distance those apparently servile blacks from Rhoda. In fact, the narrator establishes Rhoda’s difference from the black community by describing her feelings of alienation from them and her negative response when she interacts with them socially: “Rhoda distinguished faces, sad repulsive visages of a frog-like ugliness added to the repulsive black in all its shades, from the unalloyed brilliancy of the pure negro type to the pallid yellow of the quadroon. These mixed bloods were more odious to her than others, because she felt herself more akin to them; but they were all abhorrent.”66 This classificatory description of the “types” of African Americans participates in the eugenics discourse that categorized phenotypically diverse people into a heirarchy, suggesting their position on the ascending evolutionary path from savagery to civilization. Referencing “pure” and “mixed” blood, this reclassification of visible members of the “black” community conflates their identificatory practices, their performance of a black-identified position, with their unsuitability and justifiable exclusion from the category of “white” and, by extension, citizen. Despite this deliberate gesture of alienation, these minstrelized formulations of blackness also function as a surrogate for the unknown but essential “Africanist presence” that both engenders Olney’s attraction to Rhoda and heightens her anxiety about her own racialized, gendered, and classed identity.67 Rhoda’s “dark” ancestry fuels Olney’s desire for her. Like Lisa in The White Slave, Rhoda’s miscegenated body signifies blackness and whiteness simultaneously. Her racially mixed yet white-skinned body challenges attempts to maintain a “pure” white population by its mere existence. For if she passes as white and performs whiteness successfully, then she redefines what it means to be white. Moreover, if she looks white but can also be classified as part of the black community, then the notion of “authentic whiteness” is unsettled. Still, the “one drop” of black blood exoticizes her in the eyes of Olney, for she represents all that is unknown to him: It was the elder world, the beauty of antiquity, which appealed to him in the lustre and sparkle of this girl; and the remote taint of her

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servile and savage origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses to let itself be put in words: it was like the grace of a limp, the occult, indefinable lovableness of a deformity, but transcending these by its allurement in infinite degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep into the mysterious places of being where the spirit and the animal meet and part in us.68 Unable to maintain his rational distance any longer, Olney expresses the fiery emotions that Rhoda’s presence ignites in him. Employing the language of race and eugenics, Howells exposes the intersecting rhetorics that both eroticize and spectacularize difference. But the narrator’s inability to “put in words” his visceral response to Rhoda’s presence reinforces the power of her embodied performance. Calling on vague “antiquity” rather than considering any concrete explanation to account for his “fascination,” Olney associates Rhoda’s allure with the “grace of a limp, the occult,” and the “indefinable lovableness of a deformity.” Both antiquity and the occult provide Olney with the ultimate transhistorical and cosmic evidence for his reading of Rhoda. By invoking the discourse of disability — a key element of the eugenics platform — Olney employs Rhoda’s embodied “Africanist presence” to assert superiority to those indigenous and immigrant bodies that were rendered invisible and deemed unfit not only for citizenship but also for unsupervised mobility. Functioning as a surrogate for the audience and for white male desire to pursue and conquer the unknown dark “other,” Olney attributes his own passionate and unrestrained erotic response to Rhoda’s ignition of his own buried primitivism.69 His view also intersects with contemporaneous developments in psychology and related fields of mesmerism, such as in the works of Sigmund Freud and William James, which popularized the notion of a “dark” other that was, in fact, located within one’s self rather than outside it.70 As with the liminal role of Lisa (and Zoe in The Octoroon), Rhoda both approximates and fails to perform the idealized role of nineteenth-century white womanhood because of her “taint” of black blood. By mythologizing Rhoda’s “savage” or “primitive” origins, Olney punctuates his own centrality to the narrative. For this response is more about how she invokes and represents his own fears, forbidden associations, and identity as a white man than it is about her. He employs Rhoda’s body and their intimacy to express who he really is and to transmogrify Rhoda into the contained form of white womanhood that conforms to his

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wishes. By the end of the novel she has given up her independence and abandoned her own agenda in order to adhere to his plans (become his wife, move to Italy, disavow her racial ancestry). She represents the surplus and lack that characterize surrogacy,71 for she is not quite the dark unknown black “other” but, in Olney’s eyes, represents an overabundance of sexuality that white women were supposed to suppress or disregard. In fact, in some ways, Rhoda stands in for the independent “new” feminist white woman who was compelled to conform to a subordinate position in order to support white-supremacist patriarchal structures. In the same way that Lisa carries the progressive message in The White Slave, Rhoda takes on some of the threatening roles that were denied to white women in the nineteenth century. For example, before Olney convinces Rhoda that she ought to remain with him, she plans to go south alone, look for her family, and establish a career working for racial uplift. Moreover, whenever she asserts her autonomous will or laughs with abandon, both Olney and Mrs. Meredith “race” that behavior and suggest that her black side is emerging from within. When they mark Rhoda’s “unacceptable” behavior as “black,” they indicate that either she possesses certain gestures that are inherently “black” or she successfully performs blackness. Here it is especially significant to note the powerful voices of black feminists like Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Harper, who, unlike Rhoda, advocated tirelessly through their writing, speaking, and racialized gender performances on behalf of African Americans in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. Serving as a reminder of these women’s highly visible political, social, and cultural work, Rhoda’s “black” actions unsettle her “white” appearance and challenge the meanings of white womanhood. Nonetheless, it is the combination of her black ancestry, which enables her to stand in for the uncontainable “white” woman, and her “white” skin, which allows her to be reincorporated into dominant culture, that makes her an effective surrogate for the process of instantiating elite Anglo-American whiteness as the “norm.” Ultimately, though, this muddy realm of black/white contact undermines the constitution of an unadulterated and self-contained whiteness. By the end of the novel, Rhoda is distinguished from the other whitelooking figures in the earlier works discussed, where, ultimately, whiteness is overwritten and recategorized as blackness. Rhoda’s plotline, by contrast, has the most sustained subversion of whiteness. Only Alcott’s central white female characters come close to Rhoda’s independence because of

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the way in which their intimate contact with black men motivates them to challenge the limits of upper-class white womanhood. Rhoda’s difference may suggest a shift in thinking toward the end of the nineteenth century, where the presence of blackness could no longer be dismissed or expelled or subordinated by whiteness. Instead, black people represented a force to be reckoned with. This interpretation suggests that Howells’s work prefigured this shift in attitude and would seem to make sense in light of increased white violence aimed at blacks and toward other non-Anglos at the close of the nineteenth century.72 Olney’s final move to erase Rhoda’s blackness is what allows him to enact his love/desire for her most explicitly. Her whiteness, rather than her invisible black blood, is what legitimizes their relationship. Like the final revelation at the end of The White Slave, which confirms Lisa’s white status, Olney reclassifies Rhoda as white performatively. He asks her to claim the white part of her ancestry over her black part. In fact, like Judge Hardin, he makes good use of the performative utterance as he discusses white people’s obligation to black racial uplift, and includes her as part of the white population. He distinguishes blacks from himself and Rhoda, as does she, by referring to blacks as “them” and by reincorporating her into the white community by using the inclusive pronoun “us”: “The way to elevate them is to elevate us, to begin with.”73 Besides referring to conventional racial uplift ideology, the subtext of Olney’s comment indicates that by permanently reclassifying Rhoda as white, he raises her status, thus reinforcing the overdetermined racial hierarchy that was already in place. In fact, Olney’s voice not only articulates the narrative, but also completes it, effectively silencing Rhoda. Moreover, it is only through the authority of his white male position that this reclassification is legitimized. Before Olney declares Rhoda’s change in racial status, neither Mrs. Meredith’s attempt to protect her nor Rhoda’s own performance of whiteness carry the same power.74 As in The White Slave, black men in Imperative Duty are safely relegated to the background, and all other interracial unions (those of Rhoda’s mother and father, and grandmother and grandfather) are conveniently categorized as historic transgressions that should remain buried in the past. Rather than accepting their love as interracial, Olney insists on transforming Rhoda into a legitimate white woman so that they can participate in a sanctioned relationship. However, Howells chooses to transport Rhoda and Olney to Italy — a site associated with a different racial constellation;

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or, as Mrs. Meredith asserts earlier in the novel, “in Europe, especially on the Continent, there was little or none of that race prejudice which we have.”75 For, in Italy, Rhoda “is thought to look so very Italian” that they avoid any hint of the racial politics of the United States. Within the context of another country, Olney and Rhoda share the same status as expatriates yet enjoy the benefits of elite Americans abroad. In a sense, their relocation places them on a more even plane; however, Rhoda’s discomfort with her liminal position remains, as she must now take on yet another role, that of an “Italian” woman. In contrast to Lisa, Rhoda does not necessarily live happily ever after. Instead, Rhoda never feels at ease, and it is not clear whether she and Olney will remain in Italy or whether she will reveal her black ancestry to those with whom she comes in contact. Imperative Duty does, however, share with The White Slave the possibility for a nonconventional ending. Like Lisa, Rhoda does not die tragically — she lives. In fact, Olney sees her entire situation as comic rather than tragic, evidenced by his claim that “as tragedy the whole affair had fallen to ruin. It could be reconstructed, if at all, only upon an octave much below the operatic pitch. It must be treated in no lurid twilight gloom, but in plain, simple, matter-of-fact noonday.”76 As Olney dismisses Rhoda’s concerns, the narrative’s fundamental gender dynamics emerge, similar to his earlier treatment of Mrs. Meredith, demonstrating the contrast between his “legitimate” point of view and her “hysterical” and “irrational” perspective. Through the confident male narrative voice, Howells transforms a potential tragedy into something positive and pragmatic. But, he also creates the ambiguous space that suggests multiple readings. The ending could be read as tragic, since they must leave their home, and Rhoda experiences a kind of death once she finds out the truth about, and then suppresses, her heritage.77 Or the ending could be interpreted as romantic because they escape the rigid boundaries of the United States and remain together despite Rhoda’s black blood (that is, love conquers all). Still, their move and the unsettled ending ultimately speak to the material conditions represented in and by the text. Their union signifies the various ways in which, historically, dominant white male culture has both succeeded and failed to reproduce its “normative” ideologies by incorporating or marginalizing those who did not conform to those standards. It is also suggestive of the unsettling impact of global and domestic demographic shifts that challenged the conflation of a particular brand of classed

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and gendered (male) whiteness with citizenship and world dominance. These issues were in no way resolved by late nineteenth-century U.S. society, which was eagerly exporting its racial ideology to transnational colonial sites and through cultural events like world’s fairs, just as it was terribly anxious about its own importance as a nation. Therefore, the conclusion remains indeterminate. . . . Both The White Slave and Imperative Duty, along with Boucicault’s The Octoroon and Alcott’s “My Contraband” and “M.L.,” negotiate the complex and potentially explosive issues that they invoke. By representing interracial unions as possible or even desirable, these texts threatened the dominant racial ideology that was in place — one in which racial intermingling was not only prohibited but also violently resisted. The Civil War–period texts were written when abolitionism was gaining popularity and the future of the nation was in turmoil, which in some ways allowed for more ambiguity and optimism; however, these post-Reconstruction texts faced a different kind of strained race relations, as well as a desire to consolidate a nation that had been divided violently for so long. Within this fractured and divisive atmosphere, it is not surprising that Campbell and Howells both circumvented any discourse that directly challenged or threatened mainstream white America. Still, the use of white-looking characters who occupy both black- and white-identified positions afforded each author a certain flexibility in terms of representing interracial desire. The characters’ ambiguous racial identities provided space for rehearsing antimiscegenation fears and for testing the resilence of racial essentialisms, even if in the end the tests failed to dismantle them. Although Howells’s and Campbell’s texts allow interracial unions to occur, neither overtly promoted them, and both de-emphasized the threat that these relations posed to strictly policed boundaries between black and white people. Unlike Boucicault, who followed the “tragic” convention of killing off the mulatto/a characters, or Alcott, who split the difference by ending Bob’s life in “My Contraband” and by allowing Paul and Claudia to remain together in “M.L.,” Campbell avoids death altogether by removing blackness from the final encounter. Olney and Rhoda, in Howells’s Imperative Duty, move to another land, like Paul and Claudia in Alcott’s “M.L.” The two interracial couples who survive leave the United

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States; similarly, their authors remind us of the muted black ancestry in both these couples, which in their new foreign locales is not only imperceptible but also disposable. By distancing these “imperfect unions,” the representations effectively reduce their transgressive impact. All four representations — Boucicault’s, Alcott’s, Campbell’s, and Howells’s — produce meanings that exceed the boundaries of the text and, sometimes, the logic of the narrative. Despite Howells’s pragmatist approach to race issues, articulated through his rational protagonist (Olney), passionate desire and the realities of race relations complicate the union between Rhoda and Olney, forcing them to relocate to Italy. In another instance, Campbell’s attempt to sanitize Lisa still produces an unsettling formulation of whiteness as well as blackness. Campbell’s and Howells’s works, along with those of Boucicault and Alcott, reveal the instability of the categories of identity and demonstrate—even in the midst of increasing change and anxiety—the impossibility of clearly demarcating racial boundaries, territories, and definitions. This ambiguity at the turn of the century was countered by didactic and ideological inflected works that ushered in the twentieth century; unlike their predecessors, cultural producers inserted the trope of miscegenation into their own ideologically informed cultural productions in order to participate in the reformulation and transmission of its contested meanings.

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· CHAPTER 3 ·

Staging the Unspoken Terror [If] it [the South] needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts — then I say lynch, a thousand times a week, if necessary. —Rebecca Latimer Felton, in the Macon Telegraph, August 18, 1897

You set yourselves down as a lot of hypocrites; in fact, you cry aloud for the virtue of your women, while you seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours. You sow the seed — the harvest will come in due time. —Alexander Manly, in the Wilmington Daily Record, August 18, 1898

B

etween 1897 and 1898, the very public interracial clash between Alexander Manly, an outspoken African American journalist, and white reformer Rebecca Latimer Felton offers an instructive example of the ways in which the meanings of miscegenation were reconfigured as a  staging ground for the articulation of interrelated cultural, political, and  economic concerns following failed Reconstruction and the reentrenchment of the black–white binary as the nineteenth century approached its final curtain.1 Their public sparring took place in the menacing shadow of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. This 1896 case cemented into law the division of society into two opposed arenas: black versus white. It institutionalized segregation and created a legacy of discriminatory practices that still have reverberations in the twenty-first century. Part of the rationale for separation was based on racist rhetoric about the sexual and moral deficiencies of free black men. Reinforcing these negative stereotypes, Felton, in the 1897 publication of her “Woman · 99 ·

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on the Farm” speech, called for a continuation of the violent racialized practice of lynching to protect white women and police black men. Manly replied fiercely with an editorial in the black-owned Wilmington Record,2 citing the counterarguments that many of the charges levied against black men were groundless, that white men and women were also guilty of crossing the color line, and that some interracial unions were consensual (recalling the historical documentation of fellow journalist Ida B. Wells and the contemporary research of historian Martha Hodes). He also supported some of Felton’s reforms for women, including her chastisement of rural working-class white males for not maintaining better “control” of their families. This highly visible dispute played out the most inflammatory kind of interracial encounter because Manly, an African American man, dared to employ authoritative language, written and spoken, not only to corroborate some of Felton’s claims but also to highlight the culpability of white women and men in their own “debasement.”3 Manly’s argument challenged the popular representation of white superiority and moral righteousness used to rationalize the systematic undoing of black advances made in the aftermath of the Civil War and the characterization of Reconstruction as a horrible injustice directed at undeserving whites. He also directed his criticism at the myth of white women’s unquestionable purity and vulnerablity: one of the central propagandistic arguments used to support aggressive antiblack terrorism and subjugation. Claiming that white men were also culpable for debasing black women, among other social ills, Manly unsettled the belief that blacks alone were responsible for the alleged deterioration of civilization in the aftermath of the Civil War. In fact, Manly was part of a growing black middle-class community of educated, successful, economically independent and influential men and women. His achievements were representative of those of his contemporaries, including Charles Chesnutt, who had raised their own status through hard work and perseverance. Community leaders, like the famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, argued that blacks alone were responsible for their own destiny. Their successes in business, the arts, performance, politics, and other diverse arenas provided evidence of the inaccuracy of racist misrepresentations and debunked negative stereotypes, such as the claim that blacks were unambitious or childlike. Uniting in the face of hostility, black intellectuals and activists continued the struggle for racial uplift and resisted the dis-

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mantling of civil and political liberties gained during Reconstruction.4 In contrast, whites, particularly southerners, who still felt the sting of the lost Civil War, black enfranchisement, and labor competition, took every opportunity to demonize blacks and reframe the discourse about life after black emanicipation as destructive to U.S. progress, not only in the South but throughout the nation. The most sensational tactic was the intensification of antimiscegenation discourse. However, far from empty rhetoric, the hostility and fear about interracial intimacy had real consequences that were cemented with criminal prosecutions and legal decisions that remained on the books for another one hundred years. (The late nineteenth century witnessed several precedent-setting antimiscegenation cases, both on the state and federal levels, that authorized state autonomy in legal decisions involving interracial relations.) Although post–Civil War civil rights law ensured the right of blacks to make and enter into contracts, as well as equal protection under the law, the federal government defined marriage as a public institution established by God that represented much more than a contract, and therefore it was not subject to federal law. In other words, each state could determine for itself to what extent interracial marriage violated a God-given right. This flexibility enabled states to criminalize marriages, as was the case with Thomas Gibson (octoroon) and his white wife, Jennie Williams, in 1870 in Evansville, Indiana. The local criminal court charged Thomas with violating antimiscegenation statutes. The case was dismissed at the local level and then appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, where it was determined that Thomas Gibson should be tried for a criminal violation. Similarly, and more decisively, Tony Pace (a “negro”) was indicted and charged for living with Mary Jane Cox (a white woman) illegally in Grove Hill, Alabama, in 1881. The case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was determined that interracial marriage was a social institution that should be placed outside of contract rights guaranteed by the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. This decision freed up local and state officials to prosecute interracial sex crimes unhampered by conflicts with federal equal protection laws. It also allowed states to concretize miscegenation as an identifiable crime.5 This unprecedented level of court involvement in a social issue followed the trajectory of greater and greater restriction that we have seen since the Civil War. Just as miscegenation only became a grevious social

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issue after the emancipation of slaves and the spiking of white anxiety about a new, slaveless world, a few decades later the community policing of interracial intimacy had transformed into legal rulings at every level of government. Each new ruling further established the illegality of miscegenation and in the process revealed the deepening anxiety of a white population desperate to protect its social status and the institution of marriage. As historian Peggy Pascoe illuminates, in these “key” late nineteenthcentury cases the denial of “civil rights” was easier in cases in which “black” men and “white” women stood before the court, because both groups’ “claims to the privilege of contract, citizenship, and property were tenuous at best.” In the popular imagination and juridical realm, then, miscegenation was already established as against the laws of nature. Aware of the high stakes of controlling how black–white intermingling would be portrayed to the mainstream public, both Charles Chesnutt and Thomas Dixon capitalized on this intense climate to increase the impact of their work. Chesnutt’s popular “local color” stories not only attracted the attention of literary giant W. D. Howells, his fiction also played an important role as he advocated his progressive politics, particularly his commitment to promoting civil rights and equality for people of color. Dixon, whose work as a minister, author, and public speaker diametrically opposed Chesnutt’s views, was celebrated for his fictional portraits of southern white supremacy and black degeneracy, as well as for his public resistance to universal equality, regardless of race. Both authors tapped into mainstream anxiety about racial intermixture and miscegenation in their depictions of the Reconstructed south as each promoted his distinct perspective. Chesnutt’s and Dixon’s representations were informed by the increasingly pronounced laws restricting black–white intimacy and by the expansion of antimiscegenation statutes to include other nonwhite groups, particularly in relation to westward expansion (in states like Oregon and California), ongoing immigration, and imperial expansion. The confluence of this pressure on the binarized laws of miscegenation increased the need for these static categories to apply to a variegated population with distinct histories, such as the Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Hawaiians.6 As the ethnic mix of the United States became more and more complicated, extraordinary efforts were spent to meld these diverse populations into rigid racial classifications in order to protect white hegemony and white control of lands and territories. As the nation became less black and white, the black–white binary remained an ideal for white-supremacist

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thinking. Although both Dixon and Chesnutt depict a more varied America, they do so to promote nearly opposite ends. The complications of the black–white binary were especially evident in the fact that American Indian and white intermarriage, although prohibited in some states, had usually not been denied, because it facilitated the legal transfer of Indian property rights to white husbands and placed the property under U.S. jurisdiction rather than that of the Indian nations. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, when white control over Indian lands was less disputed, Indians joined the ranks of other racialized nonwhites as courts began to invalidate and prohibit Indian–white intermarriage as well.7 The legal and social prohibition of interracial unions spilled over into the twentieth century with renewed vigor and remained one of the strongest arguments in favor of legal segregation and the strict policing of black populations throughout the United States. Different theories about the results of racial mixing circulated at the turn of the century. Some believed that mixed-race blacks contained the negative aspects of both blackness and whiteness, producing a dangerous mixture; others believed that the blending of races raised the status of blacks. Differing opinions like these supported and refuted various arguments about how to negotiate the free black population. These options ran the gamut (from integration to segregation, colonization, amalgamation, and extinction) and provided pseudoscientific evidence for competing philosophies and policies about the future of race relations in the United States and the global implications of the practices and policies at home as the nation expanded.8 The increasing hostility toward black progress, and the increase in white uncertainty and, in some cases, paranoia about how the “white” race would fare as the cultural and political tide shifted at the dawn of the twentieth century, provided the raw material that both Chesnutt and Dixon adapted for their own purposes. As public figures and, in some sense, performers, they also engaged in the ongoing debate about the racialized “progress” and “civilization” domestically and globally in and through their civic involvement, politically engaged articles, and creative works. Far from being written in isolation, Chesnutt’s controversial black resistance and uplift novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Dixon’s explosive white-supremacist drama The Clansman (1905) entered the fray of postReconstruction society. Their texts then, were created in the midst of enormous cultural, historical, ideological, and economic clashes. To name just a few: entrenchment of Jim Crow segregationist policies and racial

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terror; the rise of Ku Klux Klan activities;9 increasing racial, class, and gender inequality; the Progressive movement’s call for social reform; growing numbers of immigrants and African American migrants coupled with restrictions and policing of these mobile subjects; increased urbanization and technological advancement; the growth of the United States as a global power and its concurrent acquisitions of territories and protectorates; the growing popularity of eugenics ideologies; and reformulations of U.S. identities displayed in the ever-popular form of the world’s fairs. The turn of the twentieth century offered a maelstrom of human conflict, and both Chesnutt and Dixon threw themselves into the mix. As a testament to their faith in the significance of their work, and its relevance to a general population, both authors sent copies of their manuscripts to Congress for review.10 Unlike earlier authors who negotiated miscegenation circuitously, through surrogate figures, sites, and conflicts, Chesnutt and Dixon foreground their stagings of miscegenation — it is no exaggeration to say that they are obsessed with sex across the color line. The great taboo here becomes the contested site, in which they not only rehearse their imagined versions of the future but also develop their “utopian” visions of civilization and humanity. Both texts engage cultural, political, ideological, and even scientific debates, as well as each other’s arguments, about the fate of the nation and the world at the beginning of the twentieth century.11 Chesnutt’s and Dixon’s projects seem at first glance in opposition to each other; however, they intersect in their commitment to the cultural and moral improvement of society and, by extension, the world. Their works engaged the contested meanings and results of the competing and sometimes complementary strategies undertaken to achieve these goals, by the supposedly polarized communities that each of their works represented.12 The scholarly consensus, that Dixon’s and Chesnutt’s works provide diametrically opposed ideologies, has merit; however, I believe that reading them side by side not only reveals some of their shared strategies for staging miscegenation, but also provides a comprehensive understanding of their works’ intersecting projects, an understanding that is lacking in critiques of their work that deal solely in terms of their oppositionality. My comparative reading of these polemic works underscores the critical importance of miscegenated reading practices. By reading these dramatic and literary texts in tandem, as overlapping stagings of racial polarization, my critique exposes the unlikely intersections in their work. By crossing the boundaries of genre, ideology, and race, to name a few, my study of

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their interactive interventions establishes a critical framework for identifying each text’s excessive citation of miscegenation rhetoric in a discursive and material landscape that was already saturated with its multiple manifestations. I can then determine how both authors deploy the contested trope of miscegenation as a pedagogical tool, drawing on everything from its emblematic meanings to its innumerable performances to its actual impact on the racialized hues of the United States and world populations. In doing so, I render visible the naturalizing effect of the ubiquitous miscegenation discourse and show how it infuses every related issue in each piece, such as gender roles, national identity, U.S. expansion, segregation, racial violence, class struggles, racial uplift, the “science” of eugenics, and regionalized conflicts.13 The black–white polarity here becomes a symbolic melodramatic mode that distills racial, gender, national, imperial, and class entanglements into legible images and familiar sound bites. Such telescoping, however, is a flawed technique for promoting ideology, and a careful critique will reveal how glimpses of more-complex truth emerge.14 The Clansman is Dixon’s dramatic reproduction of his own fictional and nonfictional white-supremacist writings; The Marrow of Tradition is Chesnutt’s self-proclaimed narrative response to Dixon’s racist fiction predating the stage play of The Clansman. Both are, in a word, dramatic. By exploring the intense stagings of miscegenation in Chesnutt’s and Dixon’s texts, I identify the recognizable signs and symbols of melodrama but reframe them in terms of their animation in and through these hypervisible, overproduced, highly spectacularized renderings. By foregrounding the performative function of the miscegenation trope in Chesnutt’s and Dixon’s representations, it is possible to gain a fuller understanding of their mutual employment of miscegenation, both its overt, popularized meanings and its covert implications. In this chapter, then, I press against the generic, racial, gendered, and political bifurcations that have long placed these authors in polarized camps, rather than alongside each other as coparticipants in the contested history and culture of post-Reconstruction United States. Although Chesnutt and Dixon shared intersecting histories and common cultural knowledge, such as the legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and the impact of U.S. expansion through the Spanish– American War and the annexation of other Central American, South Pacific, and Caribbean territories, their political agendas diverged. Dixon’s dramatic piece espoused the racist argument that the only salvation of the

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nation was the reestablishment of white domination. This popular view reproduced racist opinions that were accepted without question by a large percentage of the population. Interrupting this dominant discourse, Chesnutt’s fiction demonstrated how similar issues and beliefs represented the corruption and hypocrisy of the southern white-supremacist “tradition” and government. Both writers, however, engaged the popular belief that black/white desire is “always already” transgressive, “impossible,” “unspeakable,” and that interracial liaisons produce destabilizing and, more often than not, “tragic” results.15 Wielding Representational Weapons, Reconstructing Miscegenation

As indicated above, both Chesnutt and Dixon were concerned with contemporaneous events, but they were also invested in how the past both informed the present and projected the future. That both men chose to connect their stories to the 1898 racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, is no coincidence, as has been noted by most Chesnutt scholars. In addition to its significance as a harbinger of future regionalized tensions in the United States, the Wilmington violence was also a marker of the historical and contemporaneous imperial designs of the nation.16 Chesnutt’s and Dixon’s works’ preoccupation with the powerful trope of miscegenation brings together transnational, regional, domestic, racialized, gendered, and classed concerns by telescoping them into recognizable discourse, symbols, and (contested) meanings, easily accessed by the popular imagination of those who encountered these authors’ works or the issues that their works rehearsed. Certainly, the increasingly popular “science” of eugenics informed both of their depictions of interracial sex and its impact on future generations and their respective definitions of civilization. In particular, emphases on heredity, genetics, and survival, theorized by scientists and philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” and his intellectual disciples Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, suggested that questions of racial and ethnic differences carried great importance in the processes of remaking the nation and empire building in which the United States was actively engaged by the time of Chesnutt’s publication in 1901.17 Miscegenation thus became the staging ground, the literal and symbolic locus where the battle to define the collective identity and future of

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the United States as a cultural and economic global power would be staged, fought, and won. Armed with their respective ideological hardware, both Charles Chesnutt and Thomas Dixon entered the rhetorical battleground to debate the so-called “Negro problem” — a blanket term encompassing the political, social, and economic issues that emerged as a result of changes created by emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction — and the future of the “race” both in terms of humanity and in terms of biologically based classifications. The intersecting post–Civil War settings of both the novel and the play enabled Chesnutt and Dixon to reframe history to support their pedagogical imperatives: Chesnutt illustrated the systematic eradication of black civil rights and power that culminated in violent antiblack “riots” and destruction of black property by whites; Dixon characterized Reconstruction as a period of “terror” against whites, justifying violent white “resistance” and retribution. For both authors, anxiety around miscegenation and racial mixing served as a focal point for all other interrelated issues, even when miscegenation was merely invoked as part of the unmentionable past, rather than directly addressed.18 Both Chesnutt and Dixon, as has been noted by contemporary critics,19 also relied on conventionally gendered roles for men and women in which the public battles for supremacy were represented as masculinized spaces in contrast to the domestic and private negotiations of the related issues, which were depicted as feminized spaces. In each text the standard racialized, patriarchal, and class structures of the era also remain in place, although they do not escape critique. Although they employ different genres, both authors have similar objectives: to entertain, influence audiences, and transform public opinion. They both staged interactive performances in which the dynamic interplay of sight, gesture, and words gained its meaning most completely in relation to those who interpreted them (the audience) both within and outside the narrativized and staged scenes. Chesnutt, who also authored short stories and nonfiction essays, chose the novelistic form to present complex portrayals of similar issues. As he did in his conjure tales,20 Chesnutt employed performative strategies to unsettle static formulations of race or what he referred to as the sort of “social fiction” that white supremacists like Dixon promoted.21 Although his goal was to write a novel with the same social impact as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Marrow of Tradition never enjoyed the same overwhelming success.22 However, it did speak to representations like Dixon’s by offering an alternative .

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to the white-supremacist perspective and black disenfranchisement. Its novelistic form took on the role of alternative historical documenation that would, at the very least, serve as a written testament to an invisible history, remiscient of the symbolic role of slave narratives. Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858 to free black parents who had moved there from North Carolina to marry. His mixed-race heritage, as the descendant of white grandfathers on both sides of his family, lightened his hue to the point that he could have passed as white, but he and his immediate family members were firmly rooted in the African American community. He was raised and educated in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but returned to Cleveland to work as a legal stenographer in 1884. He was admitted to the Ohio state bar and continued legal work to support his family, even while he actively authored fiction and nonfiction. His intimate knowledge of the law and of the complexities of the color line informed his life and career. Along with other public intellectuals, successful businessmen, and reformers, Chesnutt, a member of the NAACP, took an active role in the struggle to improve living and working conditions for people of color during the historical period designated as the Progressive Era. Chesnutt helped put race into the conversation with other issues that made up the Progressive Era’s focus on social concerns generated from urbanization and industrialization (issues like child labor, and the agency of single women). He joined debates about the future of black America and the black diaspora alongside the likes of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, using his writing as a platform to espouse his theories.23 Chesnutt’s fictional and nonfictional work, like Dixon’s, intersected. In The Marrow of Tradition he revisited ideas he had articulated in essays such as the “Future American” series, in which he condemned racial and class oppression by the “white South,” upbraided the “mute” and complicit North, and called for a return to America’s founding principles of “liberty” and “equality” rather than the “revival of slavery” at home and the enforcement of the U.S. Constitution’s “fundamental laws” in “the affairs of distant peoples.” Additionally, Chesnutt employed eugenics theories familiar to both his and Dixon’s audiences to counter the “conception of a pure Aryan, Indo-European race” as the gauge for progress and civilization. Instead, he posited that, based on science and history, “the future American” would be formed from racial “mingling” of the “three broad types — white, black, and Indian,” which would bring about the “natural” disappearance

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of racial distinctions not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, like Latin America, where this “fusion” had already ocurred or was in the process of unfolding. The striking similarities with “Anglo-Saxon” arguments about the degeneration of “white” civilization suggest that Chesnutt’s strategy was twofold: First, he reappropriated the language of racist takes on “natural selection” by arguing that intermingling was, in fact, natural and produced a superior, rather than an inferior, type. Second, he challenged the legitimacy of racial categories as a means of evaluating development and progress by foregrounding the use of these categories as a performative device that naturalized social, economic, and geographic inequalities. In fact, although Chesnutt’s novel was written before Dixon’s play, Chesnutt’s work intervenes in Dixon’s staging of miscegenation. Given Dixon’s popularity as an orator and his significant body of written work that appealed to mainstream white Americans, Chesnutt would have been quite familiar with his theories about race. And since the term “miscegenation” was coined almost fifty years before both works were produced, Chesnutt would have had ample time to determine his response to Dixon’s deployment of miscegenation discourse. It also is possible that the two men, who both had roots in North Carolina and who both earned law degrees, may have even crossed paths, although it seems unlikely, given the segregated environment in which they lived, studied, and worked. Entrenched on the other side of the strictly guarded color line from Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon was born into a North Carolina family (which later would have full membership in the North Carolina chapter of the Ku Klux Klan) in 1864 — the same year that Croly and Wakemen coined the term “miscegenation.” Dixon’s family were relatively poor farmers, and their class background would have positioned them in direct competition with black families for employment. It is not surprising then that Dixon’s father and other members of his family passed on their beliefs to the younger generations that blacks were inferior and in need of strict governing by whites. Despite their struggles as members of the impoverished white laboring class, the Dixons were able to provide their children with formal educations. Thomas excelled in academics and attended Wake Forest College, earning a master of arts degree. After he won a scholarship, he attended Johns Hopkins University and befriended future president Woodrow Wilson. After a failed attempt at acting, he returned to North Carolina,

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earned a law degree, and became an ordained minister in 1886. He preached to large audiences both in the South and in northern cities. After resigning from his final ministerial post, he began publishing fiction and drama, touring the country with his dramatic productions. His greatest success was his role as producer and collaborator with D. W. Griffith on the highly acclaimed 1915 film The Birth of a Nation—a celebration of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—based on his 1905 play (published in 1906) The Clansman. Commenting on his own work, Dixon contended that his “sole purpose in writing was to reach and influence with my argument in the mind of millions . . . vividly and simple.” After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 1939, he remained disabled, living in Raleigh, North Carolina, until his death in 1946.24 Confronting the Challenge of Interracial Contact

Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition is set in the fictional town of Wellington, North Carolina, in the late 1890s (prefiguring a similar historical southern scene in Dixon’s play). The setting was inspired by the historical town of Wilmington, North Carolina, the site of the 1898 Wilmington riots, or massacres. The violence was part of a statewide white seizure of government power. Orchestrated by a group of prominent whites called “The Secret Nine,” the antiblack and anti-Republican campaign drew white supremacists from all walks of life. Through intimidation, including gunshot fatalities and wounds, the black population was driven out of the city of Wilmington,25 even though the black population outnumbered whites 11,324 to 8,731. Overall, this racist campaign destroyed interracial cooperation, restored white supremacy, and reappropriated power for the state’s white planter and industrial leaders.26 Chesnutt’s novel incorporates the heightened racial animosity of that period, including his representation of black journalist Alexander Manly’s editorial that implicated white men, rather than black men, in the debasement of white women. Whites blamed Manly’s inflammatory article for sparking the violent outrage in Wilmington, which also led to the destruction of Manly’s press, one of the few prominent black-owned newspapers in the country.27 The novel opens with Olivia Carteret, wife of the white-supremacist newspaper editor Major Carteret, giving birth to their only son, Dodie, and being cared for by her old-time mammy, Aunt Jane. It turns out that Olivia has a mixed-race sister, Janet Miller, who lives in the same town and is married to a prominent black doctor, Dr. William Miller. Olivia’s father,

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Samuel Merkell, secretly married his slave Julia after his first wife died, and Janet is their daughter. Janet’s presence disturbs Olivia because of their striking resemblance and because of her fear that exposure of their familial tie will disturb her own claims to racial purity. Their aunt Polly, who raised Olivia, discovered the marriage papers and will just after Olivia and Janet’s father died, but hid the documents so that Janet never received her small inheritance or learned that her parents were legally wed. Other central characters are General Belmont (a white southern aristocrat) and Captain McBane (of poor white origins), who work with Major Carteret to stir up antiblack sentiment in the town. They conspire to destroy any gains made by blacks, including voting, with their campaign “No Nigger Domination and White Supremacy Everywhere.” A young corrupt white aristocrat, Tom Delamere, advances their plan by impersonating his grandfather’s most loyal black servant, Sandy, and by robbing and accidentally murdering Aunt Polly. This crime, characterized as a black sexual assault on white womanhood, creates the passionate anger that Carteret, Belmont, and McBane need to galvanize the white community. This impetus enables them to terrorize the black community and to drive successful blacks out of town. Opposing these white racists are members of the black community, including Dr. Miller and his wife, Janet (representatives of black middleclass success and values), Josh Green (a working-class advocate of armed self-defense), and various servants, like Sandy, Jerry, and Aunt Jane (relics of the “old South” who maintain subordinate positions). Dr. Miller’s belief that achievements, such as his own, will win white respect and equality is continually challenged by the whites in Wellington. Despite the violent results of the white racism that Carteret engineers, several events indicate that alternatives to mob rule and white supremacy not only exist but are also more desirable. When Tom Delamere’s grandfather discovers that his grandson, and not Sandy, is to blame for the robbery and murder, he saves Sandy from a lynching. In response to his family’s moral deterioration, the elder Delamere dies, willing a portion of his money to Sandy and the rest of his estate to Dr. Miller’s hospital. However, General Belmont suppresses the will — a move that repeats and reproduces the historical erasure of black claims to property and inheritance by self-serving whites. Similarly, at the end of the novel, Major Carteret and his wife must entreat Dr. and Janet Miller (whose son was killed during the antiblack riots)

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to save their son Dodie, because no white doctor is available. At first, Dr. Miller refuses, but Carteret’s wife, Olivia, begs the couple. In the process, Olivia reveals the truth about the legitimate marriage of Janet’s mother to her father, calling Janet “sister.” Rather than embracing Olivia, Janet exhibits her magnanimity by sending her husband to help them. The story ends with Miller’s arrival at Carteret’s house. The baby is still alive, but it is uncertain as to whether he will live or die. Nor is it clear how, or if, the Millers’ generous gesture will impact their personal relationship with Janet’s kin or race relations in the community. Contemporaneous reviews of Chesnutt’s novel, including one by William Dean Howells, alternated between praise for its attention to historical and social inequalities and disappointment at its “bitter” portrait of the South and race relations in the United States.28 Similar to Dixon’s later play, Chesnutt’s novel was accused of sacrificing aesthetics for propaganda. Other analyses seemed more concerned by the divide between accomodationist and radical African American politics represented by Dr. Miller and Josh Green.29 What these critics ignored was the issue at the very heart of the novel: miscegenation. As noted earlier, Chesnutt referenced racial “fusion” in both his fiction and nonfiction, which he argued was the “natural” alternative to the illusion of white-Anglo-Saxon homogeneity. Although his language draws on concepts of eugenics, he employs them to suggest that mixture might offer progress rather than degeneracy. He also invokes some of the utopian racialized discourse advocating miscegenation imported from transnational sites like Cuba, rather than accepting what he refers to elsewhere as a southern degradation of an “honest word.”30 Similarly, in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt links the outbreak of violence in this small community and in other oppressed communities around the world to the criminalization and misrepresentation of miscegenation. In an effort to explain the broader implications of the antiblack violence sparked by the accusation of “miscegenation,” Marrow’s narrator describes how public sentiment all over the country became every day more favorable. . . . The nation was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-domination, before the exigencies of which mere abstract ethical theories must not be permitted to stand. The same argument that justified the conquest of an inferior nation could not be denied to those who sought the suppression of an inferior race. . . . Constant lynchings emphasized his [the black

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man’s] impotence, and bred everywhere a growing contempt for his rights.31 Through his narrator, Chesnutt warns his readers that the justification for racialized and colonial oppression, as described here, is deeply intertwined with the use of lynching in the South to tame the alleged hypermasculinized black virility associated with black freedom and equality. The overproduction of the image of this sexual predator in relation to hysteria surrounding miscegenation discourse created the need for protection from this menacing figure. At first glance, it may seem that Chesnutt’s emphasis on the fabricated and hyperbolic stagings of miscegenation might relegate it and the interrelated images, such as unbridled black sexuality and white female purity, to the imaginative realm, merely social fictions. But under closer scrutiny, Chesnutt’s careful attention to the intersections between these cultural performances of race and the “rising tide” of violence and panic that the very idea of miscegenation produced in the real world grounds his fiction in lived experience, as much fact as fiction. Chesnutt’s balancing act between discursive and embodied miscegenation in Marrow demonstrates how each enactment and subsequent response should be evaluated in the context of historical and cultural conditions, rather than as a testament to universally applicable differences or to any predetermined fate. . . . Rather than negating the instability that miscegenation produced, Chesnutt challenged racist discourse that prohibited and condemned it. His intertwining of Olivia and Janet establishes the connection between the two families, as well as between the polarized black and white communities. Their mixed genteel lineage, despite their opposing racial classifications, reinforced Chesnutt’s belief that, similar to the reality in South and Central America and the West Indies, interracial unions would lead to “complete racial fusion,” combining “to produce the best results” rather than the worst qualities of different groups.32 Chesnutt’s portrait of Janet Miller borrows, once again, from popular eugenics discourse and from utopian philosophies and scientific theories contending that only the “fittest” would surivive and improve “civilization.” Although Olivia wants to erase the past, it continually confronts her in the form of her almost identical nonwhite sister, Janet — the embodiment of unsanctioned interracial intimacy. Chesnutt’s use of twinning provides a reminder for the reader

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and for other characters in the novel of parallel histories that have been purposefully suppressed in order to preserve the fiction of refined southern culture and of the purity of the Carteret/Merkell familial lineages.33 As with many real-life southern families, no doubt, Olivia’s biggest fear is that disclosure of her actual relationship with Janet will raise questions about the legitimacy of her own “white” status: She shuddered before the possibility that at some time in the future some person, none too well informed, might learn that her father had married a colored woman, and might assume that she, Olivia Carteret, or her child, had sprung from this shocking mésalliance, — a fate to which she would willingly have preferred death. . . . The secret should remain buried forever in her own heart!34 Olivia, who is responsible for continuing the Carteret family legacy by producing a son, prefers death over the shame of acknowledging the black–white union in her family history — an exposé that would delegitimize her own and, by extension, her son’s societal and racial position. Her anxiety also highlights how the responsibility of reproducing racial “purity” and familial sanctity was relegated to women. At the same time, these women were also blamed, along with their husbands, if they “failed” to do so, recalling the rhetoric of elite white reformers like Rebecca Felton. Olivia’s greatest objection, however, is that her father bothered to make his relationship with Janet’s mother Julia (his former slave and lover) official at all: “To have lived with her without marriage was a social misdemeanor, at which society in the old days had winked, or at most had frowned. To have married her was to have committed the unpardonable social sin. Such a scandal Mrs. Carteret could not have endured.”35 Here, Chesnutt highlights Olivia’s fears as a way of exposing how, even when proof of a legitimate black–white union exists in the form of a marriage license, assertions of white purity prove more important and powerful than the truth. Still, despite Olivia’s destruction of the certificate, the knowledge that it once existed haunts her and rises to the surface later in the novel. Chesnutt incorporates legal documentation of the bond between Janet’s parents in order to challenge racist propaganda that transforms all black–white liaisons into sexual crimes and to offer an alternative: an intimate relationship between two consenting adults. The legitimacy of their

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union also recalls the history of interracial unions, some that were tolerated before the Civil War and others that were, in fact, legal or accepted as common-law marriages by the members of the communities in which these couples lived, before antimiscegenation legislation was passed.36 In order to protect their rights and marital status, parties involved in an interracial marriage had to sue the states to avoid nullification. These cases led to lawsuits that fought against the type of erasure that Chesnutt depicts here. Challenging reductive revisions of the past and present, Chesnutt’s novel interrogates the historical discursive ellipses that informed miscegenation discourse and legislation, such as the denial of inheritance to children of black–white unions. This exclusion is exemplified by Aunt Polly’s and Olivia’s denial of the property willed to Janet and her mother Julia by father/husband Samuel Merkell. In addition, General Belmont refuses to adhere to the stipulations of the elder Mr. Delamere’s will, which bequeathed money to Dr. Miller’s hospital and Sandy, because of Belmont’s conviction that white property and wealth “belonged of right to the white race.”37 By exposing the self-serving and racist motives of promoters of white supremacy, Chesnutt highlighted the often invisible ideological scaffolding that supported white-supremist structures within his narrative, in other representations of similar doctrines, like Dixon’s Clansman, and in mainstream U.S. culture. Chesnutt’s legitimizing portrait of interracial marriage went along with his exposure of the complex and often contradictory meanings of miscegenation discourse that extended far beyond Janet’s mixed heritage. In order to represent the high stakes attached to miscegenation, Chesnutt staged it spectacularly, in a manner recognizable as part of the polarized history of racial divisions in the nation. Central to this staging are his two most flamboyant and oppositional characters: the subservient black servant Sandy Delamere, and his employer’s morally corrupt and elitist son, Tom Delamere. Sharing the same last name because of the slave-owning convention of labeling human property with the owner’s own surname, these two men, like Olivia and Janet, serve as a constant reminder of the history of slavery that simultaneously disenfranchised blacks while intertwining the lineages and fates of master and slave. Their pairing invokes the doubling of the sisters and reformulates it as a same-sex enactment of interracial intimacy. Sandy Delamere, the elder Mr. Delamere’s most loyal servant and former slave, does not question his inferior position on the social and economic

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ladder. He does, however, attempt to cultivate the trappings of white aristocracy and reproduce them for the whites who he serves. Sandy’s role represents Chesnutt’s most complex characterization of blackness. On the one hand, he exemplifies the common stereotype of the “zip coon,” a type of black dandy often portrayed as laughable in his attempts to mimic western European high culture in blackface minstrel shows. On the other hand, Sandy’s carefully constructed persona (as well as the fact that Tom Delamere easily impersonates him without detection) indicates that this model of blackness is part of a strategic performance for survival rather than his genuine character. In fact, Chesnutt’s invocation of the blackface minstrel tradition of spectacularizing blackness through exaggerated impersonations challenges their authenticity, by foregrounding the constructedness of these popular stereotypes. Tom Delamere’s observations also reemphasize the theatricality of Sandy’s appearance and behavior. Describing Tom’s response to his grandfather’s description of Sandy as a “gentleman in ebony,” the narrator foreshadows Tom’s subsequent racial performance: “Tom could scarcely preserve his gravity at this characterization of old Sandy, with his ridiculous air of importance, his long blue coat, and his loud plaid trousers. That suit would make a great costume for a masquerade. He would borrow it some time, — there was nothing in the world like it.”38 Here, Tom reveals a keen understanding of the role that Sandy plays. His comment that there is “nothing in the world” like Sandy’s persona acknowledges that Sandy’s role is a product of images imposed on him by whites and that, in fact, these trappings are part of a caricature that does not correspond with reality. By emphasizing the performative aspects of Sandy, along with the use of other black types, like the contented mammy, Chesnutt’s representation unsettles the same stereotypes that Dixon, as we shall see, presents as legitimate. Taking this critique of static formulations of blacks a step further, Chesnutt creates a performance within a performance when Tom masquerades as Sandy. Tom, who has intimate knowledge of white expectations of blacks, reproduces Sandy’s persona twice: first, in a sensational blackface version of the cakewalk, and second, as the thief and murderer of Aunt Polly. Both roles represent stereotypes — servile entertainers and savage predators — that were attributed to the “natural” character of black men and, as we have seen, were used to justify racist legal and social policing of the black community.39 The first instance of Tom’s racial impersonation is when he enters the “genuine negro cakewalk” contest put on to

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provide “a pleasing impression of Southern customs” for a group of white northern visitors. Indicating that white racism is not confined to any particular region, Chesnutt’s inclusion of these northerners implies that they, like white southerners, take pleasure and comfort in images of “authentic,” docile blacks. It also recalls the exploitation of black and other non-“white” populations for profit, entertainment, and consumption, such as in the works of contemporaneous authors like Thomas Nelson Page, in blackface performers, and in displays at world’s fairs throughout the nation.40 Both Sandy’s approximation of whiteness and Tom’s staging of blackness enact a type of interracial desire. Sandy’s rehearsal of the trappings of whiteness suggest an attraction to the privileges and status associated with that position. When he puts on those “airs,” whites respond positively and seem to recognize the not-quite reproduction of their own characteristics and behaviors. Similarly, Tom’s pleasurable performance of Sandy reveals “an investiture in black bodies” that seems to be “a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ ” that “demonstrates the permeability of the color line.” Similar to the appeal of blackface minstrelsy, Tom’s impersonation reveals “a cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices.”41 Tom enjoys his successful impersonation of Sandy at the same time that he mocks Sandy’s position and reassures himself that his performance is merely temporary. In these instances, Chesnutt demonstrates how interracial intimacy allows for subtle crossings of racial boundaries but only in a way that seems safe because, in the end, both return to their assigned positions. Still, Tom and Sandy could both be viewed as engaging in miscegenated theatrical forms, which might have been more overtly suggestive of the permeability of racial boundaries and the provocative appeal of cross-racial performance. And, by extension, their racial enactments also apply to the entire genre of minstrelsy in its many forms; these performative stagings of race, and their popular consumption by members of varied classes, races, and cultures, certainly functioned as sites of miscegenation. And even more telling are the lasting influences of these varied types of interracial entanglements. For once Tom and Sandy return to their “appropriate” roles, they both remain forever changed because they have embodied the other’s position and thus gained more explicit insight and knowledge. In contrast to Tom’s intimate understanding of blackness as a performable category, the white community’s ignorance and prejudices fuel

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its fiery reaction to Tom’s second blackface impersonation. He dresses up as Sandy so that he won’t be implicated when he breaks into Aunt Polly’s house to steal money to support his illicit escapades, such as gambling; however, when she catches him in the act, he hits her on the head, a blow that turns out to be deadly. His use of Sandy’s persona both reinforces and is reinforced by white racist beliefs that all blacks are ultimately uncivilized barbarians, capable of theft, murder, and rape. Tom’s father is the only person to question the whites’ assumption that Sandy was the perpetrator. White prejudice reconfigures Tom’s fictional masquerade into fact; it transforms “safe” Sandy into the most horrible and threatening stereotype that whites can conjure: the murderous black rapist. Chesnutt employs Tom’s performance not only to challenge the spectacular (and static) roles assigned to black men but also to make more visible the ulterior motives behind these constructions. Chesnutt demonstrates how these racist depictions, rather than actual reality, constitute Sandy’s guilt (and absolve Tom of the crime). Chesnutt’s staging of miscegenation also complicates mainstream notions of gender. Neither Tom nor Sandy can effectively play the hypermasculine role assigned to the “black” rapist.42 Chesnutt characterizes both men as feminine, unproductive members of their respective communities, echoing social Darwinist theories about the eventual elimination of genetically inferior and less “competitive” members of society. His rendering of Tom’s and Sandy’s overlapping enactments of feminized black–white interdependency is also suggestive of same-sex miscegenation. Its meaning, similar to all miscegenation discourse, is contextual and historically contingent. In this case, it could have invoked attacks on black–white male political and social equality, represented by the Fusionist movement, for example. Moreover, white men and women, like Rebecca Felton, accused certain white men of embracing their black colleagues too intimately and violating codes of racial decency. This pathologization of Sandy and Tom’s interracial entanglements distances them from mainstream formulations of race, gender, and sexuality. Tom Delamere also exposes fallacies inherent in articulations of white supremacy. Unlike his noble grandfather — who would rather “let a crime go entirely unpunished, than to use it as a pretext for turning the whole white population into a mob of primitive savages” — Tom is willing to let anyone take the blame for his crimes. Although he is considered an aristocrat and maintains a sense of superiority toward blacks and lower-class

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whites, Tom does not adhere to the codes of honor established by his grandfather. He relies on his family’s noble legacy for status, but his actions and demeanor reveal his corrupt morality. Unlike the Ben Camerons of Dixon’s Clansman, who restore the power of white masculinity, Tom represents aristocracy in decline. He is described as “easily the handsomest young man in Wellington. But no discriminating observer would have characterized his beauty as manly. It conveyed no impression of strength, but did possess a certain element, feline rather than feminine, which subtly negatived [sic] the idea of manliness.”43 Dark and handsome Tom carries all the trappings of the elite but provides nothing more than a polished performance of white manhood. In this way Chesnutt differentiates Tom from other white men in the novel and links his position to the decline of white southern hegemony after the Civil War.44 However, Chesnutt’s depiction of Tom’s “inauthentic” or failed “white” masculinity also lends to Tom’s successful imitation of Sandy. In other words, Tom performs “blackness” more successfully than he does his own inherited position. The success of Tom’s staging of miscegenation and Chesnutt’s exposure of its inauthenticity also rely on the other starring and supporting roles. Without the main victim, the crime cannot occur. Introduced as “old Aunt Polly” at the beginning of the novel, Polly represents a relic of the old South whose sole purpose is to preserve the racial and social order established by the plantation system (similar to Miss Rosa in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom). After her murder, Polly is refigured instantly as the symbol of innocence and purity in need of white male protection. Her emblematic status has less to do with her actual character, which is described as ornery and stern, than it has to do with white supremacists’ need to justify violent vengeance against the black community. Chesnutt’s use of this renewed focus on the value of Aunt Polly’s life and her significance in the community as an exemplary model of white womanhood points to the underlying political motives behind this spin. In order to galvanize the white community, prominent members construct this image of Polly as a sacrificial lamb who has fallen prey to one of the predatory black “wolves” in the community. By revealing the process through which Polly’s image is transformed into a spectacle of white purity under attack, Chesnutt challenges the legitimacy of other portraits of vulnerable white womanhood, in particular, and of the overarching stereotype, in general. His portrayal identifies the ways in which her character is revised so that it conforms to a narrow definition of

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whiteness designed to justify white control of the black population. In doing so, Chesnutt not only exposes the ways in which whiteness is constructed in order to serve ideological purposes, but also critiques the false notion that whiteness is a stable and unmediated category. Following his faith that miscegenation would ultimately lead to the disappearance of color distinctions, Chesnutt highlighted the limitations and social fictions that his characters represent. But at the same time he retained their relevance to the juridical, economic, social, and political realities that African Americans and other nonwhites/noncitizens had to negotiate in order to survive while his prophesied utopian “civilization” evolved. Janet Miller occupies the center of Chesnutt’s staging of miscegenation, as his idealized “future American” subject, a racially mixed, educated, middle-class representative of “true” womanhood. Chesnutt surrounded this central figure and her family with a spectrum of racialized figures. Still, despite their multiply-articulated identities, Chesnutt also indicates that the force of the monolithic categories of black and white remains a significant challenge to his vision. Amid Chesnutt’s depictions of local race relations, Marrow also shows how the communities of Wellington intersected with more expansive national and transnational concerns that were unfolding at this postReconstruction moment. The miscegenation trope provides the landscape on which he can map competing ideologies about the intersections that link local and global racialized political and economic policies. Scenes of interracial contact of all kinds pervade the novel, trouble the stability of the black–white color line, and gesture toward its multiple and expansive implications. One example of the interactivity of southern segregation and Western imperialism emerges in an extended scene on a segregated train. Here, Chesnutt represents some of the broader conflicts that lie both at the heart of Wilmington and, I believe, at the heart of his fiction. In this scene Dr. Miller rides with Dr. Burns, his former medical teacher, who has requested his assistance on a medical procedure that he will perform when they arrive in Wellington. Although Dr. Miller is black and Dr. Burns is white, they treat each other as equals, respect each other’s abilities, and locate themselves solidly in the upper-middle-class stratum of society. Both men are also attuned to local, national, and international goings-on, as evidenced by Dr. Miller’s perusal of the newspaper while they ride together. The narrator provides a quick glimpse over Miller’s shoulder to indicate

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how the local racist policies intersect with the nation’s exportation of democracy and freedom: “Miller had opened a newspaper, and was deep in an editorial which set forth in glowing language the inestimable advantages which would follow to certain recently acquired islands by the introduction of American liberty.”45 By omitting any specific names of the island acquisitions, Chesnutt leaves open the possible connection to different parts of the globe—from the Philippines to Latin America — where U.S. imperial exploits were occurring. Here, Chesnutt, a member of the anti-imperialist league, also links black–white post-Reconstruction domestic relations to contemporaneous efforts to identify sites, including the “New South,” that could offer potential markets, sources for raw materials, and new labor pools to increase production in the United States.46 Chesnutt contrasts these men with Captain McBane, who “had sprung from the poor-white class, to which, even more than to the slaves, the abolition of slavery had opened the door of opportunity.”47 Unlike Burns or Miller, McBane is neither educated nor middle class. He has gained his legitimacy solely by aligning himself with white supremacists in their efforts to disenfranchise blacks. During this same scene, McBane barges in the white train car where both doctors are sitting. Because the train has now crossed the Mason-Dixon line, McBane insists that Dr. Miller be forcibly removed from the whites-only car to the “colored” car. This blatant display of white dominance reproduces the rhetoric of rigorous white manhood associated with militarized exploits at home and abroad, like the white posses in the South and West that took the law into their own hands in order to establish their superiority over blacks and others deemed undesirable.48 By highlighting Miller’s and McBane’s differences, Chesnutt highlights the artificiality of the racialized binary that elevates one man over another based on his classification as either black or white. The racialized binary emblematized by the segregated train does not account for the complex matrix of relations shaped by distinctions such as class, education, and cultural upbringing. Miller and Burns have much more in common than McBane and Miller. And McBane, it seems, shares more qualities with the poor blacks who carry on loudly in the colored car where Miller is forced to sit. How is it, then, the narrative asks, that such reductive definitions determine who we are and what we are allowed to achieve? What happens to all of those people who get lumped together regardless of their unique identities?

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Given Chesnutt’s vision that the nation and the world would eventually become a heterogeneous intermixture due to the inevitable fact of miscegenation, his critique of the inadequacy of the polarization of race makes sense. The segregated train ride scene reveals the failures, contradictions, and hypocrisy of the black–white color line. For example, even though Miller must ride in the colored car, Chesnutt also depicts “a Chinaman, of the ordinary laundry type” and a “colored nurse” who were both allowed to sit in the whites-only car without objection.49 Why is it that these nonwhite figures circumvent the color line drawn so severely by the law and by McBane? I believe that the presence of a Chinese man invokes the particular U.S. resistance to those in between, those who Chesnutt argued would soon represent the world majority, forever confounding and erasing color lines. And, as Sanda Lwin and other critics have argued, the presence of a Chinese man recalls Justice John H. Harlan’s dissenting opinion in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, in which he aligns blacks and whites as fellow (yet still separate) citizens by comparing the two groups to the foreign status of Chinese in the United States. Referring to the Chinese as a race “so different from our own,” Justice Harlan echoes, once again, eugenics discourse but in the ser vice of anti-immigration policy aimed specifically at Chinese exclusion.50 At the same time, however, the “Chinaman” also represents efforts in the “New South” and in the Caribbean to recruit and conscript nonblack laborers; these recruits were seen as a potential mediating population that could assist white landowners by replacing recently emancipated slaves (in the case of imported “coolie” labor following emancipation in the South) and by helping “manage” the remaining black labor pools following Reconstruction and the Great Migration, as a means of increasing productivity, lowering the costs of employment, and maintaining white “rule.”51 Further nuancing this scene was the impossibility of citizenship for Chinese migrants concretized by exclusion laws, which effectively contained their mobility to such a degree that their presence in an all-white railway car was not acknowledged. Alongside the Chinese man, the “colored” nurse serves her white female employer. As a woman working for another woman in a caretaker’s role, she does not necessarily destabilize the racialized and gendered Jim Crow patriarchal system. However, Chesnutt’s reference to her as “colored” rather than “negro” might indicate that, despite her relegation to servant status, her profession — a nurse — was also indicative of the progress

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that he and other professionals of color achieved, offering another challenge to the black–white binary that deemed blacks inferior. His language also echoes the official language of the Supreme Court opinion in the Plessy case that legally codified the use of the label “colored” for segregation purposes. This reference to the rigid classificatory system reiterates the belief that even “one drop” of black blood classified one as “colored” and therefore excluded that person from the rights afforded to whites. Along those lines, her presence also recalls the silence around white male sex with black women, both forced and consensual, that contributed to the “visible admixture” of racial hues to which Chesnutt and many of his contemporaries, including Dixon, referred. The juxtaposition of Dr. Miller, Captain McBane, Dr. Burns, the colored nurse, and the “ordinary Chinaman” in this scene aboard a segregated train offers insight into Chesnutt’s staging of miscegenation: it maps onto this mobile representation of diversity a rigid, racially bifurcated frame that diminishes the diversity of their identities, as well as their intersections. As Chesnutt’s narrator indicates, although the similarities of all the varieties of mankind are vastly more important and fundamental than the differences, what is most visible to the “American eye” is the reductive black– white binary. Differences and intersections in racial, gender, class, and educational status disappear in the name of elevating white manhood and womanhood at the expense of all “others.” However, this scene also supports Chesnutt’s theory of future progress: despite static formulations, the train continues to move, and the process of racial mixing will occur regardless of attempts to police boundaries based on color or class or nation. Setting the Stage for Supremacy

Thomas Dixon based his 1905 play The Clansman on two of his novels — The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan and The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden.52 The dramatic piece allowed him to telescope and spectacularize the question at the heart of both novels — whether the nation shall be “Anglo Saxon or Mulatto” — in a concise and propagandistic portrait. Dixon recognized the powerful potential of the stage to influence people. In “Why I Wrote the Clansman” Dixon proclaimed that “drama is by far the most powerful of all forms of art.”53 Demonstrating this point, his play sold out theaters throughout the South for the first year of its run and, as intended, reached a much larger audience

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than his novels. Its topic was the source and inspiration for Dixon’s collaboration on the screenplay with D. W. Griffith for The Birth of a Nation. This 1915 blockbuster film adaptation drew mass audiences and unprecedented praise for its “historical accuracy” and “fidelity” to the racial hiearchy that deemed blacks inferior to whites.54 Although the play received uneven reviews and created controversy, it also earned many accolades from audiences, especially in the South.55 The play enabled Dixon to translate his already theatricalized stereotypes from the page to the stage, and from individual consumption to collective consumption, in order to captivate and instruct a growing audience. Almost a year to the date after Dixon’s play opened in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 22, 1905,56 audiences “packed the aisles” of Atlanta’s Grand Opera House in 1906, despite protests from the vocal “black intelligentsia” and from some southern newspapers arguing that the play warped white supremacy. The audience cheered when “Klansmen assembled before a blazing cross, and roared when sheeted whitecaps astride a half-dozen live steeds raced across the stage to save Southern womanhood,” and when “Dixon strode before the footlights after the third act and extolled his father as a member of the original Klan, hundreds stood and applauded, including Governor Joseph Terrell of Georgia.”57 This type of polemical spectacle helped galvanize white righteousness and foment the city’s racial strife. It fueled the intensification of black–white antagonism to such an extent that an armed mob of at least ten thousand men and youths — instigated by reports and rumors of black male attacks on white women — attacked scores of blacks and lynched at least twenty-five across Atlanta.58 The Clansman is the epitome of extreme racist doctrines. It condenses the long history of antiblack sentiment (and two long pieces of fiction) into a four-act play, and thus can be read as a reanimation of historically sedimented, static renderings of race into an updated but equally simplistic popular drama. Not surprisingly, the end result obscures the complexities of dynamic interplay between race and intersecting categories of gender, class, nation, and region.59 One of the frightening aspects of The Clansman is simply how familiar it is. Dixon expertly translates iconic stereotypes from the page to the stage, building his didactic racist ideology from the deep well of American racism.60 Whether novel to play, play to novel, or even play to film, the translatability of Dixon’s emblematic racialized tales was facilitated by his use of reductive caricatures regardless of genre. The spectacular dramatic form lent itself to a more forceful, almost slogan-like,

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rhetoric that carried with it the power to mobilize audiences.61 The stage enabled Dixon to transform his antimiscegenation ideology into a polemical racial drama that (re)produced and imparted white-supremacist propaganda to his audiences. When comparing Dixon’s work with Chesnutt’s portraits of similar types, we can see the intersecting and divergent ideological and cultural underpinnings of both these strategic stagings. These boundary crossings, despite polarized ideology, result in the generative trope of miscegenation that both authors employ in their works. The works also demonstrate the malleability and performativity of identity — race, gender, regional, national, sexual, class, cultural, etcetera — that these authors both employ strategically — drawing from an intersecting and somewhat limited pool of miscegenation discourse in order to promote their opposing yet intersecting perspectives on the future of the globe. Set in Piedmont, South Carolina, in 1867, The Clansman opens with a  group of blacks discussing their newly legislated right to vote, excited about the possibilities that Reconstruction offers. The play tells the story of how these former slaves gain power over a short period of months unscrupulously. Led by ardent northern abolitionist Austin Stoneman, they take over the local government, winning all the elections and appointed civil ser vice positions, including the police force. The first law that Stoneman proposes is the legalization of interracial marriage—an act that would be viewed by local whites as an unspeakable affront to the sanctity of their race. Stoneman, who is modeled on the real-life northern abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens, whom Dixon despised, is portrayed as the brains behind a black “reign of terror.” For Dixon, Stevens’s miscegenous intimacy with a mulatta symbolized the corruption of not only the domestic southern locale of his dramatic piece but also the nation and the globe. Berating Stevens in his autobiography, Dixon referred to him as “the Dictator of the Republic” who contaminated his “white” familial domain by “living with a negro woman who dominated his life and was dictating the program of prescription, confiscation, negro equality, and revenge against the South! . . . This malevolent social outcast had suddenly become master of the nation, determined to destroy Lincoln’s plan of Reconstruction and enforce one of his own, inspired by his black mistress.”62 Invoking this relationship, Dixon pairs Stoneman with Silas Lynch, a mixed-race “black” man whom he has educated and mentored, to lead the Black League in Piedmont. Under the auspices of migrating South for health reasons, Stoneman and his daughter Elsie move to Piedmont, enabling him

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to secretly direct the blacks in power. Complicating Stoneman’s plan is the fact that Elsie has met and fallen in love with Ben Cameron — a racist Confederate soldier — while working as a Civil War nurse in the North. Although they love each other, and she has earned the love and respect of Ben’s friends and family (especially his father, Dr. Richard Cameron, and his younger sister, Flora), his beliefs conflict with her father’s and prevent any sanctioned union between them. Despite his love for Elsie, Ben actively combats her father’s political activities because he equates black political power with the desire to possess and/or rape white women. Ultimately, his fear is justified by Flora’s murder (supposedly perpetrated by Gus, Piedmont’s newly appointed black sheriff ). When the white community discovers Flora’s death, they enlist the full support of the Ku Klux Klan, establishing a chapter in Piedmont with Ben Cameron as its leader. When Elsie discovers Ben’s involvement in the Klan, she unsuccessfully entreats him to quit and then regretfully leaves him to support her father. Klan violence quickly escalates, resulting in Gus’s murder, the forceful disarmament of black soldiers, and terrorism against blacks. In the meantime, Stoneman calls in federal troops to quell the violence. In an impromptu hearing, Stoneman exposes Ben’s involvement with the Klan, resulting in Ben’s arrest. Confronting Piedmont’s white rebellion, Lynch attempts to regain control by establishing martial law. He also has a secret desire to possess Elsie. To demonstrate his supreme power in the town, Lynch condemns Ben to death and attempts to woo Elsie. She rejects Lynch; he responds by taking her hostage. Stoneman, who has been in Washington to update the president, returns to Piedmont, at first unaware of the hostage situation, and wonders if he has judged Ben too severely. However, once Lynch and Stoneman reconnect, Lynch persuades Stoneman that Ben’s death is the right course of action; Stoneman and Lynch then express their mutual desire for equality. Assuming he has earned Stoneman’s respect, Lynch reveals his hostage Elsie and his wish to marry her. The very idea repulses Stoneman and reveals his hypocrisy. In this climactic scene, Lynch threatens to kill Elsie if Stoneman interferes with his marriage plan. While they wait for a minister, the Klan arrives just in time to arrest Lynch and save Elsie. The play concludes in a flurry of racist victory: the blacks of Piedmont are subordinated, the Ku Klux Klan are heroes, and Ben and Elsie are reunited. Of all of the threats that blackness poses to the stability of the white community in Dixon’s play, the possibility of black–white intimacy of any

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sort is the most dangerous. Tapping into the anxiety that interracial unions produced, Dixon foregrounds them at the beginning of the play, evoking contemporaneous sentiment that black agency and equality would devolve into racial intermixture. Contrary to the historical reality of the postReconstruction era — the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation and the legal and extralegal persecution and criminalization of “free” black men — the first act of the play centers on the first official “act” of Piedmont’s newly minted African American government: the legalization of interracial marriage. Dixon, like Chesnutt, centers his drama on miscegenation and the innumerable issues it brings forth; like Chesnutt, he too trades on the commonly held belief that miscegenation was not only unnatural but also immoral. As we have discussed, the flurry of late nineteenth-century legal rulings brought a new gravity to miscegenation and its illegality; to Dixon’s audiences, therefore, a black government’s announcement that interracial marriage was legal would have seemed a terrifying inversion of all that was natural and right. The law, which to some whites in the early twentieth century must have seemed the last bulwark against a dark-hued chaos and destruction, emerges in Dixon’s exaggerated portrait as an antiwhite weapon. In light of this racially polarized climate, Stoneman’s request that Lynch announce the new law by posting “the proclamation of the Commanding General on the intermarriage of blacks and whites” would seem absurd — perhaps even designed to impassion viewers. Unlike the Lynch portrayed in the novel — who supports this new law vigorously — Lynch, who stands onstage, face to face with a boisterous audience, expresses reluctance about this public act, maintaining that “the marriage of blacks and whites is a dangerous subject, sir!”63 Although it is arguable that the introduction of this pro-miscegenation platform was imaginable only because it was staged, Dixon’s emphasis on Lynch’s hesitation registers his (and his viewers’) knowledge of the violence that this explosive subject generated well beyond the boundaries of the theatre.64 In fact, the black editor J. Max Barber suggested that the play’s enactment of black male desire for white women helped provoke a “mob spirit” — and perhaps contributed, as mentioned, to the Atlanta race riots in September 1906. Dixon rehearses the “solutions” to the explosive problems his play introduces in a relatively “safe” space. But the question must be asked: “safe” for whom? Certainly, blacks who were implicated by the accusation of rape beyond the walls of the theater were not safe and could quickly become the targets

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of violence. At the same time, though, it is possible that within the theatrical space, this rehearsal allowed for a cathartic expression of violence that Dixon, and other white supremacists, hoped to then channel into political, social, and economic policies that subordinated not only blacks, but also any groups, both domestic and global, whom white Anglo-Saxon supremacists considered uncivilizated and in need of imperial rule. Either way, Dixon’s reenactment of miscegenation and its consequences indicate that the trope of miscegenation provided a powerful generative site for addressing the racialized tensions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout the play, black political power and civil rights are equated with access to white women. Supporting this objective, the opening scene, set near the Camerons’ rustic, reputable home is overshadowed by “characteristic crowds of negroes . . . all laughing, talking, shouting with noisy enthusiasm.”65 The Camerons’ tranquil residence, decorated with manicured shrubbery, seems to represent the stability and security of the past that is being violated by uncultivated blacks. Ben Cameron responds to this visible threat and to Stoneman’s promotion of interracial marriage, declaring angrily: “And in the end permit the negro to meet our mothers and our sisters as social equals. Never, sir, — so help me God!”66 Ben’s claim that black–white racial social mingling is morally reprehensible is supported by all the other white southern men in the play. For example, General Forrest raises the stakes when he claims that social interaction will lead to crimes against white womanhood: “The next step downward and you enter the shadows of the unspoken terror — the grip of a black beast’s claws on a white girl’s throat!”67 His hysterical comments transform blacks into murderous animals. This bestialization of black men reinforces accusations of rape, which, as we have seen, were cited repeatedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to justify lynching.68 The image of the “black beast” also indirectly equated the need to police uncivilized blacks with similar imperialist rationales used throughout Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and Central and South America, as witnessed in the unspoken parallels exhibited in the “ethnic” non-Western villages at the 1904 St. Louis Fair and elsewhere. As long as black men remain inhuman, the only way that an interracial encounter with a white woman can be imagined is as a pathological rape scene. Yet, the issue of rape is so explosive that Dixon’s characters never utter the word explicitly. They merely reference it throughout the play, invoking its horrors without even needing to give voice to that

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most terrible of fears, using silence and inference to stoke the whitesupremacist cause. According to historical accounts of the play’s reception, boisterous responses, ranging from hisses to cheers, suggested that audience members reacted to and identified with these rhetorical devices.69 Helping to build the crescendo of the white-supremacist movement in the play, Dixon uses the most threatening character, Silas Lynch, to embody and enact miscegenation. This coupling of miscegenation and lynching echoes Samira Kawash’s contention that the two are inextricably linked: “Just as miscegenation is the crime in which all anxieties and absurdities of white purity and the color line are embodied, lynching is the symbolic and bodily response to miscegenation’s threat to whiteness and racial separation.”70 Lynch’s mixed-race identity provides a constant reminder of interracial sex, and in his continual transgressions of the social and legal lines that separate blacks and whites, he invokes fears about the contamination of whiteness. However, his eventual subordination and castigation also demonstrate the powerful masculinized forces put into place by “New Southerners” to maintain and enforce white supremacy. Lynch’s character can also be read as a reminder of the historically factual crimes of miscegenation (as well as the hidden consensual unions) that created the racially mixed men and women who confounded the color line and troubled the eugenicist theories used to promote Anglo-Saxon superiority. Lynch’s character also creates moments of fissure in Dixon’s play because of his liminal status. As the only educated “black” character, he represents the greatest danger to whites who want to subordinate him. Lynch represents the threat of granting freedom and providing education for blacks. At the same time, Dixon depicts Lynch as the worst kind of brute in order to amplify both his corrupt power and the ultimate justification for his destruction. But, by demonstrating Lynch’s capacity to learn and govern, Dixon’s portrayal contradicts rhetoric about the innate inferiority of blacks. Lynch speaks eloquently and challenges the notion that blacks are naturally inferior to whites. In addition to moving in and out of these polemic formulations of blackness, Lynch also takes on both masculinized and feminized characteristics. In some instances, when Dixon foregrounds his danger, Lynch appears hypermasculine; but, in others, when Dixon emphasizes his weaknesses, Lynch takes on characteristics that could be read as feminine. For example, he plays a subordinate role to Stoneman, who continually reminds Lynch of his need to assert his manhood. Lynch’s shifting roles expose contradictions in Dixon’s construction of the

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threatening mulatto, as well as in other rigid formulations of race and gender that are constructed in relation to Lynch. Because Lynch does not perform consistently as essentially black or white, male or female, or even civilized or bestial, those identities that are constituted in relation to his status are also destabilized. As an emblem of black–white intermingling, Lynch’s indeterminacy troubles the rigid racial hierarchy that fixes his identity, as well as the identities of other characters with whom he comes in contact. His mobile status troubles Dixon’s efforts to produce a monolithic model of miscegenation as contaminating and destructive. Adding further intrigue to Lynch is the possibility, advocated by Glenda Gilmore, that the character is influenced by a biracial man who claimed to be the son of Dixon’s father and their African American female cook — and thus Dixon’s half brother. The complexity of Lynch’s role then spoke to the inherent contradictions, illicit practices, and hypocrisies of whitesupremacist doctrines.71 Ironically, Lynch’s role also literally gave a voice onstage to the illegitimacy that his character embodies. However, despite all of the “messy” elements of the United States’ racial, gendered, sexualized history and Dixon’s own father’s alleged interracial exploits, Dixon telescoped the corruption in Lynch’s role in his dramatic rendition of history. According to this portrait, black male predators must be controlled by the utopian white-dominated civilization that Dixon envisioned. And the only way to eliminate the sins of the past was through the redemption of white supremacy and the complete subordination of free blacks, especially those who threatened to infiltrate the sacred boundaries of white culture. Following this logic, it is no surprise that early in the play, while discussing his aspirations with Governor Shrimp, Lynch alludes to his goal of possessing a white woman:72 “A little secret, Governor, My fight for wealth and power is a means to an end and the Camerons may give me trouble in gaining that end — the one white dream of my soul, — before which all other ambitions fade! I’ve set my heart on it — .” Like other characters in the play who only allude to this controversial issue, Lynch does not express his objectives directly; however, he voices the standard (white) argument that black aspirations for power are linked to an underlying desire for white women. Shrimp reiterates the issue by asking: “What’s your white girl’s name?”73 He also adds that no matter who she is, Lynch’s interest in her is equivalent to signing his own death warrant, warning Lynch that his desire for a white woman represents a direct threat to white patriarchal privilege. This interpretation exposes the gender politics, present in every one of our texts, that reduce white women to property. Ownership

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of white women — the vehicle through which masculinity is ensured — reinforces the authority and power of white men. With such foreshadowing, it is no surprise when Flora disappears. Once again, indicating that this crime is unspeakable, we only hear indirect references to her rape. This small but crucial plot point is in fact a condensation of two explicit descriptions of black attacks on white women in Dixon’s novels. In The Leopard’s Spots, an innocent young girl, Flora, is murdered by a black man. In The Clansman: A Historical Romance, a mother and her daughter are sexually assaulted by several black officers; afterward they jump off a cliff to their death rather than live with their shame.74 In Dixon’s play, Flora’s death takes on the symbolic importance of both instances. Rather than allow her to live, Dixon eradicates her contaminated body from the play. Like the women who jump from the cliff, her assault is represented as so horrible that it cannot be represented within the imaginable boundaries of the stage. Dixon telescopes the value and innocence associated with white womanhood, along with the horror of its corruption, into the crime committed against Flora. Her murder embodies the dangers that black equality poses for whites. In contrast to the novels, which describe the assaults through the voice of the omniscient narrator, in the play Flora’s death is revealed to the audience through Gus’s forced confession, directed by Dr. Cameron, who mesmerizes him in order to elicit a full description. Cameron commands Gus to perform the crime in front of angry Klansmen: “She — she comin’ — now — now I git her — ” / (Eyes gleaming, lips agape, fingers clawed, body trembling for the spring) / “Now — now — ” / (Crawling cat-like — suddenly springs, clawing, gripping breathlessly) / “Uh — uh — She git loose! — she gone!” / (Instantly rising to his knees — repairing rapidly) / “Come back! I ain’t gwine to hurt ye!” / (Pause) / “Look out! You go ober de cliff !”/ (Pause — staring) / “Gawd er mighty! She jump clean over!”/ (Awed peers over cliff ) / “She drownin’! She in de ribber drownin!”75 Gus’s description, as well as his wild gesticulations, provide the Klan with the evidence they need to murder him and terrorize other blacks in town. However, in Gus’s reenactment of the story, he frightens Flora rather than harming her intentionally. And Dr. Cameron must hypnotize Gus in order to get him to admit that he has done anything at all. It could be argued, in

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fact, that Gus was treating Flora the same way that other blacks and whites treat her—like a “pet”—and that it was racist fears instilled in her by others that led to her death/suicide. Still, Dixon’s narrative resists this reading by foreshadowing Gus’s predatory inclinations and by showing us Gus’s voyeuristic surveillance of Flora in earlier scenes. This characterization of Gus’s degeneracy is another example of the impact of psuedoscientific theories on our two authors, here concerning eugenics and other theories attesting to the innate genetic inferiority of African Americans. In contrast to interpreting Gus’s hypnotic state as a means for eliciting the truth, however, it can be read as a form of control that forces him to play out the racist role imposed on him by whites. This performance within the performance indicates that Gus is merely playing his role as the serviceable black body that adheres to the desires of whites in power. From this perspective, Dixon’s playing out of the typical racist rationale for lynching becomes less straightforward, and perhaps even a little ambiguous. It is staged less as a declaration of white supremacy, and more as a rehearsal of black guilt in which both whites in Klan costume76 and Gus stage their overdetermined roles. We can also gain insight into Dixon’s ideology through the distribution of characters in the play. There is not a single mulatta character, even though a mulatta named Lydia plays a crucial and destabilizing role in his novel. She lives with Stoneman before he moves to South Carolina, is referred to as a “yellow fiend,” and is characterized as the seductive powerhungry manipulator of Stoneman. Further, there is only one black woman in the play, Eve, who is the familiar embodiment of the happy mammy. With this construction, the play reduces the presence of black womanhood and replaces it with exaggerated and polemical images of black manhood (read as irrepressible sexuality) and white womanhood (read as pure and vulnerable). Similarly, out of the two central white female characters, Nellie’s (a local southern belle who is in love with Ben) role functions as foil to Elsie’s. She demonstrates a rebellious nature by insisting that Ben induct her into the Klan fraternity, and it is she who rides out into the wilderness to report Lynch’s assault on Elsie. Nellie’s enactment of the conventionally male heroic role suggests that white women are more than capable of protecting themselves. The one objective she shares with Elsie is her commitment to preserving white supremacy, reproducing the complicity and silence of some white women around issues of racial discrimination, while

The Klan forces a confession from Gus before they lynch him. The actor playing Gus is in blackface. The Clansman, Thomas Dixon. Courtesy of North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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they simultaneously challenged inequalities based on gender. However, Nellie’s role as a savior can also be read as unsettling strict gender formulations. She is the vehicle through which white masculinity, in the form of the Klan, enacts its power. However, Nellie’s independent white womanhood (which could be read as a metaphor for white female sexuality “out of control”) is upstaged by male Klan members’ heroic rescue of Elsie; this scene culminates with Elsie’s celebrated marriage to Ben rather than any acknowledgment of Nellie’s role; she remains unaccounted for and unmarried. She drops out of the staged frame, suggesting that her anomalous representation of white womanhood is neither contained nor containable. The binarized structures on which Dixon relies do not account for Nellie’s role. Her mysterious disappearance also intersects with Dixon’s and other white supremacists’ belief that women were the ultimate uplifters of the white race whose roles would be most effectively played out through romantic heterosexual love and the legal sanction of marriage. And since white women represented the purity of the white race (especially since they had the dual task of reproducing future generations and transmitting culture), the stakes of keeping them under control in the domestic realm were high. Accordingly, higher education and political activism for women that extended beyond feminized domestic concerns were viewed as destructive. This circumscribed role for white women would have echoed the sentiments of Rebecca Felton, who advocated for progress at the same time that she upheld strict elitist and Victorian standards for white women and the men who were supposed to protect them. By foregrounding reductive models of black male and white female identity, Dixon’s play exaggerates the threat of black freedom and reiterates the need for unified white hegemony. It also avoids including the more-complex characters that he was able to flesh out more fully in his novelistic version. However, his reliance on polarized models makes their constructedness, for ideological purposes, more visible, which once again created space for alternative possibilities that exceeded the limits of this reductive formulation of race/gender roles. In other words, by conflating differences of all kinds into a binarized divide separating “black” men and “white” women emblematized in and through the staging of miscegenation, Dixon produced a unified model of (masculinized) whiteness that reigned supreme over all populations and subject positions, smoothing over conflicts and contestations in the name of his version of an ethically sound righteousness. In this creation of a reductive unified veneer, Dixon’s

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work masked the complex racialized, political, class, (trans)national, and regional differences that continually threatened to rupture the veiled façade that he helped to erect around mainstream culture.77 Promoting (the Fallacy of) White Supremacy

With representational strategies that rival Chesnutt’s efforts to undermine racist rhetoric, Dixon reinforced his defense of white supremacy by imbuing it with a larger-than-life quality. By using the trappings of theatre to spectacularize both white power’s legitimate role and the forces that threaten its hegemony, Dixon increased the visibility of white supremacy and intensified its presence in the play. Like Chesnutt, Dixon articulated his beliefs and practiced his advocacy in multiple arenas. Certainly, he was no stranger to public speaking, given his experience in the pulpit and at the podium. Addressing large audiences who shared his beliefs, in places like Manhattan’s Twenty-third Street Baptist Church and the YMCA, he promoted the active pursuit of white hegemony as an expression of religious beliefs through reform and the reformation of society.78 Attesting to the popularity of his sensational oration, his public addresses and sermons were covered in New York newspapers in both the religion and the drama sections. In his work as a minister and a paid public speaker, he politicized the nation’s two-pronged “divine” mission: to civilize the republic and to assist in the “natural evolution” of humanity. He explicitly linked Christian patriotism to segregationist domestic policies and imperialistic “Anglo-Saxon” world alliances, even going so far as to offer “war prayers” justifying the U.S. invasion of the Philippines and Cuba.79 Following that logic, Dixon predicted that with active vigilence, “American Christian virtue” would replace the darker races with white Anglo civilization and thus bring about world unity.80 The intersection of his theory of the disappearance of the races with Chesnutt’s is striking, despite their distinct views on how miscegenation would accomplish this eventuality, and what the end result would look like. Throughout The Clansman, Dixon incorporated imagery, signs, and symbols of white domination. In fact, the theatrical frame reconstituted white hegemony through its exaggerated and forced reenactments of the crime of miscegenation and the threat of black freedom. For example, Dixon’s Klan members legitimize their actions with claims that their sacrosanct brotherhood represents law, order, peace, and justice and that they

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belong to an “institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism.”81 They share with the national organization a universal goal of maintaining and enforcing white hegemony and eliminating primitive chaos, once again invoking the rhetoric of imperial expansion and colonization. Intensifying this spectacle’s impact, Dixon’s characters indicate that their local tragedy is part of an explosive issue of epidemic proportions, including their use of common phrases like “the Negro Problem” and “The White Man’s Burden,” which implies that they — and other aggrieved whites — contend with far more than a local menace. In the second scene of Act Three, when the Klan gathers to punish Gus, their prisoner, Dixon amplifies the white-supremacist cause into a (trans)national crisis that extends beyond the boundaries of the stage. Like Chesnutt, Dixon includes fragments of history in his drama that blur the lines between fact and fiction, offering audiences a live rehearsal of conflicts that they were also negotiating in real life (such as immigration, westward expansion, and U.S. imperialism, as well as illegal activities, such as lynching and rioting).82 Still, Dixon’s use of Stoneman to reenact the fate of a white man contaminated by black intimacy resists complete incorporation into the whitesupremacist-conquers-all ending that is offered. By suggesting that Stoneman’s close contact with blackness pollutes his whiteness, Dixon contradicts his own underlying theory that blackness and whiteness remain distinct, oppositional, self-contained categories. For example, throughout the drama he characterizes Stoneman as “black,” because he voluntarily identifies himself with a black political agenda and engages regularly in interracial relations. The unintentional suggestion is that racial identification is something that can be appropriated and that is socially constructed, as we have seen in earlier works, rather than an intrinsic quality. And despite Dixon’s move to reincorporate Stoneman at the end of the play, his alliance with blacks opens up the possibility for black–white relations that challenge Dixon’s static segregationist model. In fact, Stoneman and Lynch’s relationship could be read in terms of its transgressive homoerotic interracial undertones, another type of staged miscegenation. Lynch serves as Stoneman’s partner in crime. And even though Stoneman eventually rejects Lynch, their interracial bond empowers them both, at least temporarily, enabling Stoneman to assert his authority over, as well as his distinction from, blackness. Rather than merely reiterating the distinction between whiteness and blackness, their interracial union and mutual contamination trouble the categories of

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whiteness and blackness, regardless of the play’s conclusion. In order to compensate for their unsettling interracial alliance, Dixon enforces the power of whiteness twofold by amplifying Stoneman’s ultimate vehement conversion to white supremacy. Stoneman’s reformation at the end of the play inflates the powerful threat of black freedom depicted in the play by demonstrating how even the white character most sympathetic to blacks cannot tolerate the disruptive potential of miscegenation. It also reemphasizes the need both for whites to stick together and for the fortification of the borders that separate “black” from “white.” By foregrounding the binarized language of miscegenation, Dixon was then able to map it onto (trans)national, economic, political, racialized, gendered, regional, and social dynamics that characterized this transitional post-Reconstruction moment in the United States. In doing so, he renders these multifaceted concerns into a recognizable, readable, and racialized reproduction of the black–white divide that was easily transferable to other challenges to the supremacy of whiteness, such as the “negroid” racial classification of Filipino and Chinese immigrants and their subsequent disenfranchisement. This imposition of the conflated black– white polarity onto other nonwhites, who were both imported as competitive laborers or geographcially displaced because of U.S. military occupation and conquest, erases the historical specificity of their experience in the United States and fuses their identity with African Americans. The ultimate triumph of the Klan at the end of the play conflates white supremacy with a type of masculinized physical prowess. Responding to the racist stereotype of the hypermasculine black man, part of the Klan’s objective was to restore and assert the power of white masculinity, which was certainly impacted by the losses incurred during the Civil War, the new policies instituted during Reconstruction, and the feminization of southern regions that, like colonizable sites abroad, were considered underdeveloped and available for reoccupation and industrial development. The play’s conclusion enabled white aristocrats to display their power while simultaneously destroying gains made by blacks. The literal and symbolic arrest of Lynch conflates the loss of black manhood with the forced termination of political power.83 Both are instantaneously stripped from Lynch by the Klan. The powerful impact of this moment is reinforced by Elsie’s public unification with Ben. When white men, in the form of the chivalric Klan, reclaim Elsie, they enact the ultimate defeat and emasculinization of black men. This triumph of white male supremacy, which

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instigated loud cheers from audiences, replicated the mass spectatorship of lynchings during which the mutilation, burning, and destruction of black men’s bodies, especially their genitalia, staged the remasculization of white supremist male valor, vigor, and dominance. Resisting and Revising

By foregrounding the fictions that support racism, Chesnutt questions many of the claims used to reinforce it. The most extreme example is the violence sparked by accusations of black men raping white women. Directly opposing the formulaic hysteria of sensational nineteenth-century newspaper accounts and personal testimonies, Chesnutt suggests that stories about rape are staged, based on lies and perverted truths. In fact, he also offers a preemptive strike earlier in the novel by uncovering the legal status of Olivia’s white father and Janet’s black mother. By presenting in advance this nuanced counternarrative to antimiscegenation — one that highlights points of contestation, fissures, or even overlaps — Chesnutt’s work speaks to some of the strategic gaps left open by white-supremacist discourse like that represented in Thomas Dixon’s plays and novels. By offering the fabricated story of a black man who attacks a white woman in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt emphasizes the constructed orchestration of white-supremacist propaganda. In this way, Chesnutt exposes the staging of black–white rape —recalling Tom’s other performance of the cakewalk — and reveals its underlying purpose of undermining black legitimacy, as well as legimate interracial unions. Tom’s racial impersonation lies at the center of Wellington’s “race war,” and as a result plays a critical role in Chesnutt’s explicit critique of white supremacy and antimiscegenation rhetoric. By exposing how the town’s explosive antiblack campaign is part of a carefully orchestrated drama,84 fueled by racist illusions rather than by any actual crime, Chesnutt’s novel interrupts the cyclical constitution of white-supremacist discourse. His fiction also intersects with his real-life interventions, such as his participation, along with other NAACP members, in protests and boycotts of both Dixon’s play and The Birth of a Nation. Chesnutt’s references to the performative aspects of this calculated white takeover also anticipate Dixon’s strategic staging of violent antiblack sentiment based on the crime of miscegenation. It suggests that the power of Dixon’s drama emerges out of its invocation of the historical sediment of racist propaganda, and its endless replication. By destabilizing the per-

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petual reproduction of propaganda, Chesnutt interrogates the legitimacy of Dixon’s model, marks its promotion and preservation of didactic doctrines, and highlights its failure to depict the complexities of this historical moment. Troubling the happily-ever-after conclusion of Dixon’s whitesupremacist fairy tale, Chesnutt’s novel resists resolution. The novel ends with Dr. Miller’s uneasy acceptance of Major and Olivia Carteret’s desperate appeal for medical assistance in order to save their son. In fact, critic Stephen Knadler suggests that in the scene in which Olivia kneels to beg for Miller’s help, she represents an object of sexual desire, particularly in her scantily dressed, disheveled, vulnerable state. As his wife’s almosttwin, she can stand in for Janet, but Miller refuses to take advantage of the “prostrate,” grief-stricken Olivia, thus refusing to imitate the history of white male exploitation of black women.85 This display of ethics and his refusal to captitulate to her appeals, claiming that his first duty is to his own family and to his own wife, also challenges the white-supremacist claim that miscegenation occurs because all black men possess an underlying desire to sexually dominate the sanctioned emblem of white masculine superiority — white women. In giving the doctor the courage to prioritize his own wife, Janet, a product of miscegenation, Chesnutt foregrounds her as a symbol of the future. In this instance, miscegenation represents a cooperative relationship in which the fates of Janet’s and Olivia’s families are joined because of generosity rather than exploitation. Whether or not this moment prefigures a shift in the antagonistic relationship between these two intertwined families or the possibility of a future alliance remains uncertain. However, the open acknowledgment of their families’ intersecting histories represents the first and only movement of Carteret’s entrenched personal and political views. This potential transformation in thinking is not even imaginable in Dixon’s Clansman. In fact, the black characters in his play do not approximate the intelligent and skilled blacks — doctor, newspaper editor, nurse — who make up a significant part of the community in Marrow. Although Chesnutt does not dismantle the polarizing discourse of race, class, or gender, he opens up the meanings and implications of miscegenation by staging it amid the overlapping regional, national, and transnational dynamics that troubled U.S. reliance on binarized racial classifications. Moreover, Chesnutt’s fascination with miscegenation’s potential to reformulate racial differences, as well as his literal embodiment of interracial identity, bridges the work of the Civil War–era and postbellum writers I

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discuss in the first part of this study and the early twentieth-century, pre–World War I writers that I discuss in the final chapters. Reading Chesnutt’s novel and Dixon’s play in terms of their overlapping and conflicted stagings of black–white intimacies during and after Reconstruction makes the inconsistencies and fissures within the mantle of miscegenation become more visible. Though the authors do not always intend it, within the crevices of these texts we can glimpse alternative formulations of white and black womanhood, for example, and the destabilization of masculinity and patriarchal structures. This comparative analysis demonstrates how both portraits engaged in an interactive and ongoing debate about how to articulate and (re)present the history of black and white relations in the United States, and to what end. For example, both Chesnutt and Dixon promoted utopian futures for the nation and world — albeit quite different ones — but their visions both relied on patriarchal, upper-class, and sexist/gendered models of family and reproduction that did not necessarily take into full account issues such as class conflicts, diasporic identifications, and alternative conventions of kinship and familial structure. Neither author’s work exhibits a significant challenge to the gendered heirarchy that relegated women to the private domestic space, the logic of eugenics, or the privileging of masculine agency and visibility in the public arena. Both, however, employ hybridized approaches — integrating performance, history, spectacle, propaganda, and entertainment — to articulate and circulate their beliefs. By engaging the era’s polarized model of blackness versus whiteness, Dixon’s and Chesnutt’s productions of miscegenation set the stage for further exploration of this highly contested issue. Their compelling portraits helped generate contemporaneous and alternative representations of interracial unions that recalled and reformulated the rigid racial codes and limited generic conventions that they simultaneously negotiated, challenged, and reinforced in their work and lives.

· CHAPTER 4 ·

The Remix: Afro-Indian Intimacies [The Red Moon] contrasts the joyous humor of the negro with the stoic bearing of the Indian; the pleasing and mellow harmony of negro music with the weird and primitive note of the aboriginal American. —Kansas City Post, November 7, 1908

Many strange tales of romantic happenings in this mixed community of Anglo-Saxons, Indians and Negroes might be told similar to the one I am about to relate, and the world stand aghast and try in vain to find the dividing line supposed to be a natural barrier between the whites and the dark-skinned race. —Narrator, in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest

A

s the united states continued its slide into legal segregation, the opening years of the twentieth century witnessed a quieter, but no less significant phenomena: the explosion of the black uplift movement. During the post–Civil War period, black migration out of the rural South to southern cities, the North, and the West was slow but steady, especially since Reconstruction had afforded blacks some sense of political and social agency. Between 1890 and 1900, rapid industrialization in the urban South created new urban employment opportunities for blacks, evidenced by a 31 percent increase in black employment in domestic and personal ser vice, 39 percent in trade and transportation, and 12.9 percent in manufacturing.1 However, the restrictions of segregation began to saturate every aspect of black life in both rural and urban settings, dictating when and where blacks could live, worship, go to school, shop, sit on trains, buses, and steamboats, as well as which doors they could use when entering · 141 ·

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private and public buildings, where and with whom they were allowed to fraternize, and, of course, whom they were allowed to marry. As a result, blacks survived by working collectively and resisting complete subordination in subtle and more visible ways, such as buying from black-owned businesses and organizing boycotts to stall the implementation of streetcar segregation in southern cities, such as the 1870, 1899, and 1906 boycotts in Savannah, Georgia.2 Despite the predictions of eugenicists, the “Negro problem” and presence did not disappear.3 Instead, this early generation of “New Negroes” — who migrated out of the former slaveholding South in search of new opportunities and self-determination—set into motion a long-term exploration of the diversity and hybridity of black life and its intersections with other races, nations, and cultures. The African American artists and performers I discuss in these final two chapters, Pauline E. Hopkins, Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, played vital roles as innovative black-identified cultural producers, following Charles Chesnutt’s lead. As we shall see, they also reframed the popular taboo of miscegenation, not as an inherent evil but as a fact of life that offered its own intriguing possibilities. Through different types of interracial and transnational intimacies, such as Afro-Native, Ethiopian-Anglo, and Afro-Cuban, these early twentieth-century cultural producers challenged the black– white polarity and racial hierarchies that haunted their work. As conditions worsened in the South economically and racial tensions grew, members of the educated and professional black elite began moving north in the early 1900s. As W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro attests, relocation was a mixed bag. He acknowledged the potential for black entrepreneurship and leadership in the North but also criticized the low quality of black urban life, addressing issues such as poverty, violence, and antiblack discrimination.4 His scholarly analysis attested to the visible black presence outside the South that, in a sense, cleared the way for the Great Migration that followed from 1910 to 1930, when more than 1.5 million southern blacks relocated to the North, Midwest, and West. However, this earlier movement of the black population was distinct because it coincided with the massive influx of foreign-born immigrants between 1901 and 1910.5 This complex intermixture of “aliens” of all kinds created a hybridized population that exposed the mutability of the line separating black and white, despite efforts to fix it.

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This post–Civil War, pre–World War I uncertainty contributed to the general public’s keen interest in the racially mixed character of the black population, as well as in the variegated white population. One effort at classification was attempted with the 1890 census. It segmented the black population, creating distinct categories and numbers for blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. A later report from the Census Bureau in 1910 estimated that three-fourths of the black population was of mixed blood; its statistics suggested that racial mixing was still occurring despite, or in spite of, the early twentieth-century entrenchment of the black–white divide. Rather than eliminating mixing, the increasingly segregated societal structures produced a different kind of miscegenation: the mixing of light-skinned and darker-skinned members of the black population. This development continued to transform the hue of black America, echoing the diversity of the white immigrant population that was also evolving through intermixture of all kinds. However, by 1920, the Census Bureau replaced the elaborate system of classifying blacks according to percentages of black blood with the old standby: black versus white. All blacks were categorized as “Negro,” and intermixed foreign and native-born whites, such as Irish Americans, became the new “halfbreeds.” Eventually, all whites were grouped in the same category but divided into three groups: “alien,” “having papers,” and “naturalized.” These classifications created a natural progression of those included in the category of “white” toward full U.S. citizenship.6 In this way, the Census Bureau attempted to make binarized order out of the seemingly chaotic and uncontained flood of new immigrants and black migrants throughout the United States. Still, despite competition with foreign-born immigrants and the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregationist mentalities, practices, and laws, many blacks were able to benefit from this demographic shift, such as black settlers on the frontier who hoped it would provide space for new opportunities. One of these places was the prosperous all-black township of Boley, Oklahoma, founded in 1903, and praised by prominent black figures like Booker T. Washington. That same year W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he commemorated the history and progress of black Americans; he also advocated the ongoing improvement of the race through education, civic involvement, and cultural production, and affirmed the unique value and contributions of people of color, not only in the United States, but also globally.7

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Boley boasted two colleges, including the interracial Creek-Seminole College, founded in 1906, which educated children of freedmen, Indians, and African American migrants.8 Black–Indian relations, such as these, complicated the black–white binary even as Jim Crow practices migrated west into “Indian territory,”9 along with black migrants and white settlers. Debates over the status of freed persons, including former black Indian slaves, and mixed black–Indians in tribal nations, such as the Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, interrupted but did not prevent the universal application of racial segregation transported from other parts of the country. Ultimately outnumbered by white landowners and tenants, blacks were relegated to one side of the segregated color line, while whites and Indians were assigned to the other. Some tribes fully embraced black or mixed-race members, acknowledging their particular interracial alliances and intimacies, while others excluded them in order to protect their independent status as separate nations and maintain their rightful ownership of tribal lands, which was determined by their ability to authenticate their distinct indigenous ancestry, identity, and culture. Many friendly Afro-Indian relations were tested as states, including Oklahoma, adopted constitutions that disenfranchised blacks and required Indians to disassociate themselves from blacks to protect their rights.10 Still, the fact of interracial mixing among Indians and blacks, as well as others, was evident and documented in official and unofficial records, such as various census reports, family trees, and personal accounts.11 Miscegenation was also embodied by the visually intermixed population and exhibited through the equally palpable intercultural overlaps, such as the cultural miscegenation that incorporated blacks into Indian nations. As their work demonstrates, Pauline Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team12 employed the social reality of racial hybridity, as well as complex AfroIndian relations, in their work to unsettle the monolithic narratives of black–white relations. This fact and the fear that more racially mixed progeny were being produced fueled anxiety about maintaining the color line. This preoccupation was particularly evident in schools where Indians and blacks were educated alongside one another. Interracial intimacy was strictly prohibited and punished in these institutions, while intraracial relations were actively promoted. However, despite regulations, intimate connections were formed. For example, black female teachers learned native languages and were able to forge lifelong bonds with some of their students.13 And even with its taboo status, interracial unions also took

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place between blacks and Indians, as well as between whites and Indians. However, the educational environment responded differently depending on the configuration of the interracial union. For example, marriages between white women and Indian men were condoned (and sometimes encouraged) because the union of a white teacher and an educated Indian was considered the measure of full acculturation, whereas black–indigenous unions were grounds for suspension or expulsion.14 These U.S. industrial schools, as they were called, were established, at first, to educate freed slaves after the Civil War and later, in the 1870s, to also educate Indians. They were modeled after U.S. missionary and imperial activities overseas, such as missionary and Civil War general Samuel Armstrong’s experiences with his missionary parents’ endeavors to “civilize” the indigenous Hawaii population from the 1830s until 1860. Located mostly in the southern states, these institutions, such as Virginia’s Hampton Institute, established by Armstrong in 1868, were also responses to the promotion of black civil rights and Indian rights during southern Reconstruction and at the turn of the twentieth century.15 They were structured in ways that paralleled global structures of racism, where whites occupied the highest administrative and teaching positions, African Americans were located in the middle, and native staff members were assigned the lowest status. Their structure echoed the legal and cultural sanctioning of segregation occurring nationwide by maintaining separate classrooms and living facilities for each group. The paternalistic educational mission also reinforced racial and class distinctions by forbidding the use of native languages and by focusing on domestic skills rather than on traditional academics.16 It is telling that in this early twentieth-century segregated institutional context, Indians occupied a lower position than blacks; however, this dynamic changed as the status of Indians changed in the 1920s and beyond. Once some Indians aligned themselves with whites and integrated into white Western culture, they were considered superior to blacks. Others, who resisted acculturation, were killed, or contained and forgotten. Published in the midst of these late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury debates around racial destiny and white supremacy, Pauline Hopkins’s serialized novel Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) and Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative musical, The Red Moon (1908), responded to the heightened polarization of black and white. This tension was ignited by increasingly popular theories of racial degeneracy and the inferiority of

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racial intermixture, such as Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)17 and Alfred P. Schultz’s Race or Mongrel, published the same year as the Red Moon’s debut.18 In contrast, the blackauthored works reconfigured the overpowering discourse of black–white miscegenation by introducing a multiracial cast of characters. In doing so, they shaped the cultural climate in significant ways that both complemented and contested segregationist politics, economics, and law. They upstaged the familiar “cover story” of bifurcated race and nation by foregrounding the performative, productive, and procreative possibilities of miscegenation, as well as the limitations of these reformulations. Their characters and casts echoed the history of interracial and intercultural miscegenation and tapped into anxieties about the intermixing of nonwhites that fueled segregationist policies in the early twentieth century. Inspired by their imaginative visions and lived experiences, Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team expanded the ways in which race was understood and enacted in society. Their creative and productive contributions serve as testaments to the resilience of black agency and voice in the early 1900s. Not only did Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team stage miscegenation in multiple geographic sites, their work also took into account the histories and contemporaneous patterns of migration and immigration. The United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a flurry of movement as a result of numerous factors: the legacy of Underground Railroad escape routes, the migration of African Americans out of the former Confederacy, the importation of Chinese laborers, the relocation of indigenous tribes to governmentally sponsored “Indian” territories, and the aggressive land-allotment policies that deterritorialized tribal lands and promoted white resettlement. The resulting depictions of intimate interracial contact foregrounded the variegated populations of multiple racial groups that were on the move, including mixed-race Indians, as well as whites and blacks. More and more shades were emerging on the American palette, a profusion of mixing that both complicated the black–white binary and provided more impetus to solidify it, at least for those who wanted to maintain the privileges of white supremacy that they enjoyed in the Jim Crow South. Following Chesnutt, the presumption in both works under discussion was that miscegenation was not only inevitable, but also potentially productive. Rather than reducing miscegenation to the unfortunate result of bad choices or unbridled lust, these works highlighted its representative potency; their stagings of

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miscegenation reenvisioned the legacy of this great American taboo, visualized the consequences of intermingling race, culture, and national origins in a different light, and reconsidered its impact on the individuals and communities depicted. As performing artists and producers of black cultural forms, Pauline Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team contended with the theatrics of racialized identity both in their art and in their everyday lives. They engaged the multilayered process of identity formation — seemingly essential for being black in America — by staging the ways that race was both socially and legally constructed, and materially embodied. They brought these hidden processes to life in multiple genres, such as drama, fiction, oratory, music, and nonfiction. As we have seen, they were not alone in this endeavor. All four individuals — Hopkins, Cole, and the Johnson brothers — were inspired by and in turn supported a growing number of artists in a variety of venues, including vaudeville, written narrative, dance, music, and public oration, who negotiated the shifting color line and its local and global implications. Their work and lives staged the contested meanings of race, nation, gender, and class at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the context of ongoing efforts to solidify the boundaries of these classifications.19 At this particular moment, as we have seen, the black–white color line was heavily entrenched through legalized and social segregation. At the same time, however, the oppositionality of black and white was unsettled by contradictory legal and scientific discourse about who belonged on which side of the line. As discussed earlier, this schism was reinforced by early twentieth-century appeals for citizenship based on legal determinations as to whether or not the person was classifiable as “white.” Certainly, some ethnic immigrant groups were absorbed more readily into the fold of whiteness. For example, London-born, Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s popular 1908 Broadway drama, The Melting Pot, offered an idealized reconfiguration of miscegenation that not only applauded marriage across ethnic lines but also idealized the complexities of the assimilation process in the United States. Zangwill’s play depicted a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between two Russian immigrants, one Jewish and one Greek Orthodox. Despite initial conflicts and protest, the two unite and adopt the assimilationist view that they are bound by their newly acquired American identity.20 This success story differed greatly from the everyday experiences of white and nonwhite

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immigrants and working-class laborers whose actions were continually under surveillance and who were not so seamlessly admitted as full citizens of the United States. Decisions about who counted as “white” and was therefore entitled to citizenship varied, exposing the subjectivity and strategic drawing of the color line for different ethnicities and nationalities in order to support white supremacy. In a few of such innumerable examples the slipperiness of racial categories is evident. For example, in 1909 the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York determined that Knight (whose first name did not appear in the court case report) was not “white” because although his father was English, his mother was half Chinese and half Japanese; it did not matter that he had served in the U.S. Navy for more than twenty-five years and knew no other home than the United States. But that same year, the federal courts in Georgia and Boston determined than Syrian applicant Costa Najour and Armenian applicant Jacob Henry Halladijan were both “white.”21 This was also the same year that popular dramatist Edward Sheldon debuted his sentimental drama of passing on Broadway, titled The Nigger. Unlike Zangwill’s idealized marriage, the protagonist’s discovery that he has black ancestry repels his southern aristocratic fiancée and destroys his bid for governor, along with his social standing. Ironically, though, the play also suggests that his “secret” could easily remain hidden because of his mastery of white male authority — a not-so-subtle gesture reinforcing the performance of race. Unlike Sheldon’s dramatic success, all of the applicants for U.S. citizenship, who were of mixed racial and/or ethnic ancestry during the same time period, were excluded from the category of white, inaccurately suggesting that some “pure” definition of “whiteness” existed, rather than the jumbled reality of fluctuating and contested meanings. Given that many mixed-race blacks could pass as “white,” or at least as some non-Anglo nationality or ethnicity, and given that the immigrant population was increasingly diversified because of U.S. expansion and shifts in labor markets, the spectrum of racial difference grew enormously around the turn of the twentieth century. This continuum complicated the strict bifurcation of black and white that informed every stratum of society. The classification of these varied bodies occurred not only in conventional performance arenas but also in courtrooms, on the streets, in battles over contested territories, and in legal and political documents. Creative venues highlighting the artificiality of racial definitions intersected with actual Supreme Court proceedings that transformed the social-legal per-

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formance of race into policies and practices with material consequences. Legal decisions, like those cited earlier, constructed racial and national identities that not only determined where one could work, how much one could earn, or where one could live, but also whether or not one possessed the humanity and an acceptable percentage of “white” ancestry to be counted as a full citizen of the United States. As we look further, we see in these years a country that is obsessed with performance, in all its myriad manifestations, and we see how racial ideas are endlessly constructed, both consciously and unconsciously, both on the stage and on the street. Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team rehearsed interracial intimacies in their work to limn out the inconsistencies of ideological racial categorization. In their representations of miscegenation, they also invoked familiar racial passing narrative conventions in a manner that revised and unsettled conclusions established by earlier iterations of the same subjects, like the fear of racial atavism generated by interracial sex. In this way, their work highlighted the contours of black and white racial identities and intervened in the ongoing constitution of the rigid classifications of black and white. In an attempt to open up fixed racial systems, Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team produced pieces that performed multiple functions: they exposed the performative aspects of race and simultaneously invoked and transformed conventional forms that, more often than not, rigidified identities. Following earlier and contemporaneous cultural producers like Louisa May Alcott, Charles Chesnutt, and Thomas Dixon, Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team employed their artistry to engage in the sociopolitical environment in which they worked and lived. As racial segregation and white-supremacist imperial power became more solidified, the need to voice critiques became more urgent. The power of white-supremacist beliefs saturated multiple realms of society, evidenced by the increasing popularity of the eugenics movement and the grand display of racialnationalist hierarchies at popular public venues such as the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, which showcased inferior “conquered” races in exhibits like the Philippines Reservation. The scientific, cultural, political, and economic rationale for racial stratification at home and abroad supported the global solidification of white supremacy; it also contributed to heightened tensions between and among populations still struggling for self-determination and agency in a world that continually threatened to subordinate and exclude them, such as free blacks, indigenous populations,

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Pacific Islanders, and newer immigrant groups, such as eastern Europeans. Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team lent their voices to the cacophony.22 Amid the rising din of race in the twentieth century, these authors pushed beyond the standard division of the color line. Whereas the works we have considered so far were mostly bound by the intersection of North and South and black and white, our two works here push in new physical and emotional directions: into the West, and into relationships between African Americans and Native Americans. Both works emerged out of a complex triangulated history among indigenous nations, U.S. whites, and blacks (both enslaved and free). In the context of earlier eighteenth-century colonial struggles for power and domination between England, France, and Spain in the southeastern territories including Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, alliances between blacks and indigenous populations were feared. This would have also included blacks from the Caribbean, who hailed from contested colonial sites, and maroons, who escaped and hid in the swamps that were more familiar to Indian tribes, like the Seminoles, than to colonial settlers. In fact, some white settlers and government officials promoted hostilities between Indians and blacks by paying for the return of escaped slaves and by maintaining strict boundaries to prevent daily Afro-Indian interactions. White colonists also promoted the “savagery” of indigenous people by encouraging and publicizing Indian–black violence, referring to scalpings and other kinds of torture of blacks by their Indian captors.23 For example, the white minority in South Carolina feared a coordinated uprising by Creek Indians, so they attempted to prevent intimacy and communication not only among various tribes but also between “settlement Indians” living on the outskirts of town and enslaved labor.24 This tense relationship was complicated by the fact that some Indians kept slaves, while others, like the Seminole in Florida, the Pamunkey of Virginia, and the Croatan/ Lumbee of North Carolina,25 associated with and joined forces with escaped and free blacks.26 After the Civil War, both within the United States and globally, race was in many ways even more fiercely contested. The brief advances toward black equality during southern Reconstruction were quickly dismantled, and simultaneously, the national status of indigenous populations was challenged by laws such as the 1887 General Allotment Act (the Dawes Act);27 furthermore, Indian removal and segregation continued, and imperial conquest and colonization of “inferior” nonwhites (particularly

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indigenous peoples, south and east Asians, and those with African ancestry) remained central to expansionist policies originating from Europe and England and transported to places like the United States, the Americas, and the Caribbean.28 Alongside these ongoing imperial struggles, racial uplift and self-improvement formed a central part of the progressive movement both within black and native communities and in intersecting outside sites, such as educational and religious reform movements. Educated middleclass blacks and Native American citizens, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Eastman — a Dakota Sioux — were viewed as exemplars of the potential success and European acculturation of nonwhite bodies that, for the most part, were still considered unruly in domestic and transnational spaces.29 Racial uplift and self-help sentiment promoted by reformers like Booker T. Washington and Samuel Armstrong also led to the development of black colleges, like the Hampton Institute, that educated both blacks and Indians, as well as the establishment of “Indian” schools, like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. These schools also promoted racial segregation and racial hierarchies by training African American and indigenous students to work in ser vice of their white superiors. At the same time, however, they also created space for intimate relationships across the lines of color and class. In some instances these relations evolved into romance and friendship, and in others they devolved into interracial tension and competition.30 Although neither blacks nor Indians could boast cohesive consensus about the future of members of their respective and diverse communities, they shared the relentless burden of reckoning with whitesupremacist theories of racial destiny in which they were relegated to a subordinate position domestically and globally, along with other nonwhite, non-Western nations. The fates of indigenous populations, as well as their relationships with blacks and whites, seemed to explode in the public’s consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though the presence of Native Americans was a recurring issue throughout the nineteenth century—albeit one that most Americans would have rather forgotten — at the turn of the century Native Americans found themselves ensconced in the public eye. Both federal and local legislative policy in new western territories was daily shaping (and restricting) the possibilities for tribal life. Long a staple of Wild West shows, the “savage Indian” had also captured the popular imagination in fiction and burlesque shows. Boisterous and loud extravaganzas showcased gun shooting and exhibited “specimens” of various tribes, such as the Oglala Sioux, Nez

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Perce, and Apache. They featured mythical and heroic figures ranging from Calamity Jane to Chief Red Cloud to Will Rogers, who claimed Cherokee ancestry.31 Many early twentieth-century contemporary dramas also represented indigenous populations. For example, David Belasco’s 1905 drama The Girl of the Golden West and Edward Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man (written in 1905 and revived in 1911) depicted stereotypes of all kinds, from amoral and shifty squaws to noble savages. Both of these plays were revived in various genres, attesting to their popularity. Giacomo Puccini wrote an opera based on Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West in 1911. Not so coincidentally, Belasco and Puccini were also responsible for the dramatic and operatic translations of Madame Butterfly — a story of imperial conquest, interracial love, and intercultural violence. There were certainly parallels in the depictions of the self-sacrificing female “native” whose suicide absolves the white western man from the consequences and complexities of his intimate cross-cultural and interracial conquest. Additionally, her death literally and symbolically releases him, so that he can reestablish his life in mainstream America with little accountability for his actions. Similarly, Royle’s The Squaw Man was also revived a third time in 1921, as well as translated into a novel and into three film versions, in 1913, 1918, and 1931. Other depictions, such as cultural pageants, presented Indian dances and songs to celebrate accomplishments of westernized towns or regions rather than indigenous life. However, there were also alternatives, such as the musical researcher Charles Cadman, who studied the music of the Osage Indians in Oklahoma, the San Domingo Indians of New Mexico, and the Blackfoot Indians in order to develop “indigenous” opera. Or the western feminist Mary Austin, whose interest in the Indians of the Southwest led to the 1911 drama The Arrow Maker, in which she popularized the term “Amerindian” and employed an indigenous cast.32 The fascination with indigenous culture and its incorporation into both mainstream and alternative representations attested to the complex relationship of native populations to formulations of citizenship, race, and civilization, as well as to the multivalent meanings of being Indian in the United States. Often within the same work, Native American roles symbolized diverse and sometimes contrasting characteristics, such as freedom, nobility, savagery, manhood, conquest, and authentic “Americanness.” The work of both Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team was part of a dynamic cultural conversation that reckoned with competing and some-

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times contradictory beliefs. Simplistic racial stereotypes remained in place, readily attached to any group that posed a threat to narrowly defined notions of white supremacy; depending on the region and the year, this could include freed blacks, eastern European Jews, indigenous peoples from the United States, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Cubans. In the midst of this attempt to rigidify race, black cultural producers, activists, and intelligentsia attempted to define blackness in all its multiplicity and debated the most effective strategies to do so. At the same time, they also struggled to survive and thrive in a nation and world in which racial violence, inequality, and oppression were part of daily life. The color line was still very much entrenched, as evidenced by ongoing riots, like the 1900 antiblack attacks in New York City that involved white police officers; the ongoing struggles against the indigenous populations in the United States and in the Philippines; and racialized displays of white Western supremacy at world’s fairs and expositions. There was no clear sense that self-improvement or racial uplift would translate into equality or justice. In fact, very successful black leaders, like Booker T. Washington, whom the Cole–Johnson team admired, was careful to measure his calls for black progress by supporting segregated educational and living environments for black communities. Others, like Du Bois — also admired by the creative team — who advocated for full citizenship and complete inclusion and equality for blacks in all realms of society, were considered greater threats to white supremacy.33 And despite his incredible academic achievements and prolific literary, political, and cultural production, Du Bois’s accomplishments were still plagued by his belief that discrimination and inequality continued to thrive both in the United States and in colonized transnational sites. Given the slow progress and ongoing violent resistance to change, Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team were very much aware of their precarious positions, even though their successes demonstrated their commitment to hard work and their ability to excel when given the opportunities to do so. Playing Indian: Hopkins’s Winona

Born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, to free parents — Northrup Hopkins, a migrant from Virginia, and Sarah Allen, a native of Exeter, New Hampshire — Pauline Hopkins grew up in a thriving black family. She earned her high school degree in the Boston public schools and followed in the

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footsteps of older generations of her family who worked as black activists, educators, and writers. From a young age, she started writing, publishing her first play in 1879, The Slaves’ Escape; or, the Underground Railroad (also billed as Peculiar Sam), at the age of twenty-two. This musical comedy, which featured the collective resistance of the Underground Railroad, starred renowned African American minstrel and concert stage performers Sam Lucas, the Hyers sisters, and the celebrated Afro-Cuban violinist José Brindis de Salas.34 Although Hopkins developed skills in multiple arenas as a novelist, short fiction writer, journalist, editor, stenographer, and orator, she gained the most attention from her theatrical and musical performance work.35 As a performer, Hopkins carefully staged her dissenting voice in an effort to represent black womanhood in expansive rather than restrictive terms. Her work entered into the field of popular culture in a way that complicated the economies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, ranging from rearticulations of the legacy of slavery to rendering more visible the impact of global and domestic imperialism, particularly on people of African descent.36 Moreover, not only did her work overlap with black contemporaries, it also intersected with the literary and cultural production of white writers known for addressing questions of race, national identity, and gender, such as Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Childs, and Mark Twain. Some of Hopkins’s most revealing work is a group of three serialized novels that appeared between March 1901 and November 1903 in the Colored American Magazine. Each novel was printed in several distinct episodes that contained multiple unresolved chapters until the final installment. Hopkins and her colleagues at the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company envisioned this monthly periodical as an intervention in the sociopolitical climate that gave rise to the disenfranchisement of blacks, legal segregation, and lynching.37 Founded in 1900, this magazine was directed primarily at an educated African American readership, with the goal of creating a vehicle through which the black intelligentsia could maintain an ongoing and active response to the social, political, and economic concerns and conditions of black life both domestically and transnationally. It included articles by and about African Americans on topics such as photography, art, the military, literary works, political activism, and cultural outreach. Her serialized fiction followed on the heels of her popular play Peculiar Sam and in conjunction with her nonfictional publications and orations, such as her series of essays on “The Dark Races of the

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Twentieth Century,” “Famous Women of the Negro Race,” and her pamphlet A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration.38 She used the venue of fiction to appeal to a mass audience, offering both entertainment and education,39 similar to the work of the Cole–Johnson team. In fact, her strategy fell in line with a variety of cultural producers whose art and music provided venues for self-representation, sociopolitical intervention, and racial performativity. Pauline Hopkins’s Winona employs history to comment on contemporaneous injustices and inequalities. Set before the Civil War in the South and Southwest, as indicated by its subtitle, this serialized novel relates the “romantic happenings” in a “mixed community of Anglo-Saxons, Indians, and Negroes.”40 The text, along with Hopkins’s earlier works, was well received by her primarily black readership, as well as by some progressive whites. Originally written as a drama, Winona was translated by Hopkins into a serialized novel. The dramatic version of Winona tells the story of protagonist Zach, an enslaved teenager who communicates with the world of the dead, including a man referred to as the Colonel. The Colonel directs him to take responsibility for a girl he treats like a sister, Winnie, who is also the Colonel’s only biological heir. Zach puts himself in danger by selflessly uncovering the Colonel’s denial of the inheritance that rightfully belongs to Winnie.41 For unknown reasons Hopkins stopped composing the play and later translated it into fiction; the play’s differences from the novel Winona are suggestive. Like Dixon, who excised his more threatening figures, like the powerful mulatta in his staged version of The Clansman, Hopkins translated her drama about the legacy of miscegenation and the power of kinship into a more overt staging of interracial intimacy and cooperation. In the play, it is only from the grave that the white Colonel acknowledges his mixed-race female heir, and he employs a black character to act as a surrogate for himself. However, like Dixon, Chesnutt, and other writers who represented miscegenation in fiction, Hopkins foregrounded in her literary fiction the interracial intimacies that propel the plot and produce the complex web of relations. In this way, her literary representation of miscegenation, more explicitly than her drafted play, highlights the ways that interracial sex and intimacy reconfigured racial categories, such as “white,” “Indian,” and “black,” as well as the dynamics of nationhood. For this taboo subject, it seems, Hopkins relied on her faith that fiction could fill in the historical gaps and document the passions that were so frequently omitted from

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mainstream chronicles of black life.42 Through her novel rather than her drama, Hopkins weaves the intricate web of relations that inform our understanding of the interracial and intercultural intimacies that she portrays. . . . Hopkins set Winona in the 1850s, when the United States was embroiled not just in slavery, but also in land disputes and debates relating to the expansion of its territory and tribal land allotments. She infused the plot with politically and socially significant developments, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, the Missouri Compromise, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that fueled sectional tensions regarding abolition, eventually leading to secession. During an outbreak of cholera, White Eagle comes to the aid of a tribe of Seneca Indians, and his medical knowledge soon elevates his position to that of a revered member of the tribe.43 Disregarding his white aristocratic ancestry, White Eagle marries a “handsome, well-educated mulatress” who escaped from slavery along with Judah, a young mixed-race orphan. The heroine of the story, Winona, is the daughter of White Eagle and his unnamed wife (who dies shortly after Winona’s birth). Father, daughter, adopted son, and their caretaker — an older “half-breed” Indian woman name Nokomis — live together harmoniously among the Seneca and other adopted tribe members. Their tranquillity ends when two disguised white slave catchers kill White Eagle and enslave Winona and Judah, under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Act and partus sequitur ventrum, the legal doctrine that states that the condition of the child follows the (enslaved) condition of the mother. The story also features Maxwell Warren, a lawyer sent from England to find White Eagle and deliver his inheritance; Ebenezer Maybee, a neighbor and friend of White Eagle who befriends Maxwell and protects the children; and John Brown, whose antislavery resistance movement assists in the liberation of the children and the ongoing armed self-defense of the free territory from slave catchers. During their capture, Judah reveals his unrequited love for Winona but is overshadowed by Maxwell. By the end of the tale, the slave catchers are defeated in a violent struggle, and Winona and Judah return to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Through confession and the unearthing of hidden documents, White Eagle’s rightful title is confirmed, securing Winona’s inheritance of his wealth and status. After relocating to their new home in England, both Judah and Winona gain entrance to the British aristocracy through marriage.

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From the beginning, Hopkins foregrounds racial intermixture. As several critics have pointed out, the idyllic and naturalized images that commence the story frame the “cosmopolitan” (a term that Hopkins uses in this novel) space of this Lake Erie community, where it was difficult to “find the dividing line supposed to be a natural barrier between whites and the dark-skinned race.”44 However, like the artifice of the stage, there is nothing “natural” about the culturally inscribed structure that houses this multiracial, transnational, and multicultural community. Racial, national, geographical, and even gendered boundaries are challenged throughout. Not only are there members of displaced tribal nations, there are also escaped and free blacks and “other nationalities” with blue eyes and gold hair “who had linked their fortune with the aborigines.”45 Additionally, the community rests along the path of the Underground Railroad and in such close proximity to the Canadian border that it is unclear which part belongs to Canada and which part belongs to the United States. Canada is the “land of freedom” toward which escaped slaves flee, and it is also the place where White Eagle married his unnamed mulatta wife legitimately, “according to English law and with the sanction of the Church.”46 Their interracial union weds several communities, producing a “miscegenated” family that defies essentialist formulations of race, nation, and class. This alternative microcosm of “nation” joins African and Anglo ancestries, indigenous and Western cultures, the Americas and England, aristocracy and labor, cosmopolitan and local, enslaved and free. It also represents the lived experiences of what legal historian Ariela Gross calls “racial islands.” These multiracial “nations” within the United States turned the “one-drop” rule of “negro” identity “on its head,” Gross argues, such as the Narragansett who “claimed that even one-drop of Indian blood entitled them [its “negro” members] to Indian national status and the rights and privileges guaranteed their nation by treaty.”47 Although both Winona and Judah, according to U.S. law and custom, would have been classified as “black,” their legacy as products of this alternative family suggests something different. For them and those with whom they identify, “black,” “white,” and “red” are permeable and intersecting labels that fail to account for the multiracial world that they occupy. Their ongoing experiences living in a multicultural pastoral setting alter their relationship to the rigid black–white color line, even though they are still subject to the powerful regulations of that racialized divide.

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By foregrounding a history of miscegenation in her depiction of an 1850s “mixed-community” in Erie County, Hopkins stages the ongoing dramas of race and nation formation that were embodied in intimate, eroticized, romanticized, and violent interracial relations both historically and contemporaneously. Miscegenation and the U.S.–Canadian border serve as representational “contact zones”48 through which imperial desires are simultaneously rehearsed and repelled. In the opening scene, for example, Seneca “squaws,” in traditional dress, sell their wares to tourists and travelers with commercial interests in the land; at the same time, darkerskinned children, who seem to be part of the Seneca community rather than fugitive slaves, play innocently. All gaze and are gazed upon. All of the seemingly “primitive” performers who “play Indian” (children and squaws alike)49 are subject to the gaze of those spectators with whom they interact. However, they also look back, both enacting and resisting the roles imposed on them from the outside. Hopkins stages an inauthentic authenticity, calling into question the legitimacy of social and racial barriers that engender the exploitation and dehumanization depicted in her narrative. At the same time, she enlists the frame of performance in order to foreground the complexity of her characters’ positions. They play both prescribed and unscripted roles, but their acts have real consequences and determine their fates, as well as the fates of those with whom they identify. Although their identities unsettle expectations, White Eagle, Winona, and Judah perform “Indianness,” but so do the squaws, whom Hopkins describes in more stereotypical terms. They all do so, in part, to survive the binarized racial–national structures that threaten to reenslave and relocate them. Despite their cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity, Hopkins highlights their common ground (literally) and their intermingled lives, located outside the bounds of “civilized” whiteness. By staging a transnational, interracial, and transcultural historically informed community, Hopkins also excavates part of the obscured, forgotten, and reductively remembered past. Alongside these performed roles, Hopkins also depicts the various racialized, gendered, and nationalized dramas played out in these miscegenated sites and in the dynamic interactions they produced. The seemingly peaceful setting that opens this racial melodrama, for example, offers a discordant contrast with the contemporaneous violence and racialized tension in black–white–Indian communities, evoking conflicts often tied to U.S.

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expansion and conquest, such as the 1846–48 U.S.–Mexican War and the 1855–58 Seminole uprising. The U.S.–Mexican War concluded with the loss of large territories by Mexico, which included land that formed all or part of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and California. Additionally, the complex positions of those involved in the war spoke to the transnational, transracial, and transcultural networks rather than to a bifurcated racial/national divide. Northern Mexico was already home to escaped slaves, indigenous populations, and white settlers, who were displaced and reorganized because of U.S. occupation. Moreover, the history of Texas’s independence was already shrouded in mythology around “miscegenation” generated by the legend on which its unofficial state song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” was based. This song supposedly refers to Emily D. West, a free black or mixed-race woman (also known as “high yellow” because of her skin color) who allegedly seduced or was kidnapped by Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna. The story suggests that she distracted and delayed him, which enabled his white settler opponents to locate and defeat him in 1836, leading to the independence of Texas from Mexico. Whether or not the story is true, it added yet another layer to the racialized communities that shaped and that were in turn impacted by U.S. expansion.50 Similarly, Texas was also the site of post–Civil War black–white–Indian interactions when “colored” regiments of the U.S. Army, the Ninth and Tenth cavalries, were first assembled in 1866. Also known as “buffalo soldiers,” these all-black troops were enlisted in the segregated army to ensure the safety of white settlers in the area and to battle against hostile indigenous tribes like the Apaches and the Comanches.51 The Seminole uprising was also representative of the triangulated race relations Hopkins depicts because of the alliances made between free and enslaved blacks who resisted removal and U.S. conquest. Some of the community even considered themselves “black Seminoles” and were adopted by the tribes.52 However, their eventual removal to Indian Territory strained the black–Indian alliances and further complicated interracial relations. Indigenous–black tensions were intensified by the need to determine who had enough Native American ancestry to claim legal rights to native lands and political sovereignty.53 And later, when some indigenous tribes aligned themselves with whites in order to obtain U.S. citizenship, they excluded members with black ancestry.54 These complex relations also coincided with

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the uneasy relationship between black American soldiers and Filipinos during the Philippines–American War at the turn of the century. Filipinos considered black soldiers potential allies because of their racial proximity and because of the ongoing antiblack violence and discrimination that was occurring simultaneously in the United States. Filipinos appealed to black soldiers’ precarious position that compelled the black soldiers to support the same white imperial logic of superiority that was being used to repress them at home.55 These historically significant events, among others, informed the ongoing and complicated struggle over territory, emancipation, and citizenship addressed in Hopkins’s novel. . . . Hopkins’s intimate understanding of performance and the ways in which the stage highlighted both embodiment and social construction informed her representation of Winona and the other principal characters in the story. Each of the central figures, including the southern white villain Thomson, performs something other than what he seems to embody or that which others impose on him. Colonel Titus and Thomson impersonate recreational hunters while calculating Winona’s and Judah’s value as desirable pieces of enslaved property. Judah and Winona function as unfettered children of “nature” acculturated as part of the Seneca population in which they were raised; however, as much as they enact “Indianness,” their performance fails to resist the force of legalized slavery. Still, despite some of the possible limitations, Hopkins highlights the performative dimensions of many of her characters and the scenes that she depicts. Given that Hopkins first wrote this story as a play and that part of her project as a multifaceted public performer was to foreground the power and impact of cultural performance, the theatrical language that shapes the novel seems not only appropriate but also necessary. Throughout this tale of southern and southwestern life, Hopkins invokes the stage. When Warren observes his nonwhite companions, he describes the racial strife in aesthetic terms: “His refined sensibilities were satisfied by the melodramatic coloring of his surroundings. The atmosphere of art had affected him enough for him to perceive the beauties of the picture made by the stalwart men, the gigantic black’s refined prowess and the noble lines and graceful pose of Winona’s neck and shoulders.” This cast of characters play their parts in an exaggerated and staged manner that highlights the racialized and gendered roles they are forced to enact.56 Recategorized

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as oppositional, Judah is now “the black” (signaling a loss of his humanity and his manhood), and Warren becomes “the white man.” Similarly, in the spectacular lynching performance after Thomson captures Warren, Warren plays the slave, despite his racial and national identity. Complete with Thomson as orator and an eager participatory audience (the mob), the “brutal carnival” begins to take place. Thomson plays the leading role, and “with a theatrical gesture” he is intent on “carry[ing] out the programme.”57 Later, when Thomson confesses that he is an English valet, not an overseer, he drops his southern vernacular and speaks in “well-bred phrases.” “The scene was intensely dramatic” the narrator tells us, once again emphasizing the histrionic staging that white supremacy requires. Hopkins also incorporates another type of performance, during which Aunt Vinnie (a relative of Judah’s and a black mammy figure) tells Winona’s story to “groups of curious neighbors white and black, who never tired of hearing” it. In this case, Hopkins employs performative storytelling to  enact a different type of miscegenation. Aunt Vinnie’s oratory stages Hopkins’s dramatic and historical intermixture of the boundaries of race, nation, time, and space. She reproduces her command performance regularly for traveling audiences who encounter her and participate in the interactive transmission of the past as well as the future. It is through Aunt Vinnie’s creative yet historically grounded celebratory recollection that Hopkins highlights the powerful possibilities of the type of cultural work in which she, as a black female cultural producer, engaged.58 Neither the past nor the lessons learned from the stories shared by the members of her local-global community remain static; instead, Aunt Vinnie reactivates and deploys them in order to sustain herself and her community. Hopkins’s novel is also innovative, compared with the other texts we have examined, in that it contains several legitimate interracial marriages. The earlier dramatic version of Winona contains only one interracial affair, but no sanctified marriage; here, however, there are three — between White Eagle and his mulatta wife, Winona and Warren Maxwell, and Judah and an unnamed aristocratic English woman. The result is an alternate constellation of racial intimacies and alliances. Some critics have argued that her work conforms not only to the sentimental and western forms that it invokes but also to racial hierarchy that places white Anglos on top and people of color at the bottom.59 However, I believe that the reality of her presentation is more complex, and revealing of the multivalent possibilities for racial identification growing at the turn of the century. Both Winona

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and Judah gain entrance to English aristocracy through marriage and acculturation, relinquishing their immediate ties to their intersecting indigenous and black identities. Even White Eagle, Winona’s father, was perceived as tarnishing his white Englishness with a “dark shadow” that caused him to “bury himself ” in a “wilderness among savages”;60 presumably his degradation occured because he lived among the Seneca, married a “black” woman, lived with an Indian woman, and fathered nonwhite children. Here, White Eagle’s reputation as contaminated echoes contemporaneous antimiscegenation discourse that feared degeneracy because of racial intermixture and because of intimate interracial contact. Hopkins here does seem to follow traditional stereotypes. Halfway through the book, Warren witnesses the horrors of slavery and aligns himself with the abolitionists and John Brown. He helps rescue Winona and Judah from Thomson’s horrible enslavement of them but is shot, captured, and imprisoned when Thomson and his posse come north to retrieve their human property. Once Warren has aligned himself with John Brown he is racialized as nonwhite. At one point, Thomson plans to lynch Warren, warning him that he will be flogged “like a nigger” and then burned;61 Warren effectively enacts the enslavement, subjection, and torture endured by slaves, including Judah. Although lynching was clearly racialized in this context to expose brutality against blacks, Warren’s experience also points to the variegated groups who were subject to lynchmob violence in both the antebellum and postbellum context, such as poor whites, white ethnic immigrants, Native and Mexican Americans, and Chinese. For example, in the early twentieth-century Midwest, whites took the law into their own hands for property crimes or crimes against law enforcement in a setting in which legal justice and land rights were tenuous. Everything from racist ideologies to labor challenges could easily transform a citizen into the victim of a lynch mob. For black citizens, especially those who dared to contest white racism and injustice during the Jim Crow period, this threat of vicious violence remained part of their daily reality.62 The brutal death faced by Warren (which he narrowly escapes) and doled out to countless victims of slavery and to other victims of violent lynchings throughout the country reproduces the dehumanization of mob rule and racial terrorism contemporaneous with the publication of Hopkins’s novel. Warren’s experience also demonstrates the way in which the defiance of white supremacy could be transformed into pro-black, anti-

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white rhetoric, like Thomson’s, that would provoke mob violence by mainstream whites and dehumanize potential victims. By playing out this lynching scene, Hopkins intensifies Warren’s bond to the institution of slavery. She provides her readers and Warren with firsthand experience of the trauma that his future wife and countless others have faced. She also punctuates the power of performance by demonstrating how easily a “white” man can be reclassified as a disenfranchised racial “other” merely because of what he seems to represent. Here, Hopkins complicates the standard representation of miscegenation by creating a different kind of alliance between Warren and Winona. They share a bond because of her multiracial ancestry and because of his transnational origins and social construction as black that enables them to resist the restrictive boundaries that would typically separate them in 1903. Hopkins’s daringly complex vision can also be seen in the murkiness of the categories Winona and Judah inhabit. They occupy different racial classifications from each other, but they share a racial–cultural–national identity as “injun-niggers,” according to their neighbor and family friend, Bill Maybee. They undergo “Indian training,” enslavement, and expatriation because of their liminal positions. According to Maybee, because of their upbringing, “neither of them two forlorn critters realizes what ‘bein’ a nigger’ means; they have no idea of their true position in this unfrien’ly world;”63 yet it is their common and reducible status as property that leads to their capture and enslavement. They represent an oddity of sorts because they do not fit neatly into any racialized, geographical, cultural, or national space. Like the Indian pipes Hopkins describes as native to their home in Erie County — wildflowers that remain beautiful and free in their “primal” setting but turn “black” when picked — their natural resistance to strict classification is thwarted by structural and legal racism.64 Ultimately, though, Hopkins’s story overrides the negative implications of the pastoral scene early on in the novel when Winona delights at the beauty of the Indian pipes and decides it is best not to touch or disturb these wildflowers, so that they can “go away like spirits” on their own terms, rather than according to what is prescribed for them.65 Through her narrative, Hopkins contends that Winona and Judah transcend the restrictions imposed on them. They leave the Indian pipes in their native environment, but Hopkins’s tale plucks the pair from their home environment; however, unlike the flowers, they are not destroyed by their displacement. Instead, they continue to unsettle the confines of their racial classification, and,

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through their experience with the Seneca, the English, and the abolitionists, reveal the productive possibilities of crossing the color line. Unbeknownst to them, the Indian pipes are both native and migratory plants that flourish in a variety of climates, ranging from the Central American mountains to the desert sands, and the dark evergreen forests of North America. Similarly, Judah and Winona learn from their migratory experiences as slaves, Indians, and free blacks in England, taking with them the tools that they have acquired to survive and grow. For Hopkins, the fate of turning black does not represent death or diminished beauty. Instead, it provides the opportunity for a rebirth or reactivation, similar to the Indian myths about Indian pipes that Winona has learned: rather than die they “may go away like spirits.” Echoing the active dedication of her peers to the uplift and progress of early twentieth-century black life and culture, Hopkins’s novel celebrates the uniqueness of her characters’ upbringing, perseverance, adaptability, and development into proactive agents of their own destinies. Rather than having her heroes depart for Italy or England to discard or conceal their identities, as was the case in some of the earlier portraits of interracial unions, Hopkins depicts Winona and Judah’s relocation as an extension of their hybrid, intercultural, and transnational identities that they cultivated in the United States — a link to commemorate and celebrate rather than hide or erase. Attending to the cultural power of performance work that she and her contemporaries employed — among them Bob Cole and celebrated black actress Aida Overton Walker — Hopkins uses innovative representations of miscegenation as a powerful cultural avenue for promoting, and literally enacting, black racial uplift. By featuring provocative and powerful female characters and voices, Hopkins also offers an alternative to the masculine voice that often dominated discourse around racial progress, often at the cost of marginalization.66 And, although some of her characterizations can fall into stereotype, on the whole she retools popular generic forms, narrative conventions, and characters typically relegated to the category of entertainment in order to join contemporaneous debates. She stages miscegenation in the past in order to expose current contradictions and reductive binarisms that erase the contribution of miscegenation to the complex relations in communities like Winona’s. And she employs the past not to romanticize it, but to imagine an alternative outcome rather than a return to the historically sedimented conclusions that foreclosed change.

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Winona thus offered a generative outcome of miscegenation — one that challenged tragic conventions, produced innovative formulations of identity, and invigorated the historical documenation of interracial relations. In this way Hopkins tapped into the contemporaneous engagement of fellow cultural producers. Some shared her views, such as Ida Wells, Alexander Manly, and W. E. B. Du Bois, while others did not, such as Thomas Dixon, Teddy Roosevelt, and Rebecca Felton; however, they all acknowledged the centrality of racial performance, particularly as it sustained the black–white binary, and employed it vigorously as they debated its vital role in the defining and legislating of equality, freedom, and citizenship on a national and global scale. Staging Race in Red and Black: The Red Moon

The Cole–Johnson team also worked in the world of performance and were intimately involved in the politics and economics of the theatre. Like Hopkins, they were familiar with mainstream conventions in drama, but they also demonstrated an ability to create pieces that navigated and revised popular representations of race, such as the historically entrenched tradition of blackface minstrelsy. Also like Hopkins, through their work they were in dialogue with contemporaneous debates about the future of black Americans and their relationship to global and national concerns, such as political disenfranchisement and segregation. Their ongoing engagement with world politics and their extensive domestic and transnational travel, as performers and de facto representatives of the race, enabled them to incorporate their experiences in their work. The son of former slaves, Robert Allen (Bob) Cole was born in July 1868 in Athens, Georgia, to Isabella Thomas Weldon and Robert Allen Cole Sr. Like many African Americans, Bob Cole was of mixed lineage; his ancestors included Seminole Indians and whites.67 He received early musical and educational training in Atlanta and eventually relocated to Chicago. After apprenticing in several one- and two-man acts, he joined Sam T. Jack’s Creole Show in 1891 and by 1893 had published his first songs with the Will Rossiter Publishing Company. While working in the Creole Show, he met and married his wife, Stella Wiley, a singer with whom he formed a vaudeville act and moved east. About 1894, Cole formed the All-Star Stock Company, collaborating with and training other African American show

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people, like Will Marion Cook, Mattie Wilkes, and Mamie Flowers. And, in 1896, he performed as a member of Black Patti’s Troubadour Company.68 He left the troupe because of a dispute with white producers over authorship.69 In response to that experience, he later formed his own company, with which he produced A Trip to Coontown, the first full-length black musical comedy written, performed, and managed by blacks, and patronized by interracial audiences.70 The Cole–Johnson team took into account the very palpable fact that bodies, particularly racially marked ones like theirs, functioned as readable texts both in the context of performance and outside of it. Their roles as “black” performers and intellectuals whose cultural production was consumed by audiences that were white and of color, domestic and regional, urban and global, encouraged — and in some instances compelled — them to engage the competing discourses that informed their representations and receptions. In fact, according to theatre historian Paula Seniors, Bob Cole was blacklisted by white producers and writers because he claimed authorship of his sketch of whiteface character Willie Wayside in a whitemanaged show, At Jolly Cooney Island, and demanded better working conditions and a salary increase for members of the company. In response to this censure, Cole refused to give up his claim to the music and eventually collaborated with Billy Johnson to create the first all-black musical, A Trip to Coontown. This successful play defied the blacklist and attempts to control Cole’s artistic production by “wowing” audiences in Canada and then winning over U.S. theater managers in New York City. Cole’s defiance, along with his censure, demonstrated the possibilities and problems with strategic resistance; however, Cole’s success, as well as his black contemporaries’ successes, speak to their individual and collective dedication to racial uplift and education through performance and the professionalization of black arts and letters. Victories such as Cole’s, as well as other collaborative efforts, helped blacks forge legitimate spaces for their work. Tragically, Cole’s career ended abruptly in 1911 when, according to newspaper accounts, he either intentionally or accidentally drowned after suffering for years from a “hopeless case of paresis,” a debilitating condition caused by syphilis, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases of that period.71 The other parts of Cole’s collaborative team were J. Rosamond Johnson, who was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1873, and his equally renowned brother, James Weldon Johnson, born in 1871. In the midst of

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Reconstruction, their family was relatively financially secure.72 Their father, James Johnson, was headwaiter at the St. James Hotel and a Baptist minister. Their Bahamian-born mother, Helen Dillett Johnson, descendant of a black (Haitian) woman and a white man, was the first female black public school teacher in Florida.73 Their economic and educational status enabled them to nurture both of their sons’ musical, literary, and artistic interests.74 James Weldon Johnson graduated from Atlanta University in 1894, served as the principal of the largest colored school in Georgia, the Stanton School, earned his law degree, and remained politically active as a performer, lyricist, and foreign ser vice officer supporting racial uplift.75 Equally committed to the elevation of the race and to perfecting his musical talents, J. Rosamond studied classical piano at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, after which he toured with a successful musical, Oriental America, in 1896. After returning to Jacksonville in 1896, he opened his own music school and began to compose music to accompany the poems and lyrcis written by his brother James.76 After collaborating on Tolosa, an opera that satirized the U.S. annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish–American War, the Johnson brothers went to New York in 1899 to try to sell their work.77 Although the opera found no takers, probably because of its criticism of U.S. imperialism, while in New York the Johnson brothers met Bob Cole. J. Rosamond performed with Cole, and together the three of them wrote music and lyrics. The Cole– Johnson team became well known for their distinctive vaudevillian performances in the United States and in Europe. They distinguished themselves by resisting conventional stereotypes for blacks and by creating their own inventive music.78 Between 1900 and 1910 the Cole–Johnson team wrote more than 150 songs for more than a dozen shows, including their own shows featuring all-black casts.79 Although James Weldon did not perform onstage with Cole and his brother, he remained involved, contributing frequently to the team’s staged representations of the richness of African American life. Cole and J. Rosamand Johnson continued to tour and perform together until Cole’s death in 1911.80 All three believed, like Hopkins, that art was a valuable platform for education, commentary, and critique of U.S. culture and politics,81 particularly as they pertained to the future of black America. A testament to their long-lasting impact on black life, J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative creation of the music and lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was later adopted by the NAACP and was considered the

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“Negro national hymn.”82 Composed in 1896 and published in 1900,83 this anthem is still sung and performed regularly in the twenty-first century. And even after Cole’s death and James Weldon’s foray into foreign ser vice and politics, J. Rosamond remained involved in the music and performance world until his death in 1954. His other accomplishments include publishing and arranging spirituals and heading the Music School Settlement for the Colored People of New York.84 The collaborative efforts of the Cole–Johnson team and their engagement with surrounding cultural and political debates manifested in their unique staging of miscegenation, The Red Moon, which opened on May 3, 1909, at the Majestic Theater on Broadway.85 Billed as a “sensation in red and black,”86 the musical comedy dramatized the (mis)adventures of Minnehaha, a half-black, half-Indian princess. It details her life on a Virginia farm with her “colored” mother and in the West on a reservation with her “Indian-chief ” father. A complex and comic plot details her exploits in and among intersecting African American and indigenous communities, blending humor, romance, intrigue, and revenge. It was well received by racially mixed audiences in the United States, Canada, and Europe.87 The Red Moon, like Winona, capitalized on the popularity of frontier narratives and racial types.88 It was produced contemporaneously with the interracial founding of the NAACP, and amid increasingly fervent antiblack sentiment in the South and across the country due to the movement of large numbers of displaced southern blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a cultural and critical intervention, The Red Moon offered up black–Indian intersections as a counternarrative to the reentrenched black–white color line. Audiences would have been familiar with representations of “old-time darkies” and white southern aristocrats on southern plantations, as well as with Wild West settings that featured depictions of white frontiersmen and women conquering America’s untamed wilderness — both common features of minstrel shows and vaudeville routines. East Coast theaters staged regional, frontier, and borderland concerns, such as the triumphant victory of Western civilization over the wildnerness and over the “unruly” (Indian, Mexican, Chinese) populations in the mythic frontiers of the South, Southwest, and West, for the rest of the nation and for viewers outside the United States.89 These theaters also circumvented and absorbed tensions generated by increased antiblack and anti-immigrant sentiment, regional differences, urban blight, and ongoing violence against indigenous tribes by depicting a reassuring

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brand of Anglicized heroism, comic and villainous stereotypes of nonwhites, and romanticized resolutions to conflicts. The subtext of these works suggested that other unruly bodies and cultures must be secured and regulated according to white Anglo-Protestant values already established in the East but being rapidly transported and implemented transcontinentally and transnationally. The Red Moon provided its creators with an opportunity to participate in the ongoing dialogue about racial dynamics by challenging the popular racist belief that nonwhites should be segregated, civilized, and contained. Part of the freshness of The Red Moon was that it staged nonwhite intimate interracial relations in which the black–white divide was not the primary focus. In this representation of miscegenation, the Cole–Johnson team played upon the perception of Indianness as an authentic and indigenous symbol of American identity, rather than as oppositional or foreign to it. As they did in many of their other works, and in contrast to Hopkins’s Winona, they chose to exclude white characters altogether, enlisting an entirely black cast to perform a variety of black, Indian, and mixed-race characters. A contemporaneous review of The Red Moon in the New York Daily Mirror tells the story: A dusky maiden, poetically dubbed Minnehaha, the daughter of an Indian chief and a negress is taken by her father, unwillingly, from her mother’s home in Virginia, to his wigwam on a Western reservation. She is rescued and returned to her mother by two funny negro ne’er-do-wells, a bogus lawyer and a bogus physician. The adventures through which the pair of rescuers go form amusing episodes throughout the three acts.90 This “red and black” romance91 staged not one but two mixed Afro-Indian unions: the marriage between the protagonist’s parents—her black mother, Lucretia Martin, and her father, Indian chief John Lowdog — as well as the ensuing romance between Minnehaha and a black man, Plunk Green. It also represented a third possibility for interracial love: the character Red Feather, who also vies for Minnehaha’s affections but fails to win her over. The Red Moon opens at a government school for blacks and Indians, Swamptown, most likely a reference to the site in Hampton, Virginia, that served as a refuge for escaped and former slaves during the Civil War period and where the Hampton Normal and Agricultural School for freed blacks was built in 1868.92 Later, the Hampton Institute created a program for Native

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Americans that lasted from 1878 to 1923. Minnehaha lives nearby with her mother, who is associated with the school. Her father, who left them when she was young, returns unexpectedly and wants to take his daughter back to the reservation, the “Land of the Setting Sun.” He is accompanied by a younger educated Indian, Red Feather, who helps kidnap Minnehaha. The second act takes place out west in the “Land of the Setting Sun.” Eventually, two clever actors, Plunk Green (played by J. Rosamond Johnson) and Slim Brown (played by Bob Cole) disguise themselves as a lawyer and a doctor and rescue her. In the final act, Minnehaha returns to Swamptown Institute and marries Plunk Green.93 Like some of their contemporaries, these black actors played “Indian,” but the interracial and intercultural interactions that they depicted departed from more familiar representations of miscegenation offered in white productions. Whether between blacks and whites, Indians and whites, Chinese and whites, or even newly arrived immigrants (Irish and Italian Catholics and eastern European Jews, for example) and more established white Anglo Protestants, such staged interracial unions usually failed. Even in the case of a successful white ethnic intercultural union, like the one portrayed in Zangwill’s 1908 The Melting Pot, discussed earlier, assimilation rather than self-definition is the goal. The Cole–Johnson team were all too familiar with the confines and possibilities of the cultural scene in which they were ensconced. In fact, in his 1938 study of black life in New York City, Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson noted that plays like Dixon’s The Clansman or Edward Sheldon’s The Nigger, despite their distinctions, “were plays of propaganda; they were played wholly by white casts; for them the Negro was merely thematic material. They did not contemplate him as an exponent.”94 It must have been disheartening, to say the least, for the Cole–Johnson team, other black cultural producers, and members of the black elite to see the stage crowded by such reductive depictions. These plays also typically focused on the black–white color line and on the North–South divide, rarely considering a more complex vision of America or of race. As closer examination of Cole–Johnson’s work will illuminate, The Red Moon, like Hopkins’s Winona, entered new territory and explored new terrain both literally and performatively. The play received primarily positive reviews during its three-year tour across the United States and in Canada (1908–10),95 although I believe the contemporary preoccupations of many of the reviewers meant that they

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Sheet music cover to “The Same Old Silv’ry Moon Is Shining.” The Red Moon, the Cole–Johnson team. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.

often failed to see what is now most remarkable about the show. Some critics accused the play of attempting (and failing) to emulate white theatrical productions and called for a return to more stereotypical black musical comedies, with plenty of dancing and singing.96 Others, however,

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congratulated the Cole–Johnson team for producing a play that showcased a multitalented — and multihued, for that matter — cast, composers, and producers. Reviews attested to the professionalism and skill exhibited in The Red Moon, asserting that “the production is replete with good clean comedy and high-class character work, permeated with excellent solo and chorus singing of quaint negro and Indian songs, which, with the elaborate costumes and scenic effects, have made the production one of the most successful musical comedies on the stage.”97 Others, like a Philadelphia Times reviewer, attributed the play’s humor to its comic rendering of localized and culturally specific belief systems that departed from conventional Judeo-Christian notions: “ ‘The Red Moon’ owes its laugh making lines chiefly to an old superstition. The old plantation darkey believed that a red moon meant bad luck to those who saw it. To the Indian a red moon meant war. Combining these two superstitions, Cole and Johnson open their fun making in a little Western town where there is a government school for negroes and Indians.”98 Contemporaneous reviews varied as to which locations the play was depicting, ranging from Virginia or Alabama for the opening scene to the suggestion above that the government school was located in the West rather than in the South. Regardless of the inconsistencies in reviewers’ abilities to pinpoint the exact location, they all recognized that the scenes took place in distinct landscapes to emphasize the contrast between settlements that were depicted as cultivated and territories that were staged as primitive. In this way, the landscape reinforced the intercultural and interracial hybridity that was embodied by characters like Minnehaha and enacted through the staging of Afro-Indian miscegenation. Both the superstitions and “exotic” pastoral settings were also seen as powerful enhancements of racialized difference that enlivened the performance, as detailed in the New Jersey Dramatic News: All the beauty of the “Land of the Setting Sun” is brought out in the second act, the scene of Indian country. And it is here, too, that the best and catchiest music is placed. From the “Bleeding Moon” chorus at the opening, until the war dance of the braves at the close, the act is one repast for the lover of music, whether it is for the jingly tunes that are readily caught up and whistled on the street or the musicianly efforts that appeal to the more critical ear.99

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Here one might also read these relegations of singing, dancing, and superstition to the distant West or to the unthreatening realm of comedy as a way of deflecting attention from the real anxieties that were circulating about the use of dance, song, and alternative religious beliefs as a means of resisting oppression and genocide. This would have been particularly relevant to the increasingly popular Ghost Dance ceremonies of the Paiute, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche, which were viewed as subversive and threatening to white settlers. The popularity of this movement led to aggressive policies from the U.S. government to suppress it and eventually erupted into the violent Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, during which more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers were killed.100 The emphasis on music can also be read as a reminder of the alternative networks of communication that slaves used to exchange information, such as call-and-response songs, drums, and coded language. Several critics commented on the “blond-hued” or “light creamy” complexion of Abbie Mitchell, who played Minnehaha, and on the sixmember chorus of “dusky damsels” who ranged in color “from sable black to a pinkish white.”101 It is unclear as to whether commentary on the varied hues of the “black” performers unsettled, titillated, or challenged viewer expectations, but these hues were duly noted in many reviews. Such emphasis also gestured toward a long history of women of color as spectacle, and as embodied emblems of colonial conquest. However, as historian Paula Seniors argues, these Red Moon women not only defied negative stereotypes of black women, but also used the stage to redefine the ideals of black middle-class womanhood, as respectable, marriage material, and as central participants in black racial uplift. Both onstage and off, they embodied these ideals and advocated for the respectability and intellect of black middle-class and professional women, as they did through their involvement in organizations like the National Council of Negro Women and women’s clubs fighting for civil rights, moral reform, and education.102 These women performers were viewed as African American versions of “Gibson Girls,” a name coined by Charles Dana Gibson in 1890 to depict the ideal characteristics of women — typically American, middle class, independent, well-bred, and cosmopolitan. The Red Moon’s staging of miscegenation provided its female performers with a platform to ennoble their positions as black women performers and to represent themselves as proponents of middle-class values and respectability, regardless of color, profession, or upbringing — the success of the American dream was theirs

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for the taking. The range of hues seemed proof of the mixed heritage of this group of singers, and yet rather than hide that variety, they celebrated it. Attesting to their stature as role models for racial uplift through selfimprovement, activism, and education, their press agent, Charles Hunter, regularly penned a column, “The Red Moon Rays,” in the African American–owned newspaper the New York Age, which followed their activism both onstage and off. In this way, they offered black audiences, particularly women, an alternative to the objectifying and reductive stereotypes that restricted black women’s roles in society.103 At the same time, however, these idealized portraits of black elitism were not applicable to a large percentage of black women (and men, for that matter) who were still struggling to survive and working in positions such as domestics, laborers, and washerwomen — positions that did not approximate the collegeeducated, glamorous, and refined roles popularized by actresses in The Red Moon.104 The Red Moon also contrasted with popular white-produced shows that, more often than not, required light-skinned female performers instead of the myriad of colors represented in The Red Moon. The show’s variegated sampling of black womanhood complicated what Jayna Brown describes in her work on black burlesque performance as the “iconography of the sexualized Creole woman that by 1890 had long been in transnational circulation.” Brown contends that light-skinned “boisterous dancing” female performers, embedded in the “transnational politics of the fetishization and sexual commodification surrounding the mulatto,” served as “contrast, foil, and supplement” to the “tragic” mulattos in blackauthored literature. Brown also argues that these stereotypes were disrupted by the lively performances of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies. Unlike the Zoes and the Daphnes of mid-nineteenth-century drama, these racially liminal women resisted the reductive classification of “tragic,” alternating between exotic objects of desire and emblems of imperial conquest and mastery, especially those being classified and regulated in colonized sites, like Cuba, the Philippines, the urban centers of the United States, and, I would add, on reservations in the South and Southwest.105 The collective presence of the women of The Red Moon offers a radical revision of the mulatta and the Creole woman by identifying themselves explicitly with black identity, despite the diversity that they embody and the racial mixing that they represent. Because of the ubiquity of the mulatta stereotype in nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century represen-

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tations, both viewers and reviewers would have recognized the legacy of racial mixing and imperial policies in the faces and bodies of the performers, even if they did not articulate this recognition explicitly or openly. Resisting this reductive role, these advocates of racial uplift located themselves solidly in the black-diasporic community. But they did so by highlighting their racial and cultural intermixture that defied stereotypes and the limited roles designed for them to play. This intersectionality was certainly acknowledged by the Cole–Johnson trio in the lyrics of some of their songs for this play, such as “Life Is a Game of Checkers.” The lyrics to this song compare the world to a “checker board” and “Life” to a “game” in which the “stakes are the riches, the power, the fame.” Both “Red and Black” must play the “game un-to the end” taking care with each “move” against their “rivals.” The song acknowledges cultural differences in its claim that “no two play the same” as well as the structural competition that requires everyone to play to “beat the rest” and to “win before [they] die.” Both African American and Native American communities, even when educated alongside each other, recognized how their uncertain status was always being measured by their mutual exclusion from the category of “white” but also in relation to their relative distance from and proximity to either end of the black–white divide. At the same time, the song and the Afro-Indian relations it depicts also implied a shared struggle in which both groups were inextricably linked by their desire not just to survive but also to prosper. It also echoed the complex interracial relations experienced by blacks and indigenous populations that inhabited “common” spaces both during and after Reconstruction, such as the southwestern territories and educational institutions around the country.106 The diversity of the cast may have also lent to the legibility of their performance as “Indian,” African American, and biracial, for they ranged in hue, even though the entire cast was classified as African American. Visually, they embodied the history of racial and cultural miscegenation. For their interracial audiences, this obvious variety may have set the multiracial cast apart from their viewers because of the lively theatricalization of their performances of nonwhite “others”; alternatively, the complexity the cast staged might have affirmed and celebrated the diversity of the lived experiences and the real histories of those whose lives were similar in complexity to those of the characters depicted in the performance. Certainly, there was a history of interracial mixing among blacks and Indians,

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as noted earlier. Fears of intimacy were addressed with the strict policing of blacks and Indians at the Hampton Institute and other schools, which forbade and punished intimate relationships between Indians and blacks, as these would produce more nonwhites that muddled the schematics of racial classification. However, white administrators encouraged intraracial relationships, as they were deemed appropriate, self-contained familial constellations. Eventually, separate institutions for Indians were developed, a testament to the desire to control the acculturation process for both blacks and Indians and to prevent interracial alliances.107 Some of the most praised scenes were those that on the surface seem to romanticize the West and the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, as well as those that reinforced stereotypes. For example, the lyrics to the song “Big Indian Chief ” represent the alleged drunkenness and violence of Indians. However entertaining and familiar that stereotype may have been, it was also so overdone that the satirical overtones also emerge. Moreover, the song’s Chief is also represented as a brave and passionate man who is willing to die for the “Indian maid” he loves. And the character Red Feather, who has both a Westernized education and a strong connection to his tribal identity, maintains his independence and selfdetermination despite the influences of both the assimilationist institution where he is educated and the complex politics of the reservation where he grew up.108 In fact, in a note to the prominent white supporter of black artists, Carl Van Vechten, J. Rosamond Johnson reported that his “Indian” songs were so appreciated by Chief Clear Sky that he, Johnson, was inducted into the Iroquois tribe as “Chief Red Star.”109 Love, compassion, and loyalty are also represented in songs like “Big Red Shawl,” which described an intertribal Romeo-and-Juliet love of a Pawnee and Cherokee. Moreover, all these scenes were performed without the “aid of cork,” according to James Weldon Johnson, which helped to dignify the performances.110 Reinforcing their attempts to create positive depictions, while still entertaining their audiences, were Cole and Johnson’s reported research, as well as their personal relationships with some of the tribes. In a 1908 Kansas City Post article, “When Bob Cole Met Geronimo,” the author claimed that “their simplest songs are the outcome of persistent research along all lines upon which the subject may have to deal.” He details Cole and Johnson’s travels across the Southwest after performing on the Pacific Coast. During this trip they crossed the desert and visited an Apache Indian

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Sheet music cover to “Big Indian Chief.” The Red Moon, the Cole–Johnson team. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.

reservation. According to the author, after Cole mingled among the Indians and sang for the “papooses,” he met Geronimo, after which he finished the lyrics to the song “Big Chief.”111 Additionally, Cole and Johnson drew from the knowledge of Native American folklore that they gleaned through

J. Rosamond Johnson’s official documentation of his induction into the Iroquois tribe as Chief Red Star. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.

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research, stories, and, most likely, mythology. Two of their cast members, Theodore Pankey and Arthur Talbott, who played indigenous roles in The Red Moon, visited the Iroquois tribe on the Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) Reservation in Montreal in March 1909, according to historian Seniors. Several Iroquois were said to have attended the performance of The Red Moon and, as noted above, appreciated the efforts of the Cole–Johnson team. As Seniors also notes, it is impossible to know how the Iroquois responded to the stereotypes that were also part of the performance.112 The uneven success of efforts to dignify, balanced with the need to sell tickets and entertain, speaks to the complex challenges that integrating racial uplift and popular representation posed to black cultural producers. Another example of the complicated dynamic of promoting the play and critiquing U.S. culture was the song “On the Road to Monterey,” considered one of the “most pleasing song numbers” in the play. The song refers to “sunny Mexico” just “beyond the Rio Grande” and to the beauty and intoxication of a “Senorita” with her alternately “dreamy” and “roguish” eyes.113 This focus on her enchantment titillated audiences, but it also echoed ongoing conflicts between the United States and Spain over colonies like Cuba, as well as the historical violence along the borders separating Mexico and recently annexed U.S. territories, something that Cole and the Johnson brothers had also addressed in earlier plays, such as Tolosa and The Shoo Fly Regiment. These contested sites were still unsettled zones in which displaced Mexicans, recently freed blacks, migrant indigenous tribes, and white settlers lived in close proximity to one another. Although the Cole–Johnson team employ the familiar stereotype of the “pretty [brown-skinned] maiden,” they also unearth some of the intersecting histories and the interracial alliances that informed the experiences of displaced Mexicans, indigenous peoples, and freed blacks in the South and the Southwest. The complicated yet encouraging spin on the history of interracial and intercultural relations in the play can be read as staging a recuperative and generative story of miscegenation — one that opposed the rigidity of the black–white binary and the ways it continued to shape domestic and transnational policies. It also suggests that miscegenation among nonwhites offered another type of alliance that had the potential to upset and contest white supremacy. It also emphasizes the ways that racialized hierarchies of power impacted members of the black diaspora, tribal nations, and other populations relegated to the lower rungs of civilization by theories such as social Darwinism.

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Resisting the segregationist hierarchized model, the Cole–Johnson team also broke new ground by organizing The Red Moon’s plot around the fate of the daughter of a black–native union. Despite miscegenation’s centrality to the drama, some of the reviewers relegated this connection to the margins of their commentary. One Philadelphia Times reviewer noted that the play opens “in a little Western town where there is a government school for negroes and Indians,” and a writer for the Philadelphia North American noted that “[in]cidentally there are Indians who have been taught at one of the government industrial schools.”114 Far from incidental, this choice of setting reinforced the subtle echoes of the intersecting and sometimes oppositional triangulated histories of blacks, whites, and Indians in the United States. Many of the reviews suggested that the combination of African American and Native American folklore intensified the superstitious and comic representation of black–native life in the play. On the one hand, the two communities’ beliefs in omens reinforced their status as “primitive” and placed both communities outside Anglo-Christian “civilized” culture. On the other hand, their ability to understand the “signs and symbols”115 of nature suggests that both communities retained and adapted alternative and ancestral belief systems and ways of seeing the world. These indigenous cultural tools may have aided them as they faced continual violence and oppression. The fusing of various traditions could be read as reductive, but it might also indicate a reformulation or, in this case, an imaginative staging of intermingling cultures. This possibility was reinforced by reports of Cole and Johnson’s firsthand exposure to indigenous culture and music because of their travels. Throughout the play, we see a vacillation between stereotyped depictions and bold reimaginings. Part of The Red Moon’s seduction, even a century later, is that it resists a clear interpretation, and is as muddied and confusing as its rendering of the murky reality of the color line. Ultimately, however, I believe the play offers a bold vision of possibilities for a multiracial and transnational future. The reviews of The Red Moon seemed to reinforce the spectacle and curiosity of a black-produced show and an all-black cast performing as “Indian.” The Cole–Johnson team was proof that blacks working together could segregate themselves voluntarily and still be self-sufficient and highly successful. The possibility was surely unsettling to proponents of racial hierarchy, and no doubt inspiring to other oppressed groups. The success of the performance troupe was all the more powerful because it was echoed in a small but growing number

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of businesses and communities around the country that persevered despite hostility from whites and some Indians.116 At the same time, the vehicle used to demonstrate the troupe’s independence — a play about Native Americans — deserves note. That black independence, or what could also be considered a type of black nationalist sentiment, was framed through intersections with the struggle to maintain Indian nationhood raised the stakes for both variegated populations’ calls for equal rights, as either independent nations or as full citizens. The play’s representation of an independent and respectable black township and of  an Indian community somewhere “out west” in which both Western-educated Indians, like Red Feather, and Lucia’s husband live together in solidarity is suggestive of alternative types of nationhood and manhood — black nationalism and Indian nationhood — that were self-generated rather than imposed from the outside. These communities exist and interact apart from white-centered assimilationist projects and white-supremacist nationhood, in a space that the Cole–Johnson team portrays as interracial, cross-cultural, and hybrid. More than one reviewer commented on the “weird, graceful aboriginal dance called ‘Wildfire,’ ” performed and choreographed by Ada Overton Walker, who played Phoebe Brown in the production.117 This dance, along with others, like the dancing braves, might have recalled the outlawed Lakota Ghost Dance that was considered a direct threat to U.S. government officials.118 The dance’s perceived danger increased in the early twentieth century, as it was viewed as a resurgence of anti-U.S. sentiment and as a restructuring of fragmented tribes into a more unified resistant nationalized force against white encroachment on Indian territories. In fact, it could be argued that Cole and Johnson employed indigenous resistance to perform their own type of resistance to expectations that they should produce shows that catered to more specifically blackidentified forms of entertainment. In order to do so, they offered their own vision of the role of dance and performance as a vehicle for self-definition and self-expression for blacks, as well as echoing that role’s power in indigenous cultures. Additionally, their appearance in the show itself reinforced their role as performers, as well as the brains and business behind the show’s success and production. Like the successful, educated members of the fictional black township of Swamptown, Cole–Johnson staged their own value for multiple audiences. And, as J. Rosamond Johnson notes, Cole’s refusal to wear the exaggerated black makeup popularized by

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blackface minstrelsy in the 1800s reinforced his skill as “a clever comedian without the aid of cork”; 119 the rest of the cast followed suit. Affirming their success, James Weldon Johnson declared that The Red Moon was a true operetta with a well-constructed book and a tuneful, well-written score. On these two points no Negro play has equaled The Red Moon. The Cole and Johnson combination lacked any such fun-makers as were Williams and Walker [one of the foremost black musical comedy teams of the early twentieth century],120 but in some other respects, they excelled their great rivals; their plays, on the whole, were better written, and they carried a younger, sprightlier, prettier chorus, which, though it could not sing so powerfully could outdance the heavier chorus of the other company by a wide margin. His congratulatory review of the troupe’s work placed them well within the idealized standards for black racial uplift that were circulating contemporaneously.121 Returning to the show itself, the conclusion implies a clear assertion of black victory over native desires, since Plunk Green, the identifiably black character, wins Minnehaha’s hand. Red Feather, her Indian suitor, is left waiting in the wings; however, his representation as a strong, independent, and educated Indian man was considered a positive alternative to stereotypes of Indians. Still, the final act suggests a hierarchization of “black” and indigenous cultures. Like many of the popular frontier plays of the time, The Red Moon resolved the conflicts and restored order by returning the action to the East, rather than settling in the West. This may have been a gesture toward the ongoing efforts that some bourgeois blacks were making to distinguish themselves from other disenfranchised communities of color, like indigenous communities and the Chinese, in order to establish the legitimacy of African American racial progress and citizenship. Echoing this desire to promote African American progress and respectability, depictions of indigenous life in The Red Moon attributed primitivism and violence to the Pawnee, Creeks, and Blackfoot, whereas cunning and skill were attributed to the central black male figures, Plunk Green and Slim Brown, whose performances as a doctor and a lawyer, respectively, were associated with upwardly mobility. Moreover, Red Feather is

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depicted as an educated Indian who goes back “to the blanket,” playing on beliefs that indigenous tribes would revert to savagery if they were not policed by the U.S. government and converted to Christianity. The Cole–Johnson team’s use of Indian stereotypes is disturbing, especially to a modern reader who wants to believe in their forward thinking. We cannot explain away or excuse their reliance on stereotypes. But I do believe that their knee-jerk reliance on such unhelpful depictions is balanced by their overall vision. We must remember how daring it was that in 1908–10 Cole and Johnson insisted on this staging of miscegenation without any white characters. Furthermore, though many secondary characters are hampered by simplistic depictions, the play’s most important character, Minnehaha, is presented as a mixed-race woman who avoids both the pitfalls of the tragic mulatta and the noble savage.122 Despite her imperfect world that inhabits the stage, Minnehaha embodies the possibility (and reality) of meaningful bonds and relationships between indigenous and black diasporic communities. What we are left with is an insistence on the sheer visibility of native– black culture. As this play toured across the country, in Canada, and in Europe, it invoked not just the stereotypes but also the messy reality of Indians, blacks, and Afro-Indians onstage and off. It thus presented a powerful counternarrative to the discourse of the degenerate and dying black population and of the disappearing or vanishing Indian by depicting the resilience and resistance of self-sufficient black townships and of indigenous tribal communities, despite efforts to eradicate them. Rather than heralding assimilation, colonization, or eradication so common in contemporary discourse, and rather than parroting the racialized and gendered global hierarchies so common in world’s fairs and vaudeville performances and Wild West shows alike, Cole and Johnson performed their own version of U.S. citizenry and family. Their vision included members who ranged in hue, mixed traditions, shared names and dances, and intermarried across racial, cultural, class, and national boundaries. They did not shatter the black–white color line, but their staging of miscegenation reframed it. The play was translated into a screenplay in 1938, designed for an allwhite cast, presumably wearing black, brown, and red makeup. According to notes accompanying the 1938 screenplay, the film’s script maintained the general story line and intended to take “marked care” to “avoid the usual Motion Picture Indian” and to present “Legends and ceremonial

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dances” that were “authentic.”123 The search for Native American authenticity, of course, is terribly ironic, considering the film industry’s reliance on various gradations of blackface — one of America’s most revered traditions of inauthenticity — and on Indian stereotypes. The 1938 version was set in the Southwest, starting in Oklahoma, stopping in New Mexico, and ending in Arizona. It also changed Chief Lowdog’s name to Chief Clearsky, who supports Red Feather and Minnehaha’s love for each other and desire to marry; however, it also forecloses the possibility of a union between the two by killing off Red Feather when a rival of Chief Clearsky, Chief Rain in Your Face, refuses to accept Minnehaha into their tribal community because she is racially mixed. This attempt at revival transformed the “hue” of the play, with its allwhite cast, and its conclusion, even though J. Rosamond Johnson collaborated on this version. The screenplay does not resolve the racialized conflicts in the same way as the play, since the unmarried Minnehaha’s future is unknown, and Plunk Green, who marries her in the play, departs for Broadway in the screenplay rather than returning to the black township with her.124 The screenplay raises intriguing questions about the implications of the revisions in the pre–World War II context, but they extend beyond the scope of this study. It would be significant, for example, to determine whether or not the film would have included a range of hues, or whether it would have relied on the white–red binary, since it used allwhite actors. Or, if the film did use a range of makeup to establish racial differences, how might the unintended consequences of this staging echo the Cole–Johnson team’s emphasis on racial performance and the malleability of racial categories? Though the film was not produced, its revisions for the screenplay would most likely make a modern viewer cringe; fortunately, we still have the power of the original stage work. The Red Moon staged miscegenation differently from how it was depicted in previous productions of popular culture. Although, in some ways, the play relied on stereotypes, it remained less wedded to past conventions and was more of a harbinger of future racial and cultural hybridity. The play also reimagined interracial “contact zones” as potential sites for alliance rather than divisiveness. It also expanded the visual registers for “black” and for “Indian” by highlighting the elasticity of racial definitions and by showcasing the dynamic interactions that continued to complicate the black–white binary. Indeed, this work suggested worlds where whites weren’t even a part of interracial

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intimacy, a vision that, in some ways, echoed the worst fears of whites who fretted over the disappearance of whiteness and projected the predictions of nonwhites who imagined communities that embodied the diversity that was already in the mix. Through their strategic employment and staging of Afro-Indian miscegenation, Hopkins and the Cole–Johnson team played out new visions of interracial and intercultural dynamics in the context of U.S. cultural and imperial politics. By reconceptualizing the bifurcated portrait of U.S. race relations, their work transformed the national landscape into a spectrum of “hues” that staged the complexity of race, nation, and empire embodied in and through the broadly construed trope of miscegenation. Their reactivation of historic and contemporaneous black–Indian relations provided an alternative platform for imagining citizenship and nation making. They employed miscegenation to decenter the black–white color line and to serve as a model for developing kinship and multiracial communities that challenged segregation. Unlike our earlier works, they present the possibility that the trope of miscegenation could offer generative potential and productive results, rather than functioning as the symbol of a dystopic future. By viewing miscegenation with optimism, rather than doom, these artists helped inaugurate a bold new vision of racial mixing and its potential for cultural change.

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· CHAPTER 5 ·

The Futurity of Miscegenation The woman of to-day finds herself in the presence of responsibilities which ramify through the profoundest and most varied interests of her country and race. . . . She stands now at the gateway of this new era of American civilization. . . . To be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage . . . unique in the ages. . . . She must stamp weal or woe on the coming history of this people. —Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South

The few years of our married life were supremely happy, and perhaps she was even happier than I. . . . There came a new dread to haunt me, a dread which I cannot explain. . . . I was in constant fear that she would discover in me some shortcoming which she would unconsciously attribute to my blood rather than to a failing of human nature. —Narrator, in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

L

ike many of their fellow artists, intellectuals, and activists living well before and after the celebrated “modern” period known as the Harlem Renaissance, Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson employed the cultural arena to showcase and evaluate the progress that blacks and other marginalized communities had made thus far and would continue to make. As African American cultural emissaries to the nation and to the world, Hopkins and Johnson (both literally and figuratively) translated and promoted their representations of black expressive culture, politics, and history. In doing so, they explored how the complex rhetorics of blood, sex, nation, and race shaped the creation of individual and collective identity. And, in turn, they questioned how identity formations · 187 ·

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produced by these intersecting discourses were translated into powerful symbols of family and citizenry, and by extension, national and global civilization. Whereas the previous chapter explored how Afro-Indian relations questioned bifurcated racial–national boundaries and geographies, and reconfigured domestic possibilities, this chapter looks at Hopkins’s and Johnson’s staging of the transnational and diasporic contours of miscegenation. Through their creative reconceptualizations of the black–white binary, their works emphasized the elasticity of the definitions used to organize and understand the messy intersections of race, nation, gender, and class. Remaining in step with their contemporaries, who were also marching boldly into the twentieth century with their own set of hopes and beliefs, Hopkins and Johnson embraced the hybridization of the black population and of other non-Anglo and multiracial communities; their work illuminated the representational potential of interracial intimacies and intermixture, as well as the national and global implications that were so often subsumed by the overriding black–white divide. At the same time, however, they also employed radical stagings of miscegenation to promote and legitimize the visible and palpable presence of a diverse black population and to document the vital historical and contemporaneous societal contributions of the black diaspora. In Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self, which also appeared as a serial in 1902–3 in the Colored American Magazine shortly after Winona, Hopkins incorporates Pan-Africanism in her literary romance of miscegenation that spoke not only to the complexity of black-diasporic identity but also to variegated forms of whiteness. Her love story also provides her with a platform to interrogate and revise local and world histories that take into account the intercultural, multiracial, and transnational contributions that helped build civilization and the ideals that were so often attributed to western Europe. Published a decade later, Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man documents the experience of a fictionalized protagonist of mixed ancestry who moves among various racial and ethnic communities because of his ability to pass as both white and nonwhite. In addition to foregrounding the black–white divide, Johnson also provides commentary and insight into the lives of people who occupied distinct locations within the racial and national matrix that informed identity at the begininng of the twentieth century. His portrait of what he terms an “ex-colored” man

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thus enabled him to offer a window into the various scenes of productive black life that were being upstaged by lynching and racial violence. Through a story of racial mobility, which eventually leads to a lasting black– white marriage, Johnson rehearsed, unveiled, and then revised the problematic conventions and ideologies associated with miscegenation. We return to Hopkins’s and Johnson’s work in this chapter because they both take the trope of miscegenation into new territories by emphasizing its ser viceability as a multidimensional representational concept. Part of the striking impact of their work is that they both employ written narrative forms, rather than plays, to stage radical forms of miscegenation. By radical, I mean that their works both interrogate what seem to be the endless cultural ramifications of the trope of miscegenation, regardless of generic classification. Rather than follow the conventions of any one form, Hopkins and Johnson adopt and adapt multiple generic strategies to play out the myriad ways that miscegenation’s arsenal of meanings and contexts could be manufactured, deployed, and understood at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as in the future. Both authors draw from their intimate experiences in multiple arenas as performers, historians, orators, writers, and critics to craft innovative representations. They blend nineteenth-century generic conventions and playfully traverse bifurcated boundaries to enhance the powerful impact of their creative productions and their influence as black cultural producers and activists.1 This approach enabled them to reevaluate the cultural fascination with miscegenation and its taboo status during the Civil War era and even surpass their earlier decentering of the black–white binary in their work on Afro-Indian relations. In contrast to the work of earlier nineteenth-century drama and fiction writers, Hopkins and Johnson utilize the performative trope of miscegenation for their own purposes, rather than being manipulated or used by it. In doing so, they explore how intermixture might revolutionize the meanings of race in the twentieth century. Their playful yet representationally powerful experimentation with varied forms and hybridized identities, as opposed to adherence to monolithic voices and belief systems — strategies with which we are all too familiar in the twenty-first century and often take for granted — gestures toward the future rather than the past. Like all the works we have considered, Hopkins’s Of One Blood and Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man also offer responses to the historical residue of slavery and miscegenation, but they do so in ways

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that underscore the performance of race and nationhood more selfconsciously and explicitly than earlier works, or others that we have discussed. Not only do they expose the reductivity of the black–white color line, but they also simultaneously inhabit and refigure America’s restrictive structure of identification and classification. In the context of an increasingly variegated white population, each segment of which insisted on the purity and superiority of whiteness, they responded with representations and enactments of equally variegated “blackness.” In their works, performance displaced the “real” and the “authentic” and, in doing so, engaged and disrupted persistent stereotypes with which they and so many others had to contend, both onstage and in the street. By exhibiting those nonwhite racialized performances that were desirable to mainstream white audiences through embodied performances, such as the tragic octoroon, they literally staged the miscegenation process through which white audiences and readership consumed “black” cultural production. However, they also included the possibility of black pleasure and agency.2 By highlighting the pleasure and profit experienced by both blacks and whites, who viewed, participated in, and appropriated black cultural expression and entertainment, they critiqued the reductive discourse of miscegenation as a contaminating and destructive force. They dramatized miscegenation to illuminate how its innumerable manifestations — in private and in public, both domestically and transnationally — might be read as productive, or even productively disruptive, formulations of identity and subjectivity. The trope of miscegenation, as we have seen so many times before, provided a performative site for playing out the dynamic and often contradictory ways that bifurcated racial boundaries, or rather the transgression of them, exposed the mutual contingency of our broadest cultural concerns. For example, miscegenation offered, at the very least, an imagined alternative to various types of nationalisms, such as black versus white supremacist, that were pitted against each other as the solution to racialized oppositions; it also functioned as a symbolic emblem of intermingling and hybridity, one that could generate creative reimaginings of conventional transnational and cross-racial formulations that did not rely solely on the bifurcated model, such as empire-colony. In this way their work addressed more rigid formulations of race, such as the emergent black separatism envisioned by the likes of Marcus Garvey, and increasingly entrenched forms of white terror and imperialism, represented by the Ku Klux Klan’s re-

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surgence at the turn of the twentieth century. Hopkins’s and Johnson’s strategic enactments of miscegenation also include, or at least gesture toward, racial polarization that expanded the black–white polarity to other populations, such as increasingly hostile policies toward Chinese citizenship and national identity (the “Yellow Peril”), and military acts against indigenous nations. Both works reimagined and resisted the overwhelming resiliency of binarisms, like domestic/global, black/white, civilized/ savage, in favor of a rich and multivalent diasporic vision. Although both Hopkins’s Of One Blood and Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man are now considered canonical African American literary texts, they have been examined most extensively in terms of their contributions to African American literary representation, including their excavation of the undocumented past, and their complex depictions of self-discovery, interiority, passing, and racial hybridity.3 More recent interdisciplinary scholarship has added to our current understanding of the interactivity of these texts with diverse forms of African American, black diasporic, and transnational cultural production, like Susan Gillman’s work on Hopkins and the occult and Siobhan Somerville’s queer readings of both Hopkins’s and Johnson’s cultural production. Both early and more contemporaneous examinations, including my own, also take into account the collective political and social engagment of “black” intellectuals, artists, and activists that helped shape cultural production during the transitional and unsettled postbellum, Progressive, and pre–World War I eras.4 In Of One Blood’s intensely racialized manifestation of miscegenation, Hopkins sets the stage for a radical reimagination of interracial relations in which agency and authority are always in play. By displaying this process of interplay in the performative praxis of miscegenation, I argue that Hopkins creates space to imagine more elastic formulations of racial, gendered, national, and sexual interrelations, as well as the complex desires and repulsions that inform them.5 By foregrounding the fluidity of the lines that distinguish these categories, Hopkins intervenes in the binarization not only race of but also of generic forms of cultural and aesthetic expression.6 Like her heroine, Dianthe, Hopkins’s artistic expression blends intercultural, trans-hemispheric, intergeneric, intertextual, and interracial conventions and histories, enabling her to exceed the reductive expectations imposed on her because of (to name a few aspects of her identity) her race, gender, nationality, class, and marital status. Moreover, because of

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the restrictions placed on black women, particularly single black women who were also creative intellectuals like Hopkins, her intervention into cultural bifurcation helps to reveal the ways in which her contemporaries echoed and diverged from this model. Hopkins’s disruption of certain binaries also points to the ways in which those same distinctions shaped the work and career of cultural producers like James Weldon Johnson, whose vision intersected with hers. Johnson’s visibility was more significant than Hopkins’s during their lifetimes. I believe that his influence was greater, in part, because of his gender but also because of his huge success in the performance and music world (along with his partners Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson), and his revered roles as an educator, lawyer, and member of the NAACP and of the U.S. foreign ser vice. Despite Hopkins’s great accomplishments, her activism and art did not receive the recognition it merited when she was still alive.7 Additionally, their twelve-year age difference and the time lapse between the peak of Hopkins’s and Johnson’s careers, as well as her disappearance from public life after 1916,8 generated different perspectives and distinct opportunities. Johnson was able to take full advantage of expanding opportunities for black men in areas from which Hopkins was excluded,9 such as entering the foreign ser vice in 1906, which enriched his transnational and intercultural background and experiences. And, as opportunities for blacks expanded, so did Johnson’s take on miscegenation and its representational possibilities. In fact, he wrote Autobiography while working and living in Venezuela.10 Like Hopkins, he used his work as a platform to reevaluate the miscegenated roots of the U.S.-diasporic family tree. In the readings that follow, I consider how Hopkins and Johnson deploy miscegenation as a performative trope in their fiction, and how this taboo enables them to create characters who transcend the confines of the local as well as the national, along with other rigidly defined and overdetermined roles and categories. For instance, we will consider how Hopkins’s strategic employment of the miscegenation trope enables her to also intervene in other cultural bifurcations, particularly the divisions between performance and writing, lived experience and fiction, spectator and performer, domesticity and transnationalism, and citizen and alien. In a similar vein, we will examine how Johnson’s representation of miscegenation is informed by his position as a man, husband, international agent for the U.S. government, and spokesperson for domestic African Americans. And although both authors enact miscegenation in their work and in their lives

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in multivalent ways, a close comparative reading of their texts and the contexts in which they were produced reveal both the intersectionalities and the distinctions of their creative visions. The Specter of Miscegenation

Set in Boston, Of One Blood opens with a description of medical student Reuel Briggs, who specializes in brain fever and mesmerism. He looks white, though he is of mixed white and African ancestry. The only person privy to his mixed heritage is his white southern friend and confidant, Aubrey Livingston. Disregarding Reuel’s potential discomfort, Aubrey invites him to a performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers — a renowned allblack ensemble from the southern historically black university. They were known throughout the United States and Europe for their hauntingly beautiful renditions of Negro spirituals, or what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to in 1903 as “sorrow songs” detailing hope and despair of black experiences in slavery and in freedom.11 The night before the concert, Reuel sees an apparition of a hauntingly familiar woman emerge out of the stormy night. When he attends the recital, he is shocked, because the soloist (Dianthe) seems to be the same woman who appeared in his vision the previous night. The next day, Reuel is called to the hospital to examine a young woman who appears lifeless. It is Dianthe. To everyone’s astonishment, Reuel revives her from her deathlike slumber. She and Reuel somehow recognize each other from their earlier apparational encounter. In fact, Dianthe, like Reul, looks white; however, he knows that she also has African ancestry because she is one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Eventually Dianthe regains her strength under Reuel’s care, but she is still unable to regain her memory. Aubrey’s fiancée, Molly Vance, feels sorry for Dianthe and takes her in to live with her family. Once she is settled, Reuel confesses his love for Dianthe. They soon set a wedding date; however, he feels that he needs more money to support her. With covert plans to woo Dianthe while Reuel is away, Aubrey helps him secure a position on a two-year expedition to Ethiopia. Before he leaves, Reuel marries Dianthe and asks Aubrey to look after her. Aubrey secretly arranges to have Reuel murdered during the expedition. With Reuel gone, Dianthe begins to recall her life before her injury — including the fact that she is black. Aubrey reveals his love for her. In order to remove his fiancée Molly from the picture, he kills her during a

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boat ride and passes it off as an accidental drowning. He also deceives Dianthe by claiming that Reuel does not know she is black (he also withholds the fact that Reuel is black and has been passing as white). By instilling fear in Dianthe that she will be punished for deceiving Reuel and that he can save her, Aubrey coerces her into marrying him; she agrees, like a “puppet in the hands of a false friend.”12 During the expedition, Reuel has a vision of a female spirit who reveals Aubrey’s treachery. Fearing the worst, he plans to return home as soon as he reaches the Ethiopian city of Meroe. Once he arrives, he receives news that Dianthe, Molly, and Aubrey are all dead. Distraught, Reuel wanders toward the pyramids alone one night and discovers the hidden city of Telassar, where he is instantly surrounded by a noble and sophisticated multicolored race of Africans. He learns that he is the lost King Ergamenes, a direct descendant of their ancient Ethiopian king. According to their theology, Reuel is destined to take his rightful place on the throne, next to a Queen Candace, in order to “give the world a dynasty of dark skinned rulers.” To his surprise, the queen looks and sounds like his beloved Dianthe.13 While hidden in Telassar, Reuel discovers that Dianthe and Aubrey are still alive, and that they are his sister and brother. In response to this shocking news, Reuel departs for the States, along with Ai and Abdallah (members of Telassar’s ruling council). In the meantime, Dianthe realizes that Aubrey has betrayed her. Soon afterward, she also learns (through her grandmother, Aunt Hannah) that she, Reuel, and Aubrey are siblings. They are the children of Aubrey’s father and his slave Mira (Hannah’s daughter), but Aubrey was switched at birth with his father’s white son (who died at birth) and was raised as a free “white” man. Fraught with anxiety, Dianthe attempts to poison Aubrey, but he catches her and instead forces her to kill herself. As retribution, Ai and Abdallah use their supernatural powers to induce Aubrey to commit suicide. Despite Dianthe’s death, her spirit plays an important role. In the end, Reuel returns to Telassar, where he marries Queen Candace and assumes his rightful position as king. As is obvious from the plot description, Of One Blood is unlike any of our other texts. Critics have focused on the significance of the occult and passing in this piece as they pertain to Hopkins’s reframing of black identity. The work has also been characterized as part sentimental, part melodrama, part science fiction, and part “New Negro” rhetoric, to name a few interpretations.14 It is a strange blend that consistently confounds

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the reader’s expectations with uncanny plot twists, hauntings and interventions from dead ancestors, mysterious disappearances, and spectral visitations, not to mention the exposure of a convoluted lineage that crosses national, racial, cultural, and class boundaries. Moreover, travel defies the laws of science, allowing ancient Ethiopians to interact with their twentiethcentury diasporic heirs in the United States and modern-day explorers to enter hidden ancestral and mystical cities thought to be no longer in existence or mythological fictions. Every aspect of Hopkins’s work — its plot, its characters, its setting, its genre, its subject, its conclusion — resists reductive readings. The overlaps and intersections cannot be easily untangled or segregated or self-contained in this fantastic spectacle of miscegenation. Instead, Hopkins’s work stresses the hybridity of racial identity, history, civilization, and nationhood. Her serialized rendering of intermixture reinforces her own efforts to push against preconceptions about race, gender, history, and nation in her creative work and in the daily grind of her life. Throughout her work, Hopkins deliberately fused seemingly distinct traditions of “white” Western and “black” African cultures. In Of One Blood’s staging of miscegenation, Hopkins demonstrates how ancient Ethiopian cultures are appropriated and absorbed, and thereby presented as unique aspects of white Western heritage. Reuel’s racial intermixture serves as an embodied example of this absorption, as his Ethiopian features are seamlessly reclassified as Apollonian in the story. Hopkins’s narrative suggests that not only are seemingly diverse cultures and traditions interconnected through intermixture, but that it was also the long history of miscegenation, rather than its prohibition or absence, that created the need to promote “white” cultural supremacy and pure lineages. By connecting the interrelated fates of Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey to the origins of African civilization, Hopkins’s text destabilizes conventional definitions of both blackness and whiteness by redefining them in terms of intersecting African and Western (Greek) cultures.15 The Ethiopian society that Reuel rediscovers is multiethnic, where people range “from a creamy tint to purest ebony.” Rather than presenting a strict racial type, to which Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey belong, Hopkins offers a representation of multihued racial identities united by the common goal of reestablishing the value and contributions of the world’s darker people. Their diversity is also exhibited by the racial variety of the all-black Fisk Jubilee ensemble. With this objective, the unmasking of racial and

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cultural performance — namely, the revelations that the main characters are all passing — is part of an excavation process that eventually leads to an unveiling of hidden identities and suppressed culture.16 Hopkins’s choice of Ethiopia is also significant. As one of the longest-standing independent nations on the African continent, and at the time of Hopkins’s writing a successful resister to the Italian empire’s attempts to incorporate it, Ethiopia offered a radically different example of a thriving Pan-African nation and of successful collective resistance to oppression and racist statesanctioned cultural imperialism in comparison with the emergent yet fragmented and dispersed black-diasporic communities in turn-of-thecentury United States. Ethiopia also shared, with other metropolitan sites across the globe, a history of intercultural exchange and diversity that reinforced Hopkins’s cosmopolitan vision. The notion of fusion is evident all the way down to the multiple genres she uses, thereby revealing the constructedness and limitations of the subjects they represent. She plays with various forms, producing an intergeneric amalgamation linked by the specific political and cultural project of racial uplift and self-preservation. In an earlier description of her project in Contending Forces, her first novel, Hopkins captures her broader intentions: “it is the simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and complexions.” She goes on to say more generally that “fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and custom — religious, political, and social. It is a record of growth from generation to generation.” According to Hopkins, part of her task was to “portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history” (emphasis in original).17 As Hopkins’s words reveal, her vision is multifold. She employed fiction, along with her work as an essayist, public speaker, performer, biographer, literary editor, and playwright,18 to demonstrate her intellectual accomplishments and to represent the potential of the black race.19 Rather than confine her expression to a single platform, she presented her ideas on the stage, in book form, at speaking engagements, and in periodicals to underscore the interconnectedness of her different voices and positions, including her roles as black, female, historian, and cultural critic. By appropriating characteristics of multiple generic categories, Hopkins’s representations continually challenge already established milieus for the type of political and cultural work in which she engages. Of One Blood, in particular, performs the roles of fantasy novel and historical or

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ethnographical account simultaneously because of its invocation of the discourses from those genres. For example, Hopkins links the “science of the occult” with psychology, ethnology, Egyptology, and Ethiopianism in order to destabilize fixed notions of race and culture.20 At the same time, however, her revisionist work retains its connection to Western traditions that would be familiar to her audience, such as Christianity. In addition, her novel’s serialized publication in the Colored American Magazine enabled Hopkins to integrate related contemporaneous texts that both commented on and reinforced issues that she represented in the novel.21 For instance, Hopkins used her fiction, as well as an editorial response, to address criticisms of her portrayals of interracial love. And, in articles like “Venus and the Apollo, Modeled on Ethiopians,” she asserted her theories about the advancement of ancient black cultures, such as her contention that black Ethiopian slaves were the physiological models for classic art.22 Although it has been argued that Hopkins used fantastic and melodramatic forms to avoid facing the realities of social problems directly,23 I believe her placement of the serial novel alongside her concurrent discussions of relevant debates and concerns about race and identity in the United States and abroad was deliberate.24 She reproduced most of the issues that she raised in her nonfictional essays in her imaginative novels and short stories, such as miscegenation history and black America’s cultural ties to African civilizations. By allowing her remarkable story to play the role of biography, history, and even science, at the same time that it performed as melodrama, detective novel, and science fiction, Hopkins actively intervened in reality and challenged the unquestioned legitimacy of facts about race, culture, and civilization (re)produced in mainstream authorized sources, such as science and Western history.25 Hopkins thus performed a creative enactment of miscegenation that contested the oppositional, marginalized, and inferior status of blacks and other “dark-visaged” people in the United States and abroad. If Hopkins’s accounts of Africa and black diasporic history could be categorized as fantasy and science fiction, then by extension, other “legitimate” narratives, such as eugenics or the legacy of white-supremacist ideology, could also be read as part of a carefully constructed performance of the truth. She created her own miscegenous blend of the scientific and the surreal, and thus produced narratives that exceed the generic “norms” out of which they emerge.26 By repeating and then revising conventional narratives, Hopkins created a “counter-reiteration” that “render[ed] hyperbolic”27 and

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thus delegitimized the discursive conventions and ideas that formed the bedrock of white racism and cultural imperialism. Similarly, Hopkins reframes what frequently gets read as an intricate story of racialized passing around the numerous implications — gendered, erotic, familial, racial, and transnational alike — of miscegenation. The triad of central characters, Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey, immediately disrupt the binarization of race implied by miscegenation in their complex triangulated enactment of interracial intimacies. Their initial inability to understand, name, or access their interrelated, transnational, and yet hidden origins reinforces the inherent instability of race. However, the story’s ultimate unveiling of African ancestry shows that it is possible to tap into one’s hidden self, rather than relying on varied performances of race and identity. Many Hopkins scholars have linked her experimentation with the occult and subconscious identity with her knowledge of William James’s pyschological research. They have also noted the intersections of her use of James’s ideas and W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of a “second self” and double consciousness.28 I believe that Hopkins’s appropriation of the science of the mind once again enables her to highlight intermixture, because ultimately her characters demonstrate that the hidden self is itself hybrid. The hidden self is not some essentialized entity waiting for discovery. Instead, it represents the excavation of a legacy of collective, intersecting, interracial and intercultural and spiritual intimacies that compose our complex identities. Hopkins’s emphasis on intermixture demonstrates how the careful policing of racialized, familial, and national borders does not remove the erotic appeal of interracial or incestuous sex. If anything, Hopkins’s narrative suggests that suppression and denial of the intersecting histories of racial, familial, and transnational relations have led to much more violent and destructive crossings of those sacred boundaries. Moreover, the lines drawn to distinguish between race, family, and nation are always in the process of being reformulated at different moments in history, in order to enforce different ideological imperatives. For example, the familial and incestuous bond shared by Aubrey, Reuel, and Dianthe exposes a history of the displacement and exploitation of black slaves that was built upon the violent rupture of familial, cultural, and kinship ties. However, Hopkins provides a counternarrative by suggesting that their “incestuous” relations also led to a powerful discovery of the ancestral and diasporic bond that united Reuel and Dianthe and reanimated Reuel’s Pan-African destiny.

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In fact, Hopkins literally staged the fact that miscegenation sometimes led to incest. One of the ways in which this occurred was when white parents suppressed their own interracial patrilineage or matrilineage (especially during slavery), which meant that relatives could unknowingly enter into incestuous relations.29 Incest was actually often associated with miscegenation because of their shared status in mainstream discourse as unnatural.30 By allowing Reuel and Dianthe to marry, Hopkins activates their underlying familial ties through a mutual expression of sexual desire and psychic bonding. However, Hopkins tellingly offers a radically different vision of these twinned unnatural acts; the magnetism between Reuel and Dianthe is depicted as inescapable, since they are linked as brother and sister and as direct descendants of a royal line of Ethiopians. Instead of marking them as corrupt, their transgression becomes the vehicle that reestablishes their shared transnational and intercultural heritage. They also share, along with all the members of their family, a lily-shaped birthmark on their chests. This mark of ancestry proves their cultural affinity, distinct from the ambiguity of biological “evidence” signified by the “one drop” rule or by any imposed legal or scientific classification. By staging their dynamic and multivalent relationship as a type of miscegenation, Hopkins also plays out the gendered and eroticized power dynamics that informed discourse surrounding interracial intimacies. For example, both Reuel and Aubrey exert power over Dianthe, recalling the illicit miscegenous relations that occurred on slave plantations and that were part of imperial practices and domination in transnational sites. Rather than valuing her independent agency, both Aubrey and Reuel consider Dianthe an object to be possessed and protected. Dianthe, then, serves as the vehicle through which both Reuel and Aubrey express their manhood. By allowing Aubrey and Reuel to marry Dianthe, Hopkins actualizes the incestuous valence of the relationship that was merely suggestive in earlier textual representations of miscegenation (and, as we shall see, in Johnson’s Autobiography as well). Hopkins’s bold reconfiguration of miscegenation produces explicit meanings that amplify and therefore foreground the implications that are muted in the other earlier representations. Dianthe’s vulnerability and desirability, because of her “classic” European appearance and mannerisms, help sustain Aubrey’s and Reuel’s performances of “whiteness” and masculinity. As long as Dianthe enacts whiteness convincingly, they can locate their own legitimacy and value through their possession of her. The imbalance of power that characterizes

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their relationship with Dianthe also emphasizes the restriction of this identity that is imposed upon her. For whether she is labeled “black” or “white,” Dianthe does not determine her selfhood independently.31 She performs her fragmented identity in relation to the roles assigned to her, either through direct imposition or through mesmeric influence. However, when she comes to understand her familial, racial, cultural, and diasporic history, everything changes. The revelations of her blackness and of her (multiple) incestuous relationships — which have caused the ruin of innumerable men and women, both fictional and real — are actually a gift in Hopkins’s text. Once the truth is revealed, and once she is forced to kill herself, Dianthe can embody her role as a conduit,32 as one who animates intersections that were previously bifurcated — such as the division between blackness and whiteness, between domestic U.S. citizen and diasporic citizen of the world, between the past and the present, between masculinity and feminity, and between master and servant. For Dianthe, in death, reemerges symbolically in the form of Queen Candace. Hopkins foreshadows this emblematic twinning of the two women earlier in the novel when Reuel sees a spirit that looks exactly like Dianthe. Later, when he meets Queen Candace, he is startled because “it seemed to him that Dianthe’s own voice was breathing in his ears”; he is astounded by the resemblance between Candace and Dianthe that “was so striking that it was painful.”33 Through these embodied and ethereal figures, Hopkins represents the past, present, and potential future of miscegenation. These racialized blackdiasporic female figures that reemerge in multiple sites and forms throughout the narrative remind us of our miscegenated past — overlapping histories, diasporic ancestry, tangled racial and national lineage — as well as signify the potential of our uncharted future. Hopkins indicates that the black woman’s body remains integral to her revision of the trope of miscegenation as productive and even procreative rather than destructive. However, since this reformulation of miscegenation and black progress occurs outside the United States in a mystical kingdom, it raises questions about where real progress can take place and when. At the same time, however, by grounding Reuel’s discoveries explicitly in the U.S. historical context of slavery and interracial intimacies, Hopkins refuses to divorce Pan-Africa’s and America’s intertwined fates, reinforcing the interrelated past, present, and future destinies of the black diaspora in the United States and around the globe. In this way, her representation differs from earlier stagings of

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miscegenation in which the couples move to Western locales outside the United States, such as Italy or England. Instead, in Hopkins’s work, the relocation results in a return to Ethiopia rather than to another Western site; moreover, the characters move back and forth between Africa and the United States, which links the future of Pan-Africanism and diasporic identity to the hybridized past. The third member of this triad, Aubrey Livingston, has also built his life as white; unlike the others, though, he does not survive the revelation of his blackness. In the novel, he thus offers an alternative vision of how racial performance can lead to an inability to live a productive life and to (self-)destructive behavior. By relinquishing all responsibility and connection to his past, Aubrey frees himself to disregard the humanity of others whom he destroys in order to sustain his performance of white masculinity and power. He privileges his own selfish desires and pleasures over anyone who prevents him from obtaining them; however, his willful ignorance of his past and his complete narcissism isolate and eventually kill him. Aubrey’s failed attempt to forge a life for himself and Dianthe, at the expense of Reuel and Dianthe’s love for each other, undermines the legitimacy of his authority. Even though he is white, or believes himself to be white, he cannot erase history, nor can he reverse fate. As he tries to reenact the role of exploitative master over Dianthe, he ultimately faces his own impotence when the illegitimacy of the racialized, gendered, familial structures on which his power is based is revealed as merely a counterfeit performance. In the end, Aubrey’s role demonstrates not only how “blacks” can perform “whiteness,” but also how those who seem to embody “whiteness” are equally engaged in a performance. Aubrey functions as a “white” man, as well as the heir of a white slave owner. He uses his influence to undermine Reuel’s white status and to manipulate Dianthe. In fact, once he marries her, he reproduces the historically inscribed role of white slave master by governing her every move. His marriage to Dianthe not only emphasizes the patriarchal authority associated with heterosexual marriage, it also secures his own manhood (which is, at times, unsettled by the homoerotic intimacies he shares with Reuel). Both men, who treat Dianthe as a feminized version of themselves, seem to rely on their marriage to her as a public assertion of their normative white masculinity. However, since both of their relationships are eventually exposed as miscegenous and incestuous, Hopkins’s representation destabilizes the legitimacy of both

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performances of white heterosexuality and marriage. One man is able to create a new, transnational life out of the wreckage of U.S. race relations, while the other is not. Aubrey’s ignorance of the criminalized acts that he performs highlights his blind adherence to the hiearchies of race, class, gender, and nation that he has inherited. Even during the final moments of his life, Aubrey’s actions are not motivated by his own will or by any sense of responsibility for past wrongs, including the murders of his fiancée and Dianthe.34 Instead, with his eyes “fixed on vacancy,” Aubrey performs his final selfdestructive gesture (suicide) in a “trancelike slumber.” This final act, like the rest of his life as white man, suggests that the desire to dominate others requires a willful disregard for the humanity of the subjects that one attempts to control, and sustained cultural amnesia for the crimes committed to remain in a position of power and domination. Hopkins’s representation of Aubrey’s engagement in these illicit interracial alliances also exposes his corruption and demonstrates how his acts can be read as regenerative of the exploitative power relations of his white slave-owning ancestors.35 Aubrey’s manipulative behavior, which contrasts with his aristocratic appearance and societal position, challenges arguments about the superiority of whiteness. Through the unfolding of Aubrey’s fate, Hopkins plays out the hypocrisy of white supremacy. In a sense, he provides the most forceful reminder of the instability of white hegemony; and, in the end, his self-destruction invalidates his position completely. The juxtaposition of Aubrey, Reuel, and Dianthe, who occupy distinct racial categories, highlights the instability of racial categorization altogether. All three siblings, in manner and appearance, challenge preconceived notions of what it means to be “black.” Because their white-looking bodies mask their complex racial, diasporic, and familial ancestry, they gain access to the intimate domains of the white elite world. Ironically, the “white” world that they enter is inhabited by the likes of Aubrey, whose whiteness is not only suspect but is also directly related to Reuel’s and Dianthe’s African ancestry, foregrounding the social construction of “whiteness” alongside “blackness.” Hopkins’s characterizations of Reuel and Dianthe engage the conventional formulations of whiteness that contrast with more stereotypical representations of blackness, like the blackfaced dandy or zip coon. However, Hopkins reproduces whiteness “with a difference,” in that Reuel and Dianthe, who are categorized as “black,” em-

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body the ideals of classic white Western beauty, only in order to expose the ways in which those very models are also part of their African heritage. Rather than merely conforming to the standards of whiteness for personal gain, Dianthe and Reuel eventually incorporate what they discover living as whites and use it to revitalize (literally and figuratively) and recover their own hybrid identities, as well as their ancestral ties to ancient Telassar. Hopkins reveals the arbitrary muddle of what both “blackness” and “whiteness” meant in the popular imagination by first representing preconceived notions of both binarized racial categories, highlighted through complex stagings of miscegenation. She then reconceives those reductive models, so that they produce greater meaning than our historically overdetermined roles allow.36 Toward the novel’s end, the narrator asks — in no uncertain terms — the story’s most fundamental question: Who is clear enough in vision to decide who hath black blood and who hath not? Can any one tell? No, no one; for in His own mysterious way He has united the white race and the black race in this new continent. By the transgression of the law He proves His own infallibility: “Of one blood have I made all nations of men to dwell upon the whole face of the earth,” is as true today as when given to the inspired writers to be recorded. No man can draw the dividing line between the two races, for they are both of one blood!37 Aubrey and Dianthe and Reuel, though very different from one another, share the experience of occupying “black” and “white” racial categories simultaneously, reinforcing the narrator’s argument that distinctions among and between racial identities are not fixed, nor are they always identifiable. Because of their intersecting familial, diasporic, and interracial ancestry, Aubrey’s, Dianthe’s, and Reuel’s triangular relationship serves as a microcosm for the broader concept that all “races” are linked through intersecting and mutually informative histories. As suggested earlier, the parallels that white supremacists drew between incest and miscegenation reveal the contradictions of their antimiscegenation rhetoric, because the two acts represent dissimiliar crimes of nature, if we follow their logic. Their claim does not demonstrate how miscegenation and incest are the same. Instead, it represents the legal and cultural reification of the taboo status of one act (incest) in the ser vice of

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pathologizing another (miscegenation).38 The repetition and reiteration of discourse that names incest illicit was superimposed onto interracial intimacy, through juridical, historical, social narratives, which reconfigured miscegenation as equally transgressive and perverse. However, Hopkins’s exposure of the intermingled bloodlines that supposedly polarize black and white reinforced her representation of miscegenation as a performed reiteration of cultural and juridical beliefs rather than as an actual violation of legitimate racialized boundaries. The focus on corrupt blood, associated with the conflation of incest and miscegenation in the public imagination, also supported segregationist assertions that the races are biologically distinct and should remain separate. At the same time, however, the notion of shared blood invokes the humanistic belief that all people, regardless of color, creed, or class, share common (human) blood. The extension of this belief is that all races should be treated equally because essentially they are part of the same human species. The eventual unveiling of Reuel, Aubrey, and Dianthe’s interconnectedness promoted a multiracial rather than a mono- or even biracial society. Although both Dianthe and Reuel benefit, in some ways, from their temporary status as “white,” ultimately their discovery of their mutual familial, diasporic, and racial ties produces greater fulfillment in their lives and alternatives for their descendants. Aubrey, by contrast, is unable to take advantage of his altered status; tied to the fiction of his own whiteness, he cannot find an alternative means to construct an identity for himself, and moves helplessly toward his own death. His sacrifice seems essential to Hopkins’s story because of his extreme reliance on whiteness and on his inability to develop productive alliances with those around him. Although both Aubrey and Dianthe die, Aubrey’s death represents the end of something, while Dianthe’s suggests the beginning. In the context of Hopkins’s commitment to racial uplift and her strivings to create what Hazel Carby refers to as a “black literary renaissance” in Boston, twenty years before Harlem’s Renaissance was in the spotlight,39 her story of miscegenation offers a new way of narrating the past and using it productively for the future. Through her recuperation of the lost histories represented by both her serial novel and her essays and lectures on black diasporic history, Hopkins promotes the value of digging up one’s past, interrogating the complexities of identity, even those deemed unspeakable taboos, like miscegenation. Rather than attempting to pass her writing off as some-

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thing else or denying part of the past, Hopkins’s work announces a commitment to displacing the black–white binary, divesting it of its power and embracing the multiple lineages and histories that constituted blackdiasporic identity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Transnationality in Black and White

Similar to Hopkins, although twelve years her junior, James Weldon Johnson was also raised “free” and part of a vibrant, industrious, and middleclass black family. His commitment to racial uplift also emerged in his work across genres. Unlike Hopkins, Johnson’s own mixed Haitian–European– Bahamian lineage could be traced explicitly to interracial and transnational intimacies born out of imperial conquest and the slave trade linking Europe to the Caribbean and the Americas.40 Johnson’s own body, along with his representational strategies, also staged miscegenation at the very moment during which the stakes of maintaining binary oppositions were increasing. Johnson, like Hopkins, was intensely involved in the political, racial, and social climate in which he worked and lived. Born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, he attended public school, where his mother was assistant principal, until he was sixteen years old, graduating in 1887. He then matriculated at Atlanta University and graduated in 1894; he studied law while serving as principal of Stanton High School (the first public high school for blacks in the state of Florida) and was the first black person to pass the Florida bar exam.41 As we have seen, throughout these years Johnson also collaborated with his brother, J. Rosamond, writing the lyrics to the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and numerous vaudeville songs. He also joined fellow songwriters, such as Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa, in becoming one of the founding members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1914, established to protect the rights of songwriters and other music creators. He was an active member in politics and the NAACP, campaigning against lynching, against the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and for the promotion of black culture. In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the American consulate in Venezuela and then in Nicaragua; he would later serve in Panama and Cuba as well. The majority of his life was spent producing, nurturing, and documenting black life in all its variations, which dovetailed with his persistent

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quest for self-education. Included in his long list of publications are his autobiographical narrative, Along This Way; a history of performance and culture in New York City, Black Manhattan; a long-term critical column on race and culture in the New York Age; and a fictionalized narrative of black life, interracial relations, and passing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. This last text has been said to have ushered in the Harlem Renaissance and the next generation of cultural producers, including Nella Larsen, who would share many of his concerns and continue his queries of race and black life in the United States and abroad. Sadly, Johnson’s life ended abruptly when he was killed in a car crash in 1938.42 Johnson’s art was shaped by a transnational perspective, arguably more than any of our other authors. With support of his family and influential public figures like Booker T. Washington, who helped him secure his first foreign ser vice position, Johnson exposed himself to parts of the world that many Americans had never seen. Johnson started Autiobiography of an Ex-Colored Man while he studied creative writing at Columbia University from 1903 to 1904. He then lived in Manhattan but also traveled throughout the United States and Europe in 1905, something that few blacks were able to do. He continued to work on the book while he was posted in Venezuela from 1906 to 1909 and completed it in 1909 while serving as consul to Nicaragua from 1909 to 1912.43 Working and traveling in Central and South America for almost a decade — as a representative of the United States, no less — imbued him with a unique understanding of race, nation, and imperialism. Unlike most of his fellow black artists, he occupied a somewhat ambiguous position, as both an official promoter of U.S. political and economic interests in Venezuela and Nicaragua and as a member of the “class” of U.S. blacks who still did not possess equal rights at home. In a letter to Booker T. Washington in 1906, Johnson described his “first glimpse of the great and intricate color scheme of humanity that is being worked out in this part of the world.” Johnson also remarked that “in spite of American occupation and domination, prejudice based solely on race and color had made little headway there. Among the people, from the pure whites — who, are, by the way, very scarce — to those showing the slightest mixture, I could discover no distinct lines of division.”44 In the same letter, he marveled at the different status of “colored men” on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, which, he claimed, was transformed into a “thrifty and clean” town by its Dutch rulers so that it looked like “it might have been taken up bodily from

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Holland.” He was also impressed in Caracas, Venezuela, by the “colored colonels, and generals, and major-generals” in the president’s suite and declared that “the sight gave” him “a sort of thrill,” because in Europe “everything we see is white, and we can’t feel, somehow, that we are part of the procession; but I felt that night that I, too, was in it.”45 Johnson’s reactions to the variegated politics of race and nation in Central and South America were complicated. On the one hand, as part of the black elite and a representative of the U.S. government, he participated in the maintenance of U.S. imperialism. On the other hand, he recognized that the racial and national landscapes in these sites were both distinguishable from and akin to black disenfranchisement at home. His on-theground exposure to transnational intervention designed to protect U.S. political and economic interests and not necessarily the well-being or rights of the communities and nations that they occupied eventually led him to more-explicit critiques of U.S. empire. His critical view was not new, however, evidenced by his collaborative authorship of the play Tolsa with his brother, J. Rosamond, which satirized U.S. imperialsm in 1899, a year after the U.S. annexation of Hawaii and in the wake of the Spanish– American War that led to the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. James Weldon Johnson later described the work as a “comic opera satirizing the new American imperialism. The setting was an island kingdom in the Pacific. The story was concerned with Tolsa, the beautiful princess; her prime minister, a crafty old politician; the entrance of an American man-of-war; the handsome, heroic American lieutenant; and finally annexation.”46 As we have seen, performances of all kinds—from romances to blackface vaudeville — have long reflected the broader issues of the day. But rarely did nineteenth-century America see a play with such an explicit transnational dimension. Similarly, scholars have also read Autobiography as an extended representation of a man torn between “domestic struggle” and “imperial reward,” informed by Johnson’s relationship to Latin America.47 As his work and life indicate, Johnson employed performances of miscegenation and passing to navigate the complexities with which he was very familiar. Through the musing and mobility of his protagonist, Johnson contests the hierarchical and reductive binaries that structure race, class, and transnational relations. Illustrating this dynamic, his protagonist not only transgresses the black–white divide, occupying both categories at different points temporarily, but also circumvents the binary’s restrictions by passing as

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Cuban, something Johnson had experienced in his own life as a young man traveling to Atlanta with his longtime Cuban friend who spoke Spanish. They were spared from being ejected from the first-class car because the conductor believed that they were not black Americans and presumably were just passing through Florida.48 Although he first published Autobiography anonymously from his remote location in Nicaragua in 1912, it was later reprinted in 1927 because of its relevance to the cultural production emerging later in the twentieth century during the Harlem Renaissance.49 His anonymity, aside from adding to the intrigue of the autobiographical plot and form, may also indicate that his ideas were ahead of their time. In fact, he goes one step further than Alcott and Hopkins, who used pseudonyms to conceal their identities in the bylines for some of their more controversial stories, by not providing any name at all. This strategy of anonymity may have also lent to the authority of his narrative by removing any speculations about the book’s representation of Johnson’s own life or political motives. Moreover, his namelessness emphasizes both his mobility and his homelessness that results because he never identifies completely with any place, race, community, or even nation. Equally suggestive is his re-publication in 1927 when he publicly announced his authorship. At this point, during the height of what was called the New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, many more cultral producers were addressing the complexity of racial mixture and its implications, openly and critically. Even more so than his collaboration with Cole–Johnson and Hopkins’s earlier radical stagings of miscegenation, these mid-twentieth-century cultural productions openly and explicitly articulated opposition to imperialism and war and to racial violence at home and abroad; they also addressed the exploitation of marginalized citizens and laborers in the United States because of differences such as race, ethnicity, and religion, in cases that came to light following World War I. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, similar to Hopkins’s serialized novel, also interrogates generic conventions in its literary staging of miscegenation. As we shall see, the narrative takes us through the protagonist’s experiences as a young boy unaware of his black ancestry. Readers witness the process through which the narrator’s racial classification is employed as a performative device. We then witness the metamorphosis of our unnamed narrator, from a man who is not visibly black but who attempts to connect with the “black” community to a man who

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discards his black ancestry altogether and passes into the white world permanently, although uneasily. . . . Noted critics such as Robert Stepto and Valerie Smith have detailed Johnson’s strategic fusing, appropriation, and revision of canonical “AfroAmerican” narrative tropes, such as “the rhetoric of omission,” which highlight his protagonist’s (failed) attempt to come to terms with his own racially hybridized identity. Stepto argues that the narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man does not possess the racial literacy to learn from his experiences; instead, he stagnates in a superficial performance of noncommittal racial indeterminacy, resisting the in-depth communal connection and illumination forged by the literary ancestry that his narrative recalls, such as Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery.50 However, as Samira Kawash also contends, the Autobiography narrator’s “failure” to embody or name his racialized identity effectively challenges Stepto’s and other critics’ underlying assumption that a “knowable” or “stable” underlying racial identity, to which he must align himself, exists at all. In fact, the question as to whether or not he successfully chooses one side or the other of the color line also relies on the bifurcated racialized model that the Autobiography narrator’s liminal position simultaneously invokes and resists. In his refusal to occupy the empty signifier of race, the narrator’s story reinforces the arbitrariness of racial classifications, like Hopkins’s work. Yet the social and legal structures that police bodies that resist or violate the norms of race remain firmly in place.51 I believe that even though the narrator in The Autobiography of an ExColored Man plays a racially liminal role, the legibility and cultural implications of his performance come into view only in the context of its relationship to the static black–white binary. The narrator’s mobility relies on the consistently oppositional categories of black and white that he alternately resists and enacts. Part of the power, then, of Johnson’s narrative rests in the continual staging of miscegenation as a disruption of these binaries. Here, I depart from scholarship that emphasizes racial passing in Autobiography. Instead, I argue that miscegenation serves as the book’s central trope; we shall see how it is through miscegenation that the social, legal, and embodied realities of racial classification put pressure on the narrator’s resistance to the seemingly arbitrary imposition of explicit racial

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markers. I also believe that we can better understand Johnson’s text if we consider the narrator’s tale itself as a performance, an extended staging of miscegenation. The narrator in Autobiography performs distinct identities based on the context in which he is placed and on the interpretations of those around him, similar to the theatrical dynamic that brings together actors, a script, and an audience. However, these ingredients become truly meaningful only when they are activated collaboratively: the experience of the performance itself. Similarly, the narrator’s performance of race and his embodied contestation of the black–white binary are legible because of his mobility and instability as he navigates the color line, as well as the other binarized identities that intersect with it. Through the lens of the stage, we can see how Johnson’s narrative insists on the narrator’s role as both embodied and racialized performance. The narrator acknowledges his own role as a racial performer — its uneasy balance between lived experience and theatricality — when he meets the white woman he wants to marry. He claims that in the past he had “assumed and played” his “role as a white man with a certain degree of nonchalance.” Once he believes that he may lose the woman he loves, he begins to doubt his “ability to play the part” and fears that she might detect something that made him “differ from the other men she knew.” His uncertainty about how she will interpret his performance, once again, highlights the intersecting roles of the viewer, the actor, and the act. The narrator fears that her scrutiny or disapproval of his performance may reveal some inconsistency, mark of difference, or indisputable evidence that will position them on opposing sides of the black–white binary, erect an impenetrable divide and terminate their union.52 Along these same lines, Johnson’s narrative staging of miscegenation highlights the powerful process through which racial difference is enunciated, despite its social and cultural construction, rather than focusing on the narrator’s in-between status or passing performance. Ultimately, he cannot completely transcend the strictly polarized formulation of black and white and their mutual constitution of his rogue status; instead, the narrator comes dangerously close to reenacting the restrictive “cover story” of miscegenation that reproduces binarization and promotes limited visions of the individual, the community, the nation, and the globe; his choices also seem to limit the productive possibilities of his own imagination and position in society. However, through the narrator’s discomfort with his

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“present position” at the end of the narrative — a “privileged spectator” rather than a participant, who neither “disclaim[ed] the black race nor claim[ed] the white race53 — Johnson reminds his readers of other routes to success that do not involve sacrificing one’s self. The narrator’s regret plays a pedagogical role, illustrating the damage that one-dimensional labels and reductive (hi)stories can produce, even when they provide temporary comfort or simplicity in a complicated world. Johnson’s staging of miscegenation invokes a multilayered reading of autobiography. The narrator in Autobiography continually performs a kind of intermixing, culturally, geographically, sexually, racially, and aesthetically, in his travels throughout the United States and in Europe. Even his role as both outside observer and undetected performer blurs the line between actor and spectator. He does not fully occupy whiteness or blackness, despite his elitist enactments of both categories. Instead, he offers his readers a racially bifurcated view of race, from the lens of an alternately almost “white” or almost “black” man without ever fully committing to either role. Moreover, even our act of reading the autobiographical fiction enacts a type of miscegenated reading practice, because the text does not necessarily privilege any one perspective. Instead, it invites a diverse yet unnamed readership that is compelled to both participate and observe, along with the protagonist-narrator, releasing both readers and the Autobiography performer from any obligation to “pledge allegiance” to any racial category, publicly or privately. Both reader and narrator can rehearse interracial intimacies without experiencing directly the violent consequences imposed on those who engaged in interracial sex or were accused of doing so. If the narrator can “play” out his autobiography and his interracial intimacies, then it might implicate other narratives as mere performance rather than “authentic” forms of knowledge, such as pseudoscientific discourses that deemed racial intermixture degenerate and “pure” blacks inferior. This unsettling effect approximates Hopkins’s challenge to claims about the supremacy and origins of white Western culture in Of One Blood; it also recalls the romanticized depictions of indigenous culture in Winona that can be read as strategic performances designed to unsettle reductive or essentialized portraits of Indianness. Like Hopkins’s work, this counterfeit autobiography “exceeds the limits”54 of the form that it approximates through its repetition and revision, which in turn allows Johnson to counter claims of legitimacy offered in conventional narratives. Along these lines, if, as the Autobiography

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narrator’s story demonstrates, certain formulations of blackness can be enacted through performance, rather than imposed on particular bodies because of inherent qualities or biological facts, then whiteness can also be read as a similarly constructed category with an equally unsettled (and unsettling) foundation. In addition, Johnson’s work calls into question the notion that miscegenation is always a transgressive violation of the color line and, especially when occuring between a black man and a white women, always a form of rape. Regardless of Johnson’s challenge to mainstream rhetoric about the criminality of interracial intimacy, no matter what the circumstances, his fictional narrative does not shy away from the palpable violent responses that miscegenation generated; instead, his work acknowledges the palpability of punishment, such as lynchings of black men and the social or legal castigation of white women.55 In doing so, Johnson negotiated both the real-life bodily repercussions of “crimes” of miscegenation and the artificiality of the rigid black–white binary. Similarly, the narrator, who is never given a name in Johnson’s text, allows Johnson to balance the narrative’s seemingly revelatory tale with his own critical distance as its creator. Unlike his unnamed narrator, Johnson did not define himself and his work in the negative, by what it was not. Instead, he created work that critically intervened not only in the conventions of literature and performance to produce innovative forms and ideas, but also in the world of politics and culture. He refused to remain in any one arena, and his work followed suit, crossing genres, mixing audiences, and hybridizing identity. Like the work of many of his contemporaries, Johnson’s generative staging of miscegenation invites a critical reassessment of historical racial performances and encourages us to examine just who benefits from the strategic opposition of black and white. Johnson’s narrative starts with the narrator looking back on his life as a young boy growing up in Connecticut, unaware of his racial heritage. He recounts the day in school when he discovered that he was classified as black and returned home to ask his mother to confirm this fact. Evading an explicit response, she explained to him that although she was not white, his father was one of the “greatest men in the country,” and he had “the best blood of the South” in him. After his mother’s untimely death, the narrator wanders for several years throughout the country, including a three-year stint working in a Cuban cigar factory, where he becomes fluent in Spanish, and installs himself comfortably in the local Cuban community in Jacksonville, Florida. When the factory closes, he travels north with

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some of his friends and easily settles into the bohemian scene of turn-ofthe-century New York City. He discovers ragtime and plays piano to support himself. He then meets a white millionaire who hires him to play for private engagements. The millionaire takes the narrator as his traveling companion to Europe, where he continues to perform, as well as gain exposure to various nations and cultural practices. While in Europe, the narrator sees his white father and half sister at the opera. To his dismay, they neither recognize nor acknowledge him. However, his travels and presence in Europe also provide an opportunity to alert readers to black-diasporic global visibility in western Europe, particularly of black intellectuals and artists who relocated to Europe from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean; it also echoes Johnson’s own observations when he traveled and lived abroad, noting the presence and contributions of the black diaspora in Latin America, the Caribbean islands, and Europe, as well as the diverse racial landscapes. After exhausting his curiosity about European culture, the narrator returns to the South to document black music and culture, but abandons his project after witnessing a lynching. The narrator cannot bear to identify with “a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.”56 He then returns to New York, passes as white, becomes a successful businessman, and marries a white woman. They have two children, but his wife dies during the second child’s birth. The narrative ends with the protagonist expressing regret and uncertainty about his choice to continue his performance of whiteness indefinitely. Johnson’s fictional account of a successful enactment of whiteness, blackness, and even Cubanness reinforced his literary representation of racial performance. Through the narrator’s racially hybrid body, Johnson staged miscegenation as a disruptive and potentially productive process. At the same time, Johnson exposes how his narrator’s embodied performances resist the bifurcated color line, in some ways, while simultaneously relying on its powerful resilence in others. . . . Similar to Of One Blood’s Reuel, the narrator of Autobiography moves in and out of various racial classifications at different points in his life. Ultimately, however, he distances himself from the African heritage that Reuel embraces. In fact, the two experiences that solidify the narrator’s reevaluation of his identity and strategic repositioning of himself as distinct from

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both black and white both rehearse the cultural, juridical, and violent prohibition of miscegenation. The first scene plays out the teacher’s reclassification of him as part of the black student body. His “blackness” suddenly materializes through its distinction from whiteness. This moment initiates the narrator’s resistance to the magnetic pull of the polarized positions of black and white. As he says: “I had a very strong aversion to being classed with them [black students]. So I became something of a solitary.”57 His reaction reveals an inability to identify with blacks, as well as an increasing awareness of his difference from whites. Instead, he refuses to settle with either group. Another consequence of this revelatory scene, in which he is “raced” by his teacher, is his identification of particular characteristics that both distinguish him from and associate him with the white students with whom he formerly associated. On the one hand the “liquid darkness” of his eyes, the “long black lashes that fringed and shaded them,” and the “glossiness of [his] dark hair” exoticize and sexualize his “dusky,” nonwhite features. On the other hand, these same characteristics also reemphasize his proximity to whiteness, because they are simultaneously framed by and contrasted with “the ivory whiteness of his skin,” which spectacularizes his nonwhite features. The narrator’s bodily self-inspection invokes the powerful performative trope of miscegenation because it highlights the opposition between black and white, along with other binaries. For example, his feminized features recall other representations in which white-looking characters are marked as racially liminal because of their appealing and vulnerable traits that suggest their availability and erotic difference, such as Zoe in Boucicault’s The Octoroon and Reuel in Hopkins’s Of One Blood. Johnson’s incorporation of what can be read as normative feminized models of white beauty to depict the narrator’s difference from his black and white peers enabled Johnson to explore the impact of racial liminality on reductive definitions of racial, as well as gendered, identities. Rather than merely reproduce or invert these standard characterizations, Johnson reconfigured them in a manner that disrupted tendencies to classify his own “autobiographical” representation as either fact or fiction, performed or authentic. Instead, Johnson carefully blended various narrative strategies, allowing him to foreground the complexity of representing and embodying racial subjectivity. Once he is named as black, everything changes for our protagonist. Looking back, he says: “And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week, in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from

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one world into another; for I did indeed pass into another world. From that time I looked out through other eyes, my thoughts were coloured, my words dictated, my actions limited by one dominating, all-pervading ideal which constantly increased in force and weight.”58 His move from an unmarked and normative (read: white) racial performance to an identifiably “coloured” role restructures his life and provides him with a transformative understanding of the world around him. Although he detests the inferiority associated with his new racial role, he considers it an opportunity to explore communities that he never identified with while growing up in Connecticut. His mobility, however, compared with others assigned to the black racial class, gives him a distinct observer’s distance. The second event that cements the Autobiography narrator’s decision to inhabit whiteness indefinitely occurs after he witnesses the horror of a lynching in the South. Once again, miscegenation takes center stage, as it serves as the rationale for lynching and reiterates the hierarchized positions of black and white.59 By staging the lynching and the narrator’s visceral reaction, Johnson highlights how racialized brutality incited by miscegenation (or the fear of it) and the punishment enacted through lynching both rely on the ongoing fortification of racialized divides. In response to this torturous murder, the narrator determines that he can no longer endure the shame of identifying with a race that whites treat so savagely. Ironically, as Eugenia Collier notes in her analysis of the text, the narrator feels no shame about aligning himself with those who carry out the horrific lynchings that he witnesses.60 The unease that he experiences leads the narrator to reason that “to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same reasons” and that “it was not necessary for [one] to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across [one’s] forehead.”61 Conflating blackness with complete abjection, the narrator chooses what he positions as the exact opposite. For him, success in the white world means obtaining wealth and status, like the treatment he received while traveling abroad with the white millionaire. He considers his swift achievement of this objective a direct challenge to white-supremacist beliefs. At times, he says, he wishes he could assert: “ ‘I am a coloured man. Do I not disprove the theory that one drop of Negro blood renders a man unfit?’ ”62 However, his continued silence indicates that even he is not completely confident that his performance is infallible or undetectable. Still, the narrator’s strategic employment of his ambiguous racial identity enables him to escape the horror of lynching and to avoid the charge

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of transgressive interracial sex. It also allows him to access various communities that are configured differently from the black–white, North–South, and domestic–foreign binaries. As one of his acquaintances observes, his white-skinned appearance allows him to venture any place in the Jim Crow South. With this unmarked racial difference, he engages in miscegenous encounters regularly, without detection — once again suggesting that miscegenation can produce new connections rather than foreclose them. His racial hybridity also enables him to gain access to the Cuban community in Florida, where he learns to speak Spanish “better than many of the Cuban workmen at the [cigar] factory.”63 Here, his performance as Latin American reinforces his belief that “cigar-making is one trade in which the colour line is not drawn.”64 Johnson employs the trope of miscegenation as a potential transcendence of racial divides rather than as the overdetermined label that reinforces them. At the same time that his work celebrates Afro-Latino solidarity in the cigar-making culture in Florida, it omits other color lines that were being drawn and vigorously defended by white workers, like those in the cigar trade in California who excluded Chinese workers by creating local and national union labels and promoting hiring policies that maintained white exclusivity.65 The romanticized role that the narrator plays enables him to foreground the Cuban workers’ common class and national status while superficially glossing over the entrenchment of white racism in labor movements outside the small Cuban Florida town. From his perspective, simultaneously ethnographic and uncritical, the narrator celebrates how the cultural and political ties shared by Afro- and white Cubans (speaking Spanish, promoting Cuban independence) created an alliance around nationhood that challenged Jim Crow laws in the United States. Yet even this unifying (trans)nationalist association and apparent racial egalitarianism in the Cuban cigar factories required a deliberate resistance to the black–white binary that assigned Afro-Cubans to one category — the same as African Americans, despite cultural and language differences — and white Cubans to another, once they arrived in the United States. Nevertheless, all Cuban immigrants were still considered outsiders by Anglo whites; transnational connections, ethnic solidarity, and liminal racial–national identities did not prevail over racialized bifurcation.66 The narrator’s temporary membership — his successful performance as a Cuban cigar maker and revered role as a reader and translator for fellow laborers — in this community provides him with an even stronger sense of

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the deeply embedded color divisions that existed in mainstream U.S. culture. However, his strategy for gaining entrance into the Cuban community — by close study, imitation, and practice — suggests that his occupation of this role, based on a blend of racial, national, ethnic, and cultural performance, worked only because of its social construction rather than because of any inherited genes. This vision of cultural identification echoes those of Cuban nationalists, like José Martí, who encouraged Cubans to abandon racist practices of the surrounding regions and states in the name of Cuban independence and solidarity.67 It also recalls Johnson’s conflicted role as consul in Central and South America because he benefitted personally from both his elevated status as an agent of the U.S. government and from his liminal status as nonwhite and Spanish speaking.68 In both cases, his success was based on his distance from the racially marked category of black, similar to the Autobiography narrator’s self-proclaimed role as a racial performer.69 Johnson employs the performativity of race to emphasize the contradictions between the narrator’s ability to play Cuban temporarily and his inability to divorce himself completely from his elusive and “indefinable something”70 that connected him to blackness. Whiteness, too, is a role that the narrator plays through the power of association. It could also be argued that Johnson, as an agent promoting U.S. interests in Central and South America, similarly elevated his own status by playing the role of white imperial power broker or benefactor. The narrator’s experiences traveling in Europe with his (white) millionaire patron reinforce his understanding of the limitations imposed by the United States’ strict racial classifications. His apparent mobility, because of his alignment with the unnamed millionaire, suggests that the powerful status of whiteness has as much to do with class and elite culture as it has to do with appearances. In fact, the millionaire maintains his powerful position throughout the novel without ever being named. It is as if his relationship to the narrator reinforces his own superior status because he controls their lives, as long as the narrator entertains him. The millionaire’s lack of a name also reinforces the binarized structure of race by demonstrating that his powerful and racialized status as a member of the white imperial elite does not need a name because its role is universally recognized and honored. This whitesupremacist dynamic echoed the contemporaneous imperial politics that were unfolding in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and in which Johnson himself participated.

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The U.S. consulate in Venezuela where James Weldon Johnson was first stationed. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.

Once again invoking miscegenation, Johnson’s staging of this homoerotic interracial liaison echoes illicit heterosexual encounters between white masters and black female slaves who were chosen to serve as concubines: the millionaire provides support and material comfort for the narrator as long as he abides by the millionaire’s wishes. Their arrangement

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James Weldon Johnson at the U.S. consulate in Nicaragua, with a U.S. soldier. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.

also invokes prostitution, since the narrator provides performances and favors in exchange for material compensation. Here again, this uneven racialized power dynamic recalls Johnson’s own position at the U.S. consulate, as well as the history of white patronage for black artists. The narrative suggests that the protagonist willingly prostitutes himself for his own advantage. Alternatively, given the establishment of laws like the Mann Act (White Slave Traffic Act of 1910), used to police the mobility and agency of white women and to prohibit interracial relations, the idea of prostitution also associates the narrator’s command performances for the millionare with the sexual trafficking and exploitation of women. This same

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rationale — that interracial intimacy was merely a ruse for the sexual exploitation of poweful men over white women — was used to arrest and prosecute the internationally famed black boxer Jack Johnson, who spurned mainstream white society’s attempt to police his behavior and publicly defied convention by dating and marrying white women.71 It also recalls the narrator’s feminized image, described early in the text, aligning him more explicitly to his mother’s role as the illicit nonwhite concubine who is “kept” and remains faithful to a powerful white man. Along these lines, the narrator’s labor also invites a metaphoric comparison with a forced sexual encounter. He plays and plays the piano until he is exhausted or until the millionaire indicates that he is satisfied, at least temporarily. Their relationship demonstrates the way in which this depiction of invisible miscegenation still produces multiple meanings and possibilities; it allows the narrator to occupy different categories at different moments. The narrator not only functions as an exotic companion when he accompanies the white millionaire, but he also plays the role of his mistress. In the context of their homoerotic miscegenous alliance, the narrator enacts several roles simultaneously, another indicator that these positions are neither stable nor based on any essentialized traits. Even when the narrator decides to return to the United States to reconnect with his “black” heritage through the study of what he describes as primitive indigenous southern music and culture, he maintains a distant and somewhat superior position. Unlike Reuel in Of One Blood, whose interaction with his ancestral roots provides a fuller understanding of his identity, Johnson’s narrator considers this part of his journey more of an anthropological project. His study of black culture functions like his participant/observer role in Cuban Florida. The fact that he chooses to associate himself with blackness emphasizes the uncertainty of his racial status. His benefactor reiterates this point when he asserts that the narrator is “by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man” and that his plan “of making a Negro out of ” himself “is nothing more than sentiment.”72 In his estimation, the narrator’s “whiteness” has not only been cultivated successfully, it has also been embodied through his blood, appearance, and behavior. From the millionaire’s perspective, the narrator has earned his white credentials through his stellar performance. For the book’s protagonist, whiteness, like blackness, is something that he inhabits voluntarily and temporarily. His self-described role as a “privileged spectator” of black society reinforces his alignment with a white audience that consumes black culture. He moves through and over rather

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than into various southern black communities — educated and illiterate, rural and urban, middle class and poor — recording and absorbing but never discarding his removed spectator’s lens. This analytical perspective enables him to identify those aspects of racial identity that he considered performative, like what he calls a “mask” of laughter that blacks use to negotiate anger and pain. He believes that improvisation and adaptation are the keys to black perseverance and survival in the face of racism, an observation that directly relates to his own ability to play diverse roles in distinct contexts. Expanding his analysis of the specificities of blackness, the narrator also identifies the ways in which blacks successfully master the trappings of white, Western-identified geographical and cultural roles. He remarks that he has observed a black man in London who was the “perfect Englishman” and blacks in Paris who were more “Frenchy than a Frenchman.”73 For the narrator, this adaptability not only undermines strict racial definitions about the inferiority of blacks but also demonstrates the constructedness of racial (as well as national) categories. The precedence that nationality takes over race in these alternative spaces indicates that these identificatory categories carry different historical and cultural weight in non-U.S. landscapes, and thus they inform the different ways in which subjects are made intelligible. It also reinforces his own belief that he could successfully stage the trappings of various (black, white, Italian, Latino) racial and ethnic identities in different contexts either to serve his own needs or in order to survive. The narrator’s observations and experiences also indicate that race, whether black or white, is defined in relation to the way in which it is both assumed as a position and inscribed on particular bodies. By viewing it in this way, “all race identity is . . . the product of passing,”74 a type of racialized performance. However, the performance only comes into full view in and through the trope of miscegenation — this generative trope stands in for the context required to gain a fuller understanding of the complexities and hybridization of racial identity. The narrator is compelled by the intersecting performative strategies that he observes both in the United States and transnationally, among the black diaspora. For him, these strategies expose the elasticity of seemingly static categories, as well as the power of performance to contest them. His investigations of blackness eventually force him to confront the most insidious part of his identity: his own lies. In his own house, he cannot maintain his stance as a removed observer, and is consumed by doubts. As alluded to in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the narrator’s

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most poignant anxiety stems from his belief that his invisible black blood will jeopardize his relationship with his (white) fiancée. When he fears losing her, his masquerade as a white man — what he refers to as a “capital joke” — loses its humor. The stakes of staging miscegenation are too high. His anxieties about performing his role in a traditional, mono-racial marriage point to one of the most threatening aspects of his racially unmarked position for white supremacists — interracial sex. For the children produced by interracial unions, like our narrator, were considered contaminated bodies that could infiltrate “pure” white communities undetected; thus, their existence literally and figuratively undermines the legitimacy of the color line that was used to prohibit miscegenation and promote racial segregation. As a child of what he calls “forbidden love,” the narrator embodies the danger and corruption that white supremacists feared and loathed. His paranoia about detection suggests that, despite his resistance, he has internalized many of the racist notions conflated with blackness. This self-imposed abjection emerges most explicitly after he tells his future wife that his mother was black. Recalling pseudoscientific and literary representations of atavism — exaggerated reversions back to racialized stereotypical archetypes — the narrator fears that his disclosure will transmogrify him into a repulsive image of blackness: “Under the strange light in her eyes I felt that I was growing black and thick-featured and crimp-haired.”75 Instead of experiencing relief because he has divulged his secret past to his wife, the narrator feels only regret and pain, and fears the most explosive response that he has already witnessed — lynching. However, unexpectedly, the narrator’s fiancée eschews convention and chooses love over racial difference. But they pay the ultimate price for a few years of happiness and for two children: his wife dies. Although they do marry legitimately, their union is still haunted by the overdetermined pattern of devastation that accompanied most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stagings of miscegenation.76 Individual Losses, Collective Cultural Gains

Neither Hopkins’s nor Johnson’s protagonists complete their respective transracial, transcultural, and transnational journeys unscathed. Both authors draw from the mythologies surrounding illicit interracial intimacies, reiterating the potential tragedy so often associated with miscegenation.

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In their reliance on deeply embedded cultural tropes, these two novels reveal how difficult it is — despite their many innovations — to break free of the status quo. Hopkins’s recuperative objective does not occur without losses. As in other depictions of interracial encounters, those who engage in prohibited acts face punitive consequences for transgressing long-established societal and juridical rules. In Of One Blood, the costs are obvious: both Dianthe and Aubrey lose their lives. Aubrey forces Dianthe to drink the poison that she intended for him, and soon after Aubrey takes his own life. His selfinflicted death can be read as a sort of retribution for past exploitative relationships between his white (slave-owning) father and his black (enslaved) mother. Meanwhile, Reuel experiences the shame of hiding his identity, which leads to the painful discovery that he has not only married his own sister (Dianthe) but that he is also unable to prevent her death. For him, whiteness is temporary, but the damaging results of his miscegenous role in the context of the racially polarized United States are permanent. Like Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey, the narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man also sacrifices a great deal as a result of his umarked miscegenous encounters, enabled through his racial performances. As a result of his decision to live as a white man and to inhabit blackness as a  spectator, the narrator remains in a liminal and dissatisfying state of “failed” performance. His body, as well as his life, remain suspended in that in-between multivalent unresolved space. His attempt to create a white family fails: his wife dies, he does not reunite with his father, and he never meets his half sister. By the end of his narrative, it is clear that material success, children, and elevated status do not satisfy him; he remains incapable of coming to terms with his carefully constructed and performed identity. His career masquerading abroad and in the South, as well as his ability to fool whites, never completely fulfills him. As he brings his ruminations to a close, he claims that, at times, he is “possessed by a strange longing for [his] mother’s people” and wonders if he has sold his “birthright for a mess of pottage.”77 As we have seen, both Hopkins’s and Johnson’s spectacular representations reveal the potential repercussions of the ultimate transgression. However, unlike some of our earlier stories, neither narrative ends with only regret, pain, and sacrifice. Instead, both representations offer recuperative, if not necessarily revolutionary, conclusions.78 In Of One Blood, Reuel’s

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fate can be read as a revision of the more conventional destiny assigned to those who cross racial borders and who, more often than not, are the children of interracial unions. Even though Reuel is the product of illicit interracial sex, he does not die. Instead, he serves as a link between the present and a long ancestral past, between black and white, domestic and diasporic, and between sanctioned and illicit familial lines. He embodies the inextricable link between black and white. He also represents a strategy for recuperating lost history. Hopkins maps Reuel’s will to recover established familial and cultural ties onto his sexual desire for Dianthe, which emerges because of their hidden connection. By returning to Telessar after confronting Aubrey and saying goodbye to Dianthe, Reuel discards his veiled and troubled identity for a new one. His new position as a mythological Ethiopian king, similar to his efforts to enact whiteness, can also be read as a performance. His new identity, however, enables him to uncover and confront the past instead of burying it. Rather than offering a clear resolution, Hopkins’s narrative points in an alternative direction. Unlike many of our earlier texts, the conclusion resists endorsement or complete condemnation of racial transgression. Instead, the narrator claims that only “omnipotence can solve the problem” of “caste prejudice” and “race pride.”79 By relegating the resolution to an outside supernatural source, the narrative remains open-ended. The gesture toward something beyond this world can be read as optimistic, because it looks to the future beyond the limitations of presentday society, or pessimistic, because it finds no attainable solution in the here and now. I believe that Hopkins explores the possibilities of challenging mainstream beliefs about race and culture, while still appealing to the wide range of readers who read her work. In fact, Hopkins engaged in what C.  K. Doreski describes as a “double-voiced pattern” so that she could both please “accommodationist—black or white—and inform the militant race-and-culture reader.”80 Hopkins’s work functions as a springboard for identifying revolutionary possibilities, even if they are not explicitly articulated in the text. The realm of the fantastic, like the space of the stage, provides a less restricted site for playing out possibilities that seem unattainable in real life. At the same time, her text calls for a more immediate strategy of rethinking the relationships among different races, nations, and cultures as an intersecting network rather than as an inegalitarian hierarchy. For example, despite the era’s centrality of the hierarchical familial

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structure, with the white father as the symbolic head of the family and the nation, Hopkins transforms family into a structure in which mothers and grandmothers have the power to reunify families and cultures. Similarly, spirituality and “superstitious” practices dismissed by mainstream science are recuperated through the mesmeric practices that enable Dianthe and Reuel to uncover their intersecting ancestry and shared familial bonds. Although Johnson’s narrator retreats from any bold recovery of his black ancestry, his concluding remarks suggest that this sacrificial part of his identity is of great value and significance, even if he has left it untapped. For the Autobiography narrator, the staging of race creates space for reevaluating racial subjectivity and his experiences in black and white communities, but it does not radicalize him. Instead, Johnson uses his narrator’s ambiguous identity to test the public’s response to an overt violation of the black–white binary. Attesting to the underlying knowledge that interracial mixture was a part of U.S. and global history, readers did not doubt its veracity and were curious about the author. In fact, Johnson recalls one man who “tacitly admitted to” authorship of the narrative.81 However, intrigue and excitement did not necessarily transform into immediate change in this early part of the twentieth century. In fact, the narrator’s story was all the more fascinating to readers because of his public confession and his risky transgression of the rigid racial codes that were still in place in the United States. Miscegenation was still a criminalized taboo, and his daring exposé did not change mainstream discourse, laws, or culture, even though his racialized mobility exposed the permeability of the segregated boundaries and the uncontainability of the bodies they were designed to circumscribe. Johnson’s text, along with Hopkins’s, builds on the discussion that Alcott and Chesnutt started with their own stagings of miscegenation and racial performance during the Civil War era and at the turn of the century. The landscape for black cultural expression and creativity, even in the context of increased antiblack violence, was opening up space for innovative work. Both mainstream and black-run and -owned periodicals, presses, and journals — including Hopkins’s own Colored American Magazine — began to offer more space and generate more interest in blackauthored texts. Literary giants like William Dean Howells promoted the publication of work by Charles Chesnutt and other turn-of-the-century literary and cultural trailblazers in well-known journals, like the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine, which cleared a path for other emergent

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and promising black cultural producers. Taking advantage of this early twentieth-century momentum and collective synergy, Hopkins and Johnson voiced their responses to contemporary culture and articulated their visions for the future in fiction, as well as in nonfiction, on the stage, in speeches, in music, and in politics.82 Both Hopkins’s and Johnson’s texts compel readers to rethink race, national origins, and diasporic identities by staging the complexities of whiteness and blackness: both are variegated, and neither is, or ever was, pure. Race, as they depict it, is performed, and miscegenation is the process through which it becomes legible. Hopkins paired her reformulation of history, race, and diasporic identities with her anti-imperial nonfiction. Johnson, equally observant of the intersections of domestic and international policy, framed his racial performance in global terms. His recollections of race, power, and culture, as well as U.S. imperialism, from his work and travel abroad lent to his “second sight.”83 Similarly, Hopkins’s attention to the performance of racialized identity, normative unions, and white supremacy produced a provocative account of the miscegenated roots/routes of the U.S. and diasporic family tree. The two staged miscegenation differently from their predecessors (at times, even radically differently), as a symbolic platform to rehearse new conceptions of race, civilization, and culture based on the interactivity of distinct but interrelated diasporic communities. Hopkins and Johnson demonstrated the many ways in which reductive definitions of blackness and whiteness were carefully constructed performances, while simultaneously articulating the complexities of these same racial identities. They represented racial “interzones”84 strategically in their narratives in order to reevaluate the structures of U.S. and global race relations. Their innovative and performative texts pushed against more limited discourse and generic forms that dominated turn-of-the-century discussions of race, in order to offer thicker accounts of the interracial and intercultural influences that helped constitute black, white, and the range of identities in between. Although their stagings explored how race is produced, embodied, and enacted, in the end race still remains, in some ways, inarticulable. What these representations do give voice to, though, are the ways in which the collision of black and white interrupts the reiterative process through which these racial categories are created and regulated. They reproduce the disruptive impact of that in-between space and of those

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hybrid bodies in order to demonstrate the failure of reductive racial definitions to account for lived experience. As they mark and then transgress the sacred boundaries of race, these representations reveal how blackness and whiteness are made intelligible and distinct; at the same time, they reveal the fundamental arbitrariness of such classification, and show how these formulations are made meaningful not by any clear standard, but only through their relationship to each other. Moreover, even after these definitions are established, they are enacted only when individuals occupy or refuse to inhabit them. And, although the endings of these two texts are neither romantic nor revolutionary, both Hopkins and Johnson reconfigure the typical ending of a miscegenation story into ironic and unsettling conclusions. They each repeat in various ways the historically embedded ending that we have seen so many times — both tragic and melodramatic — then transform it into something not so tragic. In so doing they reduce the hysteria surrounding miscegenation by exposing the reiterative discursive process that reproduced and amplified its destructive status. In doing so, their texts invite readings of their protagonists’ fates that reevaluate their identities and connect them to a broader canvas of interracial relations. Rather than remaining trapped by the inwardly focused and self-destructive narratives of a bifurcated and isolated nation, both narratives allow us to engage the domestic, diasporic, and transnational implications of miscegenation. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, these two works offer a range of possibilities rarely seen before in American culture; their creative visions seem less burdened by the fault lines of the Civil War and the half century that followed. Despite their murky resolutions, these narratives offer a vision that is aware of this past but not defined by it. Both texts stage miscegenation as a journey toward the future, a meaningful reckoning with the past that matters. By re-presenting miscegenation and putting these stories and characters into motion, their work exposes and critiques the past but also reminds us that it does not have to predetermine the future.

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· CONCLUSION ·

The “Sex Factor” and Twenty-First-Century Stagings of Miscegenation Through it all I discerned one clear and certain truth: in the core of the heart of the American race problem the sex factor is rooted; rooted so deeply that it is not always recognized when it shows at the surface. Other factors are obvious and are the ones we dare to deal with. . . . Taken alone, it furnishes a sufficient mainspring for the rationalization of all the complexes of white racial superiority. —James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way

The Average American is apt to regard the Negro problem as parochial and temporary. . . . If such men were to look carefully around them however they would see that the Problem of the Color Line in America instead of being the closing chapter of past history is the opening pages of a new era. All over the world the diversified races of the world are coming into close and closer contact as ever before. —W. E. B. Du Bois, “The World Problem of the Color Line”

T

o conclude our story at the beginning of the twentieth century does not suggest a resolution to the “problem” of miscegenation, or to the endless conflicts that mark the representations of our great (trans) national taboo. Instead, the start of a new century marks a new departure; our discussion of the half century between the Civil War and World War I lays a foundation, I hope, for continued explorations of these issues across the landscape of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As James Weldon Johnson reminds us in his autobiographical musings about “the American race problem” cited above, our cultural obsession with sex — talking about it, prohibiting it, circumventing it, exhibiting it — drives the passionate cultural preoccupation with miscegenation. · 229 ·

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He goes on to suggest that “the sex factor” is the root, and, as I also argue, the route that must be explored and excavated in order to uncover the complex understanding and function of polarized racial boundaries and conflict. The meanings and implications of interracial sex and intimacies, then, shift over time, as the texts I discuss reveal. Their stagings of miscegenation demonstrate the ways that it has been used, what it represents, and how its meanings change over time; these revisions, however slight or radical, also indicate the degree to which our culture changes and our attitudes about the concept of race itself change. In their various ways, each of the works that we have discussed reveal the complexity and hybridity of identity, as well as the tangled histories of people of color within and outside the United States; though the ideologies of these works may seem antiquated, or their characterizations absurd, their concerns are not unlike our own. The explorations of these novelists and playwrights are simply early chapters of a vexing pursuit that is far from complete; nearly one and a half centuries after the term “miscegenation” was coined, we still fight over how to talk about the variegated colors of our skin and what it says, or does not say, about the person underneath. As W. E. B. Du Bois articulates so clearly in both his 1906 essay “The Color Line Belts the World” and in his 1914 essay cited above, interracial relations were taking on even more significance at the beginning of the twentieth century as imperial expansion, immigration, and migration increased transnational, interracial, and cross-cultural contact. As the United States built its empire, it also created a landscape in which interracial intimacy was a given. The close proximity of populations with different racial, national, and class backgrounds provided new domestic and global contexts for understanding and reevaluating the resiliency and (in)adequacy of the black–white binary. However, as our comparative readings of the texts in this study demonstrate, despite the complexities of racial, national, and cultural differences, the trope of miscegenation telescopes the racial chasm between black and white repeatedly, providing the raw material for our national scripts and for our transnational dialogues. As a critical cultural site, the generative trope of miscegenation has provided the stage on which the powerful force of the black–white binary is rehearsed time and time again, in the wake of each of our many divisive and damaging eruptions. Such was true in the half century following the Civil War, and in many ways, such is still the case today.

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Still, as miscegenated reading practices reveal, these textual stagings have long been destabilized by identifications that crossed the neat borders drawn by ideological divides based on nation, race, class, and politics. The “new” nationalism emerging after the Civil War and continuing up to World War I could not completely upstage the cultural critiques and transnational intersections that were also in play.1 Celebratory narratives of northern and southern reunification that focused on the future of white America were answered with the promise of black progress in urban centers and successful black townships across the nation. Expanding Jim Crow segregation and antiblack violence galvanized collective black resistance in the form of cultural production, political protests, and the development of national organizations, such as the NAACP. And when the 1915 blockbuster The Birth of Nation reactivated stereotypes of blacks and called for a return to the racialized structure of the antebellum past, it immediately inflamed passions. Alongside praise, the film generated vocal protests and criticisms from black communities and individuals, including James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois. One response was black independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s creation of Within Our Gates in 1920. His film challenged the racist stereotypes in The Birth of a Nation, as well as depicted the Great Migration, black progress, and the injustice of lynching. By representing the richness of black life, Micheaux countered the reductive and bestialized images of blacks that D. W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon projected onto the big screen. Reiterating the resiliency and resistance to this biracial divide and the critical value of staging it through the trope of miscegenation, Du Bois concludes his critical historical collection, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, with a provocative tale of interracial intimacy. “The Comet,”2 an apocalyptic staging of miscegenation, offers a revealing finale to the decades of representation that came before it. In early twentieth-century Manhattan, a comet crashes into New York City and seems to kill everyone except for Jim, a black bank messenger, and Julia, a wealthy white woman. The tale opens with Jim at work, descending into a dark, defunct bank vault where he retrieves old records. The job, we are told, is “too dangerous for more valuable men,” and Jim is characterized as an “outsider” whom “few ever noticed save in a way that stung.”3 However, because the vault protects him, Jim survives the comet’s devastating impact. He emerges to find a wrecked city. As he wanders the silent streets, he hears a cry for help.

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Julia has also survived the comet’s impact because she was working in her darkroom developing photos. Compelled by their extraordinary circumstances, Jim and Julia join forces. The unlikely pair travel up to Harlem, the city’s black hub of business, political, transnational, and cultural activity, and then back down to central Manhattan, the white center of wealth and commerce. They can’t find any survivors. Isolated and disoriented, surrounded by destruction, they suddenly become aware of their differences: “They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. . . . Of all the sorts of men she had pictured coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him.”4 As happens to all of us in one way or another, their racialized, gendered, and classed preconceptions about each other start to take hold. But then a simple and extraordinary event occurs: they both pause for a moment, resisting the pull of the black–white binary, and contemplate the extraordinary circumstances that unite them. Julia seems to shed the trappings of the world in which she has been socialized and instead imagines a place where she was no mere woman. She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was a primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong vigorous manhood. . . . He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.5 For an instant, the binaries that separate them seem to evaporate. They rise to the celestial, biblical status of an interracial Adam and Eve, who will presumably propagate a new race.6 In the next scene, Jim and Julia reach for each other, “face to face — eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love — it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid. Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other.” Julia, “pearl-white and slender,” and Jim, lifting his “mighty arms,” cry to each other “almost with one voice, ‘The world is dead.’ ”7 They appear to be on the brink of a union that will align black

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with white rather than reinforce the color line that has separated them up until now. This spectacular scene, however, is temporary. Despite cues and stage directions that suggest a potentially utopian finale for this couple, ultimately Du Bois stages a more conventional resolution to black–white unions. They are banished to their divorced worlds. In what seems to be no more than an instant, Julia and Jim are startled back to reality when Julia’s father disrupts their encounter with his car’s horn. It is unclear how long they have been suspended in this fantastic reverie, but the arrival of a crowd of onlookers signals its abrupt end. Jim and Julia are not alone. The shock of the car horn — and with it, the return of civilization — recalls both of them back to the post-apocalyptic setting that they seemed to transcend momentarily. Though teetering on the edge of something transformative, Du Bois restores the raced, gendered, classed order as other survivors emerge to interrupt this celestial moment and reframe it in the familiar dominant racist discourse: “ ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ cried a bystander; ‘of all of New York, just a white girl and a nigger!’ ” In response to this violent comment, Jim and Julia return to their predetermined roles at once, as if acting by instinct. In fact, it is not until this moment, when they are conflated back to their raced and gendered positions, that Julia’s name is finally revealed to Jim and to the readers. Ironically, this is also when her name no longer matters to Jim, because she is reincorporated into her wealthy father’s world, while Jim is reassigned to the margins. Their brief moment of fantasy is destroyed as other members of the community reincorporate Jim and Julia into restrictive black–white categories — she is a white “girl,” not a woman, and he is a “nigger,” not a man. Neither voices a fully articulated identity, and both are reduced to symbols of domestic racial conflict. Jim returns to the segregated world not-so-subtly referenced by his name, Jim (Crow). Julia’s father, who is thankful enough to give Jim money and offer him a job, nevertheless recalls the historical exploitation of colonized and enslaved “subjects” in the United States and around the world: Jim, like so many others, was deemed useful solely because of his potential as a laborer.8 To Julia’s father he is not Jim, but a “nigger” who has done a good job. At first, he even suspects his daughter’s savior of rape, thereby fulfilling another of the oldest tropes in the black–white binary. Julia’s swift defense of Jim’s innocence prevents him from being lynched just before she disappears back into her elite world. And in the margins Jim remains,

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silent but not alone. He is suddenly surrounded by the societal limitations and potential racial violence that he and Julia had escaped temporarily. In this final scene, after Julia and her father return to their rightful place, a “brown, small and toil-worn” woman yells out to Jim, and they embrace. She uses his name, not a racist epithet, thereby restoring his humanity. This woman also holds the corpse of a “dark baby.” Though it is never made clear, presumably she is his wife and the baby is his child.9 The result is a shattered ending to a bizarre tale, where both a momentary possibility and an established relationship are destroyed by the doings of a harsh world. The seemingly sacrificial death of Jim’s child suggests a bleak outcome for the next generation. Even in the face of planetary destruction, the diverse populations of New York City retreat into segregated, self-contained communities rather than crossing boundaries and national borders to work collectively for survival. What then can we make of Du Bois’s staging of a futuristic interracial encounter that remains so inextricably linked to the past? Jim and Julia’s chance meeting occurs only because of an unlikely planetary explosion that opens up (outer) space for unsanctioned intimacy between a black man and a white woman, a fleeting moment that is quickly sundered by civilization’s return. The hint is clear: the earthbound world is not yet ready for such a union. Moreover, Julia’s “rescue” by her white father, as opposed to Jim’s reunification with his wife, can be read as a symbolic restoration of white patriarchy, as well as the safeguarding of her sexuality, since she is paired with her father first and foremost, then reunited with her fiancé, who is not yet her husband. Her father’s role as the supreme authority is also reaffirmed by his offer to pay Jim for the protection of his daughter. The power of Du Bois’s “The Comet” is that its unique and bizarre setting, pregnant with possibilities for an alternative future, also serves as a reinforcement of our reliance on the black–white binary. Through his lifelong engagement with white racism and imperialism, Du Bois’s work anticipated our own contemporary critiques of domestic inequalities and the black–white color line, particularly our awareness today of global power dynamics and the problem of the “world color line.” Both his scholarly and creative works were informed by his intimate understanding of the reductive discourse that overshadowed the intricately woven fabric linking races and nations around the globe.10 Julia and Jim’s erotic interracial entanglement in “The Comet” represents this divide.

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Here is where the trope of miscegenation does its powerful work. For it is Jim and Julia’s strange and sudden proximity that highlights the differences that normally separate them, as well as the shared histories that yoke them together. In addition to their racial differences, they come from different socioeconomic classes, from different sides of town, and are in committed relationships with racially “appropriate” partners. As they gauge each other’s embodied identities, they both acknowledge that they are from different worlds, even though they still occupy the same hemisphere. Despite the fact that they both survive, Julia believes that she is “alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger, — with a man alien in blood and culture — unknown, perhaps unknowable.”11 Here, Julia’s language references representations of “blacks” and other dark people in the United States as unrecognizable and mysterious — literally, as “strange” — whose bodies functioned as necessary but incomprehensible components of the backdrop in front of which she, and others like her, take center stage.12 Such a sentiment reproduced contemporaneous eugenic theories that classified racial groups as though they belonged to distinct species, like the contemporaneously published 1920 study by Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy.13 The particularities of Julia’s cultural position and their impact on her initial response to Jim also warrant attention. As a photographer, Du Bois’s story tells us, she has “access to culture” and is well versed in the “tools of representation.”14 Her position wields power, and her “tools” are resonant of the type of military and cultural control exerted by imperial forces occupying a nation. As if adhering to a well-rehearsed script, Julia’s actions play out the powerful reiterative process that sustains racist discourse and the overdetermined black–white binary. Though her emotions seem a complex blend of fear and curiosity, Julia’s actions replay the simplistic power dynamics of racial difference enacted on a daily basis in the United States and around the world in numbers too large to quantify. They manifest themselves in ways that are both easily identifiable and hidden, as well as pedestrian, and extraordinary.15 Alternatively, once the explosive comet destroys the policing structures that reinforce their oppositional status, Jim and Julia gaze upon each other and contemplate those “unspoken things” that “swelled in their souls” but that in ordinary life they continually repress.16 The two find a telephone switchboard in their search for survivors, and the mouthpiece Julia

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uses is described as “wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves; It looked — she beat back the thought — but it looked, — it persisted in looking like — she turned and found herself alone.”17 The racialized phallic object that she perceives as “inert” and “unfeeling” unsettles her because it arouses both erotic appeal and fear in her. The mouthpiece sustains her attention and remains both intriguing and unsettling because it is “well-used,” indicating its past activity, but also immobile, suggesting that although dormant and safe, it has the potential to be revived, which heightens its symbolic sexual charge. The images that arise, almost instinctively, in Julia’s mind illustrate powerfully how widely — and deeply — such stereotypes had filtered into white consciousness. Julia’s transmogrification of the telephone switchboard’s mouthpiece into a phallic symbol reproduces the insidious racist mythologies circulated to heighten anxiety about black men and the need for protection against them. And even though Jim has treated Julia with the utmost respect, his mere presence conjures up imagery of black lasciviousness. This link between dark skin and unbridled lust emerged most strongly, as we have seen, in the wake of emancipation, when stories and reports of black assaults on white women began to litter the pages of white southern publications. These exaggerated depictions helped contribute to a self-righteous rise of antiblack violence and terror that would reach its height in the 1890s but continue for decades thereafter.18 Equally significant is Jim’s articulation of the gulf that divides them: “She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. . . . He had not thought of her as white. . . . [yet] yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet.”19 Apparently, Du Bois could not imagine a scene, even in this post-apocalyptic, post-national cosmic moment, in which the ever-present black–white dyad remains offstage and unseen; it still makes a command performance, a counternarrative to the planetary possibilities that Du Bois’s story invokes. Even on the brink of destruction, this couple — the world’s accidental new Adam and Eve — cannot escape the assaults of polarizing racist rhetoric. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Du Bois suggests that the problem of the black–white color line was so deeply and historically entrenched that its eradication could be imagined only through the intervention of a catastrophic natural force — a cosmic one, no less. And the shattering of that divide also necessitated the destruction of a built environment that sustained and fed racial segregation. However, similar to

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the earlier twentieth-century texts we consider, Du Bois’s story also suggests that other possibilities exist, such as interracial and transnational cooperation, even though the racialized binary remains a formidable force to be reckoned with. By employing the generative trope of miscegenation, Du Bois’s story also envisions the temporary possibility of free mobility enabled by the physical devastation of Manhattan: Jim and Julia travel up and down the island — from Midtown to Harlem — as a couple.20 His incredible story pushes against the constraints of race, class, and nation to the extreme. His views are literally out of this world. . . . Across the twentieth century, race has only become a more pronounced trope both on the page and on the stage. Later twentieth-century and twenty-first-century producers of fiction and drama, like Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan Lori-Parks, to name a few, take up the history and lived realities of interracial intimacies in their work. They each continue the difficult task of rethinking our stubborn tendencies to limit our lives, identities, and histories through static models of race. These more recent representations imagine communities that interrogate the cultural, historical, and contemporaneous power of the miscegenation trope, with its seemingly endless configurations and cultural implications. However, this still-current issue — the powerful black–white binary — remains embedded in the public imagination because of its inextricable link to formulations of identity, as well as to the ways in which we understand race, and the innumerable other intersecting categories of identification, such as sexuality, nation, and gender. With our examination of the generative possibilities of miscegenation, I hope to establish a framework that encourages further exploration. By charting the progression of miscegenation tropes from the Civil War era to World War I in and through the texts included in this study, I take on the task that each author presents to critical readers/audiences: translation and interpretation. Part of the goal of miscegenated reading practices here, then, is to determine the meaning and symbolic applicability of varied stagings of miscegenation, not only in terms of their local contexts but also in relation to the world that extends beyond their particular geographic and historic sites of production. Each unresolved representation of miscegenation invites readings similar to the multivalent responses that actual interracial unions have always generated. Like their real-life

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counterparts, fictionalized depictions of interracial intimacies produce varied, often contradictory, and sometimes surprisingly flexible social and legal responses. As we have seen again and again, moving beyond the black–white binary is incredibly difficult. Even the works that earnestly search for alternative possibilities — like Of One Blood — repeatedly come up against the fundamental difficulty of language: it is much easier to describe black–white polarity than it is to describe the infinite varieties in between. The structures of race and hierarchy that lie beneath much of our language further inhibit a more accurate rendering of the infinitely variable, and never “black and white,” nature of interracial unions. Even in this work, as in so many critical studies, we have to grope around to find language that actually represents the complexity of race. We remain tethered to binarisms, even as we attempt to divest them of cultural power. To take one particularly remarkable example: Barack Obama, who ran as an allegedly transnational, transcultural, and post-racial candidate, has simultaneously been classified as the first African American or black president in the United States — a claim that seems wholly reliant on the binary beyond which we have supposedly evolved. Obama’s ascendency to our highest office is extraordinary for many reasons, not the least of which is how it reveals the inadequacy, even the absurdity, of our reliance on the black–white binary. Despite his fairly complex ancestry, intercultural upbringing, and familial composition (white Kansan mother, black Kenyan father, Indonesian stepfather, Indonesianwhite half sister, and Canadian Chinese brother-in-law), his racial identity has been celebrated not merely because he is “not white” but specifically because he is — in the public’s eyes — black. Despite his close and sustained relationships with his mother, Ann Dunham, and his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, his blackness rather than his whiteness has remained the overriding authenticator of his identity. Even his own performances of gender and race — such as those articulated in his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and his choice to ground his education, marriage, and political work in the African American community — serve as reminders of the narrow avenues available to him for his political, educational, and cultural journey. And although plenty of pundits and popular media personalities alike have tried to call both his citizenship and his African American identity into question — because of his birth in Hawaii, his schooling in Indonesia, and his father’s Kenyan roots — these attacks have not prevailed.21

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The binaries of race, gender, and nation, despite Obama’s cosmopolitan upbringing and identity, remain powerfully present in the public imagination. Because of the limited language that we have for talking about the complexity of identity and the historical weight that the black–white binary still carries in mainstream cultural and political discourse, Obama was required to make his identity legible to mainstream America. Rather than confounding the lines that distinguish color, culture, and nation, Obama’s strategy was to tap into the well-established binarized structure to convey his understanding of the history of race in the United States. Echoing that culturally persistent dyad, Obama’s memoir focuses more on his “absent” African father, Barack Obama Sr., than on his Anglo mother, despite her role as “the single constant” in his life. This may have also accounted for limited discussion of his mother’s second interracial marriage to Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and the minimal media coverage of his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The power of the black–white binary was also evident in the shift in Obama’s emphasis on how race figures into American identity that occurred between his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in support of Senator John Kerry and his presidential nominee acceptance speech at the DNC in 2008. As an emergent Illinois political power, Obama proclaimed that there is no “black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America,” only the “United States of America.”22 He bypassed the binary in favor of a transcendent representation of race; however, as the potential leader of the nation, he called on his mother’s and grandparents’ identities as representatives of America’s white heartland to confirm his allegiance to the nation that his years in Indonesia and his Kenyan background may have called into question.23 In this context, the binary still seemed to influence his choice to highlight one side — in this instance, the white side — of the polarized equation rather than introducing something more murky and complex. The choice to align his story of “inheritance,” at least in its titular signification, with his paternal black Kenyan ancestry is informed by the rigid racialized and gendered divide that remains with us in 2011; however, as even the familial images pictured on the cover of his book reveal — a set of three photos depicting his Kenyan grandmother and father on the left side, his Anglo-American grandfather and mother on the right, and his own adult image centered in the foreground and slightly overlapping the other two pictures — his “cover story,” like so many others, exposes the

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contradictions of reductive representations and classifications. Race, for him and for most of us, cannot tell his whole story. These images suggest that he embodies the intermingling of multiple lineages rather than positioning him as either black or white. And, even though his narrative focuses on how his identity was shaped by the legacy of his Kenyan father’s and white mother’s union and separation, the photographs also highlight both his paternal Kenyan grandmother and his maternal white grandfather. His experience is pictured as a collaborative effort in which gender, racial, class, and cultural roles overlap and intersect: his father would not have become the man he was without the influence of his Kenyan mother (Obama’s grandmother), and his mother would have not become the woman she was without her white father’s influence (Obama’s grandfather). The mosaic of his multiracial, transnational, and transregional familial constellation reveals the complexity of miscegenation that challenges the binarized perspective that we have been so conditioned to see as a culture and as a nation. On the one hand, his electability to the highest office in the United States suggests great progress in the way that we, as a nation, are able to move past the history of black versus white and embrace a racially hybrid man who embodies much more than two reductive categories. On the other hand, that very same binary was also used to both vilify and celebrate President Obama. His explicit identification with the black community threatened the legacy of white racial and patriarchal exclusivity of the presidency in the United States; however, this same classification as black was also introduced as evidence of twenty-first-century racial progress and tolerance in the “post-racial” United States. Alternatively, when his nonblack ancestry, his Hawaiian birth, and his experiences living outside the United States were highlighted, he was accused of being an illegitimate citizen and a counterfeit black man. Regardless of criticisms or accolades, President Obama continues to negotiate the black–white binary and the other contradictions that he seems to represent for so many people, charting new territory for those who will follow him. At the same time, however, it has been a mere forty-three years since antimiscegenation laws were finally overturned officially by the federal government in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case — only six years after Obama’s birth in Hawaii, where miscegenation was never prohibited. When the Loving decision was handed down, it did not revolutionize policy, public discourse, or power relations in any immediate way.

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And, as we have seen in history, society often lags behind in the acceptance and implementation of legal decisions that challenge such entrenched beliefs as the black–white binary. Desegregation, for example, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 did not occur smoothly or seamlessly. It was resisted violently and angrily by whites attempting to protect their belief in their superiority to blacks and white exclusivity of better-funded and staffed public institutions, such as schools and hospitals, regardless of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Jim Crow laws that were cemented in 1896 with the Plessy decision. Still, many things have changed. For example, when a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple in October 2009, he drew national and international media attention and outrage. In response to criticism, Justice Keith Bardwell, who claimed that he treats blacks the same as everyone else, contended that his racist act and words were his attempt to protect the innocent unborn children of mixed marriages. Eventually, bowing to pressure from local government and civil rights organizations, Bardwell resigned the following month. Such logic echoes historic racism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is only more galling, though not entirely surprising, that his declaration occurred only nine months after Barack Obama — the very sort of mixed-raced child the justice felt should not exist in our world — was inaugurated as president of the United States. Although Bardwell’s refusal to issue the marriage license was condemned publicly, the fact that his unofficial policy has remained in place and uncontested since he became a justice of the peace in 1975 suggests that his beliefs, to some extent, carry enough weight to tolerate his legal implementation of them over a span of thirty-four years.24 This local horror story remains inextricably linked to the underlying binaries of race that have both supported and resisted Obama’s role as a national and world leader. The seemingly isolated parochial justice of the peace remains part of the historic fabric of the nation’s formation and identity, both domestically and internationally. Although the nation has matured, in 2011 we nevertheless continue to see the entrenched black–white binary in all the old familiar places — marriage, family, land, money, law, and politics. The simultaneous threat and possibility of interracial unions remain central to explorations of race in this country. For cultural producers of the past and the present, the rehearsal of interracial intimacies allows for a reimagining of the possibilities (as well as the failures and conflicts) that

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the nation’s diverse individuals and communities offer. And although interracial or mixed marriages are more common today than ever, they still have the potential to erupt into conflicts or debates that extend well beyond the union itself, as suggested by Justice Bardwell’s experience. His decision to deny a marriage license was not merely an exercise in free speech and free choice. It was a gross misuse of power that tapped into deep-seated histories of racial tensions, locally as well as nationally. It also drew embarrassing attention to the United States globally when it was reported by international news ser vices, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. How is it, one might ask, that a nation that just elected its first racially hybrid, black-identified president can still harbor elected officials who espouse separatist and racist views publically and unapologetically? And even though Bardwell was condemned for his words and actions, his views on interracial unions are not unique, even if they are extreme. They represent contemporary anxiety about what the national and global population will look like in the future and the consequences of ongoing racial and cultural variegation, produced by border transgressions of all kinds, such as race, nation, gender, class, religion. Recognizing how deeply entrenched the black–white binary has been across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as reckoning with the complexity and variety of its representations, offers us departure points for rethinking the treacherous divide of race. By reconfiguring the trope of miscegenation as a rehearsal of the complex intersection of race, nation, gender, sexuality, and class, we create critical opportunities to traverse new territories rather than merely transgress binarized boundaries. We open up the possibility for seeing how each and every interracial intimacy feeds and, in turn, is fed by the larger structures of our world; we can see how each dawning of friendship, each spark of passion, is shaped by the realities of our past and also shapes the possibilities of our future. If we can reformulate the black–white binary as instead a duality, and if we can see race not as a perpetual barrier but rather as a permeable boundary, then we can follow the examples of the world’s unending number of interracial unions, both famous and invisible, both fictional and real — we can perhaps achieve a new understanding of the changing colors of our skins.

Acknowledgments

T

his project has extended over many more years than I could have anticipated or imagined. Any lapses in memory or omissions are entirely my own; I can attribute them, in part, to the distractions of life, both major and minor, that have taken up more mental space than I can calculate and that have rerouted this scholarly journey in unexpected ways. I thank my dissertation committee, Harry Elam, Shirley Brice Heath, Sharon Holland, Ramón Saldívar, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, for their excitement and encouragement in the earliest stages of this project. I also thank the professors, colleagues, and friends with whom I have had the pleasure of working, as a graduate student at the University of Washington and at Stanford; I am fortunate enough to have maintained long-term relationships with some of these, especially Rebecca Aanerud, Kandice Chuh, Mark Goble, David Román, Karen Shimakawa, Elisa Tamarkin, and Lisa Thompson. I am also grateful for the collective support I received from colleagues in American Studies, English, Theater Studies, and African American Studies while I taught at Yale, especially Jean Christophe Agnew, Elizabeth Alexander, Hazel Carby, Elizabeth Dillon, Matt Jacobson, Jill Lane, Mary Lui, Sanda Lwin, Steve Pitti, Ruben Ramon, Joe Roach, Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, Vicki Shepard, Robert Stepto, Laura Wexler, and Bryan Wolf. I have also been inspired and energized by my students there and at Trinity College. In my current academic home at Trinity College, my colleagues in American Studies and English have allowed me to work through some of the most challenging revisions of this book; I am grateful to them and especially my chairs, Paul Lauter and Lou Masur, as well as Dean Rena Fraden, Margaret Grasso, and Roberta Rogers-Bednarek. I am, of course, grateful for the insights and suggestions of my anonymous readers, as well as for the editorial vision and care that Richard Morrison and Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus have taken as I navigated the publication process at the University of Minnesota Press. Both Marie Deer and David Lobenstine have also been invaluable resources · 243 ·

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who helped me push through major revisions and through the final editing stages of this project. John Donohue and Glenn Novak’s attention to detail and accuracy as copy editors provided me with two sets of eyes that helped me produce a more polished book than I could have produced on my own. I am indebted to the academic and institutional support that has allowed me to conduct research and write, both during the dissertation stage of this project and then for revision after revision, including a Ford Dissertation Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Grant while I studied at Stanford, a Dissertation Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center, a Yale Morse Fellowship, a Summer Research Grant from the Yale Provost’s Office, a Yale Humanities Center Research Grant, a Trinity College Completion Grant, and a Trinity College A. K. Smith Research Grant. I am also thankful for the resources and assistance of librarians at the Stanford Library and Special Collections; the Library of Congress; the Harvard Theatre Collection; the Yale Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library; the Yale University Irving S. Gilmore Music Library; the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Templeman Library at the University of Kent; the Wilson Library at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and the Howard University Moorland Springarn Research Center. Colleagues, acquaintances, and friends in the interdisciplinary settings in which I have found myself over the years have been generous readers, sounding boards, and cheerleaders for me. Some of these valuable resources whom I have not already mentioned include Jennifer Brody, Daphne Brooks, Gay Cima, Susan Gillman, David Krasner, Eric Lott, Dwight McBride, Jose Munoz, Peter Novak, Valerie Smith, and Alex Vasquez. Additionally, Ed Blum provided helpful editorial feedback in the early stages of my manuscript revision. Throughout the years, family and friends outside of the academy have been my life’s blood, without whom I would not have completed this book. These connections vary and have changed over time; however, they have all helped me maintain perspective about my work and its place in my life. First, my family has remained an unwavering source of support, especially my parents who sacrificed everything to educate my sisters and me, and who taught us to value the privilege of education. The configuration of my family has also changed. I lost my father, Max, and my older

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sister, Lisanne. I gained a partner, Michael, and two beautiful children, Micaela and Domenic, as well as a brother-in-law, two wonderful nephews, and two parents-in-law. My mother, Anne, has been a constant source of support, as has my sister Priscilla and one of my oldest and dearest friends, Margie Hunt. I also thank Tracy B., Dawn Bedford, Tara Bodden, Greg Crist, Alex Garcia, Katrina Harvie-Watt, Mary J., Melanie Nathanson, Gillian Reilly, Spencer Reisinger, Tina Rembish, Katya Rynearson, Eugene Scott, Robin Sirota-Bassin, and Regina Weber.

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Notes

Introduction

1. Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4. Here I build on Gillman’s recuperative work on race melodrama. She examines how it functioned as a “cultural mode” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also contends that “the irreducible historical identity of race itself ” functioned “as melodramatic in the United States.” See also Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2. Matthew Fryed Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). 3. Lothrop Stoddard, Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 310, 312–14. For a complete discussion of Stoddard’s national segregation proposal see the rest of the chapter on biracialism, 284–325; Matthew Guterl, The Color of Race in America: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 13, 131. He provides an insightful discussion of the move to conflate race with color and the crystallization of the black–white opposition that occurred in the nation after World War I. He also references biracialism and cites Lothrop Stoddard’s books on race. 4. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1980’s (New York: Routledge, 1986). 5. Although I have not marked the term “miscegenation” by enclosing it with quotation marks, I recognize that the term represents both socially constructed and lived realities that have shaped our historical and contemporary understanding of the term and its uses in U.S. culture. 6. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66–71, 223. · 247 ·

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7. Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 42–44. 8. Rosemary K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Douglas McDermott, “The Theatre and Its Audience: Changing Modes of Social Organization in the American Theatre,” in The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6–17; Gary A. Richardson, American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I: A Critical History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 86–264. 9. Lott, Love and Theft, 223. He contends, rightly so, that the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays institutionalized the social divisions they narrated.” 10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 27–25, 36–49. He posits that Victorian culture did not relegate illicit sex to silence; instead sex was talked about all the time but in multiple regimes of discourse that were dispersed into various authorized and unauthorized arenas of power and pleasure. He offers the example of eighteenth-century secondary schools for adolescent boys in which the architectural layout, internal organization, and rules of discipline were based on the “assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active, and [an] ever present” public problem. He goes on to argue that “modern societies” did not consign “sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” 11. Kirsten Silva Gruez, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 109–10. Gruez reorients New Orleans as the “Gateway to the Caribbean, west and east coasts of the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba,” as well as the transcultural site for “Hispanophone” print cultural expression produced in the Caribbean and in the Americas. See also Jung, Coolies and Cane. Jung offers an insightful rethinking of the black–white binary by introducing the vital role of “coolies” in the discourse surrounding emancipation in the United States, the abolition of slavery in the Americas and in the Caribbean, and the emergent narratives of race, nation, and commerce that were used to defend competing and contradictory justifications for maintaining/ dismantling slave and coolie labor. 12. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 4–9; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). 13. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 28–31; Carter Woodson, “The Beginnings of Miscegenation of the Whites and the Blacks,” in Interracialism: Black–White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner

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Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42–54, esp. 45; William D. Zabel, “Interracial Marriage and the Law,” in Sollors, Interracialism, 54–61, esp. 56. 14. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 307–9. 15. Ibid., 63. 16. Ibid., 21–22, 63. 17. For a historical study of the invention and instantiation of the term “miscegenation” see Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). See also George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 171–72. 18. The term “intimacy” describes a range of relations that span a variety of sites and contexts, such as the power dynamics among colonial subjects, and the close proximity of nonwhite enslaved and indentured laborers around the globe, to name but two. For a more comprehensive discussion of this productive term see Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Stoler (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the contribution by Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” 191–212. See also Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 19. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 20. Ibid. 21. Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwanko, Black Cosmopolitanism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 87–113. 22. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993). Morrison coins the phrase “Africanist Presence” to talk about representations of whiteness in relation to the presence of blacks and the African American diaspora in the American literary canon. 23. Like the race melodrama that Susan Gillman and Linda Williams examine in their respective studies on race and melodrama in the United States. See Gillman, Blood Talk, and Williams, Playing the Race Card. 24. Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). She refers to “invisible” scenes of terror that occur on a daily basis, whereas I focus on the hypervisible and extraordinary measures taken to increase anxiety about black– white unions and their disruptive potential. See also Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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25. Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 10. 26. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). She argues that sensational writing performed an important historical role that should not be dismissed because it was popular and consumed by the masses rather than by the intellectual elite. 27. Some of the scholarly works exploring these stories include, but are not limited to, historical accounts, like Martha Hodes’s White Women, Black Men; literary surveys, such as Werner Sollors’s foundational work on interracial world literature, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); cultural accounts, such as Eric Lott’s innovative study of blackface minstrelsy, Love and Theft; Elise Lemire’s “Miscegenation”; Kevin Mumford’s phenomenal cultural history Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Samira Kawash’s Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Cassandra Jackson’s provocative literary study Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Susan Courtney’s study of miscegenation and Hollywood film, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Race and Gender (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Carlyle Van Thompson’s work on miscegenation in African American literature and culture, Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Celia Daileader’s overview of literary interracial couples centering on the Othello myth, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peggy Pascoe’s phenomenal scholarly study of miscegenation law in the continental United States, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Tavia Nyong’o’s brilliant historical performance studies account of amalgamation in a transatlantic context, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). It also engages the performance-theory work of brilliant scholars who have guided my thinking about how staging, performance, and performativity intersect with race, gender, sexuality, and nation formation, including Kimberly Benston, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Daphne Brooks, Judith Butler, Elin Diamond, Harry Elam, Sadiya Hartman, David Krasner, Jose Munoz, Ann Peligrini, Peggy Phelan, Joe Roach, Amy Robinson, David Roman, Richard Schechner, Paula Marie Seniors, Karen

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Shimakawa, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. Although interracial relations have also generated fascinating work in the field of psychoanalysis, particularly in the areas of post/colonialism and race, gender, and sexuality studies, I do not take up an extended discussion of psychoanalysis in this book; however, groundbreaking and productive theorizing has enhanced this interdisciplinary study of drama and fiction, especially the work of Ann Cheng, David Eng, Frantz Fanon, Susan Koshy, Dareick Scott, Hortense Spillers, and Claudia Tate. 1. Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire

1. Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 122. Hodes contends that “as long as the mighty institution of slavery remained in place” interracial unions did not threaten the racial hierarchy. She also documents long-term interracial unions, from the early colonial years up through the nineteenth century, including the legally sanctioned marriage of Nell Butler, a white female Irish servant, to Charles, a black male slave, in 1681. 2. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi. She argues that familiar and powerful copies of “stereotyped characters . . . [were] what allowed them to operate as instruments of cultural self-definition.” They “convey[ed] enormous amounts of cultural information” in “recognizable representatives of overlapping racial, sexual, national, ethnic, economic, social, political, and religious categories.” 3. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Or, Life among the Lowly (1852; repr., New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 356. In response to a query about her origins and her belief in God, Topsy replies that she never had a mother nor a father, and that she suspects that “I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me” (356). Following Stowe’s popular novel, the Topsy and Tom minstrel shows were staged both in the United States and Europe. 4. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 55. My reading follows Brody’s analysis of miscegenated nations and bodies (“mulattaroons”) in which she argues that the coupling of black women with white [English] men in Victorian culture “might be the nineteenth century’s most important ‘miscegenated’ coupling” because of the way it was juxtaposed with “impossible” productions of “pure” whiteness. 5. Ibid., 16. Brody coins the term “mulattaroon” to describe the highly ambiguous racial figure whose “status as an unreal, impossible ideal whose corrupted and corrupting constitution inevitably causes conflicts in narratives that attempt to promote purity.” A great number of scholars and critics have focused on the powerful and disruptive role of the mixed-race unclassifiable figure, such as the groundbreaking work of Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the

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Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Brody, Impossible Purities, and Jackson, Barriers between Us. 6. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 211–24. Roach coins the term “surrogation” and demonstrates its process in his discussion of Boucicault’s The Octoroon. 7. Ibid., 11. I depart from Joe Roach’s emphasis on surrogation as an embodied performance of cultural memory engaged in the mutually informative processes of forgetting and remembering and focus on the reproduction of specific “scripts” employed to transmit the cultural meaning of miscegenation. Like Roach, I acknowledge the interactivity of orality and literacy in cultural reproduction of, in my case, miscegenation, but rather than following its explicit physical manifestations in this mediated space, I foreground the complexities of scripted enactments in fiction and drama. Roach discusses his approach and methodology in his introduction to Cities of the Dead. He cites Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s use of “orature” to describe the mediated space between nonwritten forms and varied literacies examined in performance studies. Roach argues that this approach complicates the familiar dichotomy between speech and writing. 8. Ibid., 4. Surrogation also functions as a useful critical tool because it helps to ground my readings of staged miscegenation in their historical cultural landscape or what Roach terms the “triad” of cultural memory, performance, and substitution, rather than supplying some “universal transhistoric structure.” However, as Roach cautions, the ongoing process of surrogation in which past behaviors are reproduced and revised does not indicate that there is some authentic or “pure” original to be replicated. Instead, the seemingly infinite recycling and recalling of past performances produced meanings that were always in flux. 9. Ibid., 2–4. My discussion is informed by Roach’s reference to Richard Schecnher, Victor Turner, and other scholars’ notions of performance as “twicebehaved behavior,” where he argues that surrogation is “a [performative] process” in which “culture reproduces and recreates itself,” filling in holes created by death and loss, exemplified by historically symbolic “circum-Atlantic” events such as Mardi Gras and New Orleans funeral processions. Roach contends that “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds” in reproducing culture exactly and that “the intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus.” 10. Biographers claim that there is no definite record of his birth but estimate his date of birth between 1820 and 1822. Townsend Walsh, The Career of Dion Boucicault (New York: Dunlap Society, 1915), 3, 5. Walsh claims that Boucicault was probably a “love child” born out of wedlock. See also Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London: Quartet Books, 1979). 11. Andrew Parkin, ed., Selected Plays: Dion Boucicault (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 11.

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12. Ibid., 7–21. 13. Dion Boucicault, “Letter to the Editor,” London Times, November 20, 1861, p. 5. He claims that he observed a better condition of slavery than Stowe represented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 14. Sidney Kaplan, “The Octoroon: Early History of the Drama of Miscegenation,” Journal of Negro Education 20, no. 4 (Fall 1951): 547. 15. Mayne Reid, The Quadroon (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1856). 16. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 95. 17. Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 551. A playbill for an 1878 revival production at Boston’s Globe Theatre also compared Boucicault’s play to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harvard Theater Collection, January 7, 1878). 18. New York Times, December 15, 1859, p. 4, col. 3. 19. Parkin, Selected Plays, 10. Boucicault profited from translating, adapting, and recycling French plays and techniques for the English (London) stage. Walsh, Career of Dion Boucicault, 81. According to Walsh, the New York Times accused Boucicault of plagiarism in 1847 for his play The Fox Hunt, which he denied. 20. Fawkes, Dion Boucicault, 106–7. Fawkes suggests that Boucicault may have fabricated the letter himself in order to create more publicity around the opening of the play. 21. Kaplan, “Octoroon.” Kaplan reports that Boucicault submitted copyright papers and sued in the U.S. circuit court on December 17, 1859. Fawkes, Dion Boucicault, 111. 22. Fawkes, Dion Boucicault, 111; Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 555–56. She also claims that the play opened in two other theaters in the Bowery and at the P. T. Barnum American Museum after its Winter Garden run. 23. Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 556. 24. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 28–48; Brody, Impossible Purities. 25. Gary Richardson, “Boucicault’s The Octoroon and American Law,” Theatre Journal 34 (1982): 155–57. 26. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 110. Gruesz describes the transnational exchange that took place in the mid-nineteenth century in New Orleans through Spanish-language newspapers that responded to U.S. imperialism, like the war against Mexico and the annexation of Texas, linking it to a larger global mission. She also claims that New Orleans was “fundamentally, a Caribbean city,” strategically positioned within the transportation and communication system of the Gulf of Mexico’s half-moon linked to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Mexico’s Gulf Cost and the Yucatan.

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27. Roach, Cities, 217–20. 28. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2, 6–7. 29. Roach, Cities, 217. He asserts that Boucicault’s representations of Louisiana and an octoroon figure lend themselves to the process of surrogation or “the metamorphosis of one symbolic identity into another.” 30. Brody, Impossible Purities, 15–16. Brody coins the term “mulattaroon” to characterize the “unreal” ideal of the corrupted and corrupting mixed-race “woman of color.” Jackson, Barriers between Us, 8. Jackson considers “mulatto figures as literary devices that unfold social, cultural, and political ideas.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood. Carby talks about the literary device of the mulatto. 31. Roach, Cities, 217. He describes the performance of the “fancy girl” auction and its representations in nineteenth-century art and literature as illustrative of the “function of an effigy in the process of symbolic substitution” in that they “exemplify the role of surrogation in both the transmission and the displaced transmission of cultural forms and attitudes.” 32. Ibid., 222–23. 33. Ibid., 182. The Octoroon represents multiple “cultural displacements” that perform the “intercultural” layers of history and conquest both within and beyond the borders of the United States. In fact, Roach argues that The Octoroon, along with other “performances” of “condensational events,” such as Mardi Gras Indian parades and the staging of Plessy v. Ferguson, “thematize the ‘law’ of manifest destiny and the doctrine of monoculturalism that it inscribes. But they also propose, each in its own way, the historic opportunity to accept or reject an alternative to the bloody frontier of conquest and forced assimilation: the paradigm of creolized interculture on the Caribbean model — a plural frontier of multiple encounters, another version of ‘Life in Louisiana.’ ” These layered historical connections become even more relevant to my analysis of reductive black–white formulations of race as I explore representations of the uncontainable “in-between” space in chapter 4. 34. John Degen, “How to End the Octoroon,” Educational Theatre Journal 27, no. 2 (May 1975): 173. 35. James Gordon Bennett, “Abolition on and off the Stage,” New York Herald, December 7, 1859, p. 5, col. 3. Also cited in Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 549. 36. The Octoroon, act 4, http://library.marist.edu/diglib/english/americanlit erature/19c-20c%20play%20archive/octoroon-act-4.htm. 37. Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 554. The tableaus fused stage production with the aesthetics of painting and photography. This popular nineteenth-century form was known as “tableau vivant” (living picture). 38. Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 373. 39. Kaplan, “Octoroon,” 550.

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40. Ibid., 551. 41. Brody, Impossible Purities, 4. 42. Roach, Cities, 4. He uses the term “circum-Atlantic” to describe the transnational networks in New Orleans. 43. This recalls the notion of original sin in which the woman’s body (Eve as the temptress in the Garden of Eden) is pointed to as the source out of which all other evils and sins emerge. 44. See Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7–8. 45. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 112–15. 46. Ibid., esp. 28, 62, 68, 147–57. 47. Boucicault, The Octoroon, in Parkin, Selected Plays, 11. 48. Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43. According to Jacobson, Irish immigration peaked in 1851. 49. Katy L. Chiles, “Blackened Irish and Brownfaced Amerindians: Constructions of American Whiteness in Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 31, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 28–50, esp. 31–34. 50. Ibid., esp. 30. Adding to the layers of this representation, Chiles focuses on marginal characters M’Closky and Wahnotee in The Octoroon to open up the racial and ethnic codes of the production by making “visible the ways in which constructions of masculinity (and the spectrum of desires between and among men) necessarily suffuse racial, class, and national identity formations in this text. . . . The Octoroon raises the issue of how ‘Irishness’ was perceived, performed and repudiated in the United States and in England prior to the U.S. Civil War and how the problematic acquisition of Mexican lands and peoples through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo troubled the white/American national identity . . . brought to the fore by the broader histories of U.S. imperialism, the U.S.–Mexico War, the relationship between Ireland and England, and the U.S. engagements in international relations.” 51. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 215. 52. Brody, Impossible Purities, 51. 53. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 183. 54. Review of The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault, London Illustrated News, December 14, 1861, 597. 55. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (19 How.) (1857). 56. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 143. 57. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). She discusses this homosocial spectrum.

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58. Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), chap. 2, esp. 60, 73. Another example of the potential for interracial cooperation, some of the white post–Civil War missionary-teachers and northern advocates identified themselves as part of the African American community and endorsed interracial marriage. 59. See Parkin, Selected Plays, 136; Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana: A Play, in Five Acts (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1992), 2; and the casting list for the 1859 opening as well as subsequent productions and performances. 60. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 172–74. 61. Jackson, Barriers between Us, 9–29. In her discussion of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Jackson argues that “the projection of alienness onto African Americans and Native Americans provided justification for the appropriation of their labor and land.” Jackson’s critical intervention reconsiders this novel in terms of the central role that the mixed-race character Cora plays in the negotiation of American national identity that must account for the complex relations between and among Americans and Europeans, Native Americans and African Americans, slave owners and settlers, slavery and removal. 62. See Paula Marie Seniors’s extended discussion of the black racial uplift movement’s intersection with Native American reform movements in Beyond “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 63. New York Herald Tribune, May 23, 1893, 20. 64. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 143. 65. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 21–22. She also argues that the association of interracial marriage (miscegenation) with sexually illicit behavior and unnatural acts was used to support antimiscegenation legislation. 66. Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 64–65. 67. Roach, Cities, 199–202. For example, Roach suggests that the “red” man stands in for the “white” man when he lynches/kills M’Closky. Since it would not be acceptable for whites to lynch another white, they allow Wahnotee to perform the role of executioner to enforce justice. 68. Chiles, “Blackened Irish,” 30. She argues that “by limiting the play’s historic contextualisation to the impending Civil War, scholars have understudied the multifaceted racial dynamics of the play.” Along these lines, I contend that it is not the Civil War context that needs to be replaced but rather the reading of what the Civil War was staging that should be opened up. For the Civil War was not just about sectional issues. It staged racialized, economic, and imperial concerns deeply embedded in U.S. nation formation that began much earlier than the Civil War and continued well beyond its conclusion and Reconstruction.

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69. Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), xiv. 70. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998). Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). She illuminates the intersection of sensational popular writing with the building of empire and racial ideologies in Alcott and in other fiction from the nineteenth century. 71. Elizabeth Young, “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction,” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1996): 468. Young argues that “what animates . . . all of Alcott’s writings, is the project of finding female authority in a nation whose public realms of political power — political, military, medical — are definitionally male.” She also asserts that Alcott’s fiction reconfigures the “relations of power between the sexes.” 72. Ibid., 467. 73. James Ackerman, The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Karen Halttunen, “The Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott,” Feminist Studies 10, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 233–54. 74. As critics like Shelley Streeby and Lora Romero have argued, Alcott’s work engaged deeply with gendered and racial hierarchies. Short fiction like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863) explores the racialized and gendered associations of “darker” and “exotic” peoples, like Cuban, Mexican, and indigenous populations, in the midst of U.S. expansionist efforts in Central America and the Caribbean. Even works that did not seem to address questions of race or empire directly, like Jack and Jill: A Village Story, which was part of her Little Women series, still can be read as taking up these contemporaneous issues. Maude Hines, “Missionary Positions: Taming the Savage Girl in Louisa May Alcott’s Jack and Jill,” Lion and the Unicorn 23, no. 3 (1999): 2. According to Hines, the protagonist’s transformation from “wild” tomboyhood to maturity can be understood in relation to “Victorian ideals of womanhood and the burgeoning Suffragist movement,” along with the “upheaval of Reconstruction, mass immigration, and working-class labor struggles.” The “savagery” that requires taming by mature self-restrained women in this novel and the others in the series also calls upon the ideological arguments supporting U.S. expansion and civilizing missions, like the “liberation” of Cuba from Spain or the second-class citizenship and policing of freed slaves after the Civil War. Halttunen, “Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott,” 235. Halttunen contends that Alcott most frequently played roles that “permitted her to act out her forbidden desires,” including Alfarata, “the wild and noisy Indian girl from a popular ballad; Jack, the bold masculine hero of the beanstalk story; and Apasia, the strongminded Greek courtesan from Lydia Maria Child’s novel Philothea.”

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75. Ackerman, Portable Theater, 199. In this illuminating comparative study of representations of theatre in literature and their staged counterparts, Ackerman characterizes the intersectionalities between readers of literature and viewers of theatre. He also points to the interdependence of these genres to nineteenthcentury writers concerned with both dramatic and fictional forms. 76. Louisa May Alcott, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little Brown, 1989), 98. “February, 1860. — Mr. — wont have ‘M.L.,’ as it is antislavery and the dear South must not be offended.” 77. Sarah Elbert, introduction to Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), x. 78. Elbert, Hunger for Home, 149. 79. William G. Allen, Mary King, and Louisa May Alcott, The American Prejudice against Color (1853), ed. and introduction by Sarah Elbert (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002). 80. I am indebted to the foundational work of Sarah Elbert and Elaine Showalter on Alcott, as well as to the innovative readings of Elizabeth Young. 81. Barbara Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966), part 1: 151–74. Welter details these characteristics. For a more detailed discussion see Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1976); Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 23–24. Carby cites Welter and offers a critical discussion of this behavioral code for women and an analysis of how it impacted and racialized women’s lives and representations. 82. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 45. 83. In many ways, articulation of desire for a black man by anyone other than a straight black woman still maintains its taboo status today. For example, although the relationship between O. J. and Nicole Simpson was accepted because of their elite (class) status, during his murder trial his apparent “ownership” of her was foregrounded. Given the historical discourse around black men as predators, it was not difficult to transform O. J. from a successful mainstream athlete into a murderous beast because he controlled Nicole’s money and property. The characterization of their relationship reinforced stereotypes about the danger of unions between black men and white women. 84. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics: A Review Journal of Criticism and Theory (Summer 1987): 65–82. 85. Alcott, Journals (November and December 1859), 95. In reference to the “execution of Saint John” she wrote some verses and sent them to the Liberator and wished she could do her part in the antislavery movement. 86. Elbert, introduction to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, ix–lx. Elbert claims that although “M.L.” was written earlier, Alcott’s abolitionist fiction was published and

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circulated only after “abolitionism and the Union cause were more popularly championed.” 87. Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 49. 88. Ibid.; see chapters 2 and 3 for a history of the women’s temperance movement and the eventual distancing of the movement from the African American community with which it at first aligned itself. 89. Cott, Public Vows, 60–62. 90. Harriet Wilson, Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a TwoStory White House: Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even There (New York: Vintage, 1983). It is worth noting here that Harriet Wilson also offers a representation of an interracial couple (white woman, black man) in her 1859 fictional tale of a young mulatta. 91. Louisa May Alcott, “My Contraband,” in Alternative Alcott., ed. and introduction by Elaine Showalter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 75–76. 92. Louisa May Alcott, “M.L.,” in Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, 3. 93. Ibid., 5. 94. Elbert, introduction to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, xxx. Elbert suggests that “Spanish” was often a code word for black in nineteenth-century fiction. 95. I use the term “black-identified” here to describe a person who may look white but who is legally, socially, or culturally black. In other words, he or she occupies the position relegated to those who are usually designated “biologically” black. The use of the term identified also invokes both choice and agency to name oneself black; at the same time, it reinforces the fact that racial classification is usually imposed from the outside and/or is socially constructed, therefore it is not merely a matter of choosing to be or not to be part of a racial category. 96. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (Fall 1998): 38. She contends that black characters became sympathetic in sentimental fiction only when they were separated from “the configuration of traits that in the bodily grammar of sentimental fiction signals revulsion.” 97. Alcott, “My Contraband,” 76, 78–79. 98. Ibid., 84. 99. Alcott, “M.L.,” 8. 100. Lott, Love and Theft. Lott offers a comprehensive discussion of the emergence and development of blackface and minstrelsy. 101. Alcott, “My Contraband,” 76–77. 102. Ibid., 90–91. It is quite evident, however, that Nurse Dane distinguishes between Bob and other black contraband when she meets him again in a hospital after the battle at Fort Wagner. This time, all the men who she nurses are black.

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She distinguishes Bob from the “sable heroes” and from his companion who is “as black as the ace of spades.” 103. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 133–36. 104. Alcott, “M.L.,” 16. 105. Caroline Levander, “Confederate Cuba,” in Imagining Our Empires: Toward a Transnational Frame, ed. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 88–110. 106. Ibid. 107. Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 43. 108. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). Jacobs also demonstrates self-ownership and the choice to use her body elsewhere when she chooses to enter a relationship with Mr. Sands instead of with her owner, Dr. Flint. 109. Young, “Wound of One’s Own,” 439–74, note 19. This cross-dressing echoes actual cases in which women cross-dressed in order to fight in the Civil War. Young discusses Alcott’s symbolic coming-of-age as a man and her psychological identification with masculinity. Young notes for some women the connection was not only psychological; at least four hundred women cross-dressed as soldiers in the Civil War. 110. Elbert, introduction to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, xl. Elbert reinforces this point in her discussion of “M.L.” when she asserts that “she [Claudia] uses the disruptive force of that revelation [Paul’s race] to create her own new self-identity ‘outside’ the conventional social order; her wealth, beauty, and ‘whiteness,’ however, ensure that she is a voluntary outcast, and therefore her privilege remains intact.” 111. Alcott, “My Contraband,” 87–88. 112. Alcott, “M.L.,” 7. 113. Ibid., 24. Alcott’s use of the term “master” to describe both a husband and God is interesting here, particularly in relation to the limited roles of women. It might indicate an attempt to align white womanhood with the condition of slaves, in that they were subject to the rule of husbands reinforced by the patriarchal authority of Christianity. 114. Ibid. 115. Rachel Adams, “Blackness Goes South: Race and Mestizaje in Our America,” in Shukla and Tinsman, Imagining Our Empires, 215–20. 116. See Sedgwick, Between Men, 1–27. She describes the continuum of sexual desire that characterized homoerotic spaces in nineteenth-century English literature. See also Carol Smith-Rosenburg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 117. Elbert, introduction to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, xxxi. She suggests that Alcott was rehearsing her unresolved feelings about interracial and same-sex de-

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sire through her fiction. Emphasizing this point, Elbert claims that “she [Alcott] was herself a dark-skinned ‘white’ woman with a ‘boy’s nature’ and a writer’s gift. Whatever she felt in the confusion of gender and race . . . found outlet in her fictions.” 118. I am indebted to Lora Romero for pointing this out to me when she read an early version of this analysis. 119. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, viii. 120. Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 50. 121. Showalter, Alternative Alcott, xxix. She suggests that Bob’s adoption of Dane’s surname is a kind of marriage. 122. Alcott, “My Contraband,” 93. 123. Alcott, “M.L.,” 12. 124. Ibid., 27. 125. Elbert, introduction to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, xl, claims that Alcott used biblical imagery in order to avoid using common stereotypes in her characterization of Paul Frere. He is compared to the peasant of Judaea who preached the Sermon on the Mount; William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1944), 125. This sentiment also speaks to feminist advocacy of marriage that looks beyond romantic love to other ideals, such as equal partnership and intellectual compatibility. Instead of romantic love, Stowe and other feminists advocated rational love, which “fostered harmonious sexual relations based on equivalent experience and growth”; freedom from romantic love gave women time for “more active and constructive participation in the industrial society at large.” 126. Allen, King, and Alcott, American Prejudice against Color, 28. William Allen and Mary King — free quadroon husband and Anglo wife — were forced to live in poverty and flee to England after they married. Eventually they disappeared from the public record, along with their seven children. 127. Alcott, “M.L.,” 28. 128. Elbert, Hunger for Home, 160–61. She asserts that white women’s love for black men was sanctioned because abolition was a “holy” cause. 129. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6–17. This is similar to Morrison’s discussion of the Africanist presence that ignites moments of discovery, liberation, and change for whites — black people are present, but they are relegated to the background. 2. Clear Definitions for an Anxious World

1. Even white immigrant laborers and female activists had to contend with this racialized and gendered hierarchy, which did not necessarily include them and often led to competition in ser vice work and hard labor usually relegated to

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less-expensive and subjugated labor forces, like disenfranchised blacks and recent immigrants. 2. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), 14–16; Gillman, Blood Talk, 36–37. Gillman argues that Twain displaced the present in his novel, set “entirely in a pre-Emancipation time and place” by “collapsing onto the antebellum past anxieties over the instability of racial and sexual identities produced in the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction.” 3. Robert W. Rydell, John E. Finding, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2000), 31–39. 4. Robert Rydell, All the Word’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64–68. 5. Ibid., 48–52. 6. Ibid., 40–71. 7. Ibid., 52. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. Ibid., 67. 10. Kate Chopin was also a regular visitor at the St. Louis Exposition, where she was stricken in 1904, dying shortly afterward. 11. Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 51–91. See also Laura Wexler’s discussion of Kate Chopin in Stoler, Haunted by Empire. The “Lost Cause” refers to the literary and intellectual movement that tried to reconcile the loss of the Civil War with their sense of the nobility of the southern planter class. 12. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 48–49, 51–53. 13. Rydell, Finding, and Pelle, Fair America, 37. 14. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 223. 15. Some of the stressors on race relations included the rising number of immigrants competing for jobs with emancipated and migrating blacks, imported Asian laborers, and displaced poor “white” citizens. 16. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 43. 17. Fredrickson, Black Image, 26–30; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1994), 124–76. 18. Martha Hodes, “Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 240–70, esp. 258. 19. Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 10. 20. See George M. Fredrickson for examples of increased antiblack sentiment in Black Image. See also Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, a

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Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans, ed. William Loren Katz (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987) for examples of how free black men were constructed as dangerous threats to white women, which led to lynching. 21. John Calhoun, Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 1st Sess. ( January 4, 1848), 96–101; Philip Foner and Richard C. Winchester, eds., The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States, vol. 1: From the Mexican War to the Election of 1900 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), 16–17. 22. Ian López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), appendix A, “The Racial Prerequisite Cases,” 203. 23. López, White by Law, 49–77. 24. “England and Hawaii,” Indianapolis Freeman, March 4, 1893, in Foner and Winchester, Anti-Imperialist Reader, 86–87. 25. Jacqueline Jones Royster makes reference to this part of Wells’s argument in A Red Record in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. and introduction by Jacqueline Jones Royster (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 34–35, 154. 26. Gillman, Blood Talk, 37–38. 27. Historians of the period describe how black civil rights, especially in the South, were being overturned daily and how the numbers of lynchings of blacks increased between the years of 1893 and 1904. Antiblack violence also increased in the cities, such as the 1906 riots in Atlanta. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 25–58; see also Fredrickson, Black Image, 256–82. 28. See Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, for discussions of lynching, and Fredrickson, Black Image, for examples of the shifts in thinking. 29. See Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1897–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 6–10. 30. Napier Wilt, ed., biographical sketch in The White Slave and Other Plays by Bartley Campbell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), xiii. 31. Ibid., ix–xiv. 32. Ibid., lxxix. 33. Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1882, p. 7. 34. Chicago Daily News, October 30, 1882, quoted in Wilt, White Slave and Other Plays, lxxxi. 35. “Of the Premiere of ‘The White Slave,’ ” New York Illustrated Times, April 22, 1882, p. 14. 36. Bartley Campbell, The White Slave, in Wilt, White Slave and Other Plays, 209. 37. Rita Dove, The Darker Faces of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1994); Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a

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Negro, in Black Theatre U.S.A.; Plays by African Americans, the Recent Period: 1935– Today, rev. and exp. ed., ed. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 333–34. 38. Brown, Babylon Girls, 92–127. 39. See David R. Roediger’s discussion of white slavery in Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Donovan, White Slave Crusades. 40. Donovan, White Slave Crusades, 38–52. 41. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 58–63. 42. Ibid., 60. 43. Campbell, White Slave, 206. 44. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 45. Valerie Smith, “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing,” Critical Crossings, special issue of Diacritics 24, no. 2–3, ed. Judith Butler and Biddy Martin (Summer–Fall 1994): 45. Smith asserts that “a more general paradox or conflict exists in the very syntax of the formulation ‘legally black yet physically white,’ for the phrase polarizes the two terms and invokes ostensibly stable categories of racial difference. Systems of racial oppression depend upon the notion that one can distinguish between empowered and disempowered races. Those boundaries that demarcate racial differences are best policed by monitoring the congress between members of opposite sexes of different races. Yet the bodies of mixed-race characters defy the binarisms upon which constructions of racial identity depend. . . . The light-skinned black body thus both invokes and transgresses the boundaries between the races and the sexes that structure the American social hierarchy. It indicates a contradiction between appearance and ‘essential’ racial identity within a system of racial distinctions based upon differences presumed to be visible.” 46. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 12. Austin describes the discursive impact of a performative utterance (“by saying or in saying something, we are doing something”). 47. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 48. Campbell, White Slave, 228. 49. Sandra Gunning, “Rethinking White Female Silences: Kate Chopin’s Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy,” in Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 108–35; Laura Wexler, “The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 271–96. 50. See Blum, Reforging the White Republic. 51. Review of The White Slave, Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1882, p. 21. 52. Campbell, White Slave, 236.

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53. Blight, Race and Reunion, 226–28. 54. Review of The White Slave, Chicago Tribune, 21. 55. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977), 160–69. Althusser argues that a subject or one’s identity is “always already” formed by the structural, linguistic, and ideological apparatuses that surround him or her even before birth. This term then refers to the socially constructed imposition (interpellation) of meaning that shapes meaning and our understanding of the world in which we live. 56. William Dean Howells, “Good Drama vs. Good Theatre,” sections 2 and 3 of Howells’s “Editor’s Study” for Harper’s Monthly, July 1886 (73: 314–17), and “The New American Drama,” Howells’s “Editor’s Study” for Harper’s Monthly, July 1889 (79: 314–19), in A Realist in the American Theatre: Selected Drama Criticism of William Dean Howells, ed. and introduction by Brenda Murphy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 26–35. 57. Gary Scharnhorst in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., ed. Paul Lauter, http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students /author_pages/late_nineteenth/howells_wi.html. 58. As a doctor, Olney symbolizes scientific thought throughout the novel. Scientific discourse would have been especially relevant in discussions of race/ interracial relations, particularly in relation to biologically based theories, which suggested that blacks were inferior and argued that the sexual intermingling of blacks and whites would produce atavism in offspring. 59. William Dean Howells, An Imperative Duty (New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1892), 145. 60. See Wexler’s “Fair Ensemble,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 271–96. 61. Howells, Imperative Duty, 56. 62. Ibid., 17. 63. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 896. The mask may also reference the makeup that blackface minstrel performers used to “black-up” to produce inscrutable stereotypes for the stage. Although these masks and performances presented a caricature because they merely invoked actual black bodies, they were sometimes misread as realistic representations of real black people. 64. Howells, Imperative Duty, 53. 65. Ibid., 4. 66. Ibid., 93. 67. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6–7. She describes the “Africanist presence” as “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings

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that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. . . . African Americanism makes it possible to say and not to say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless.” 68. Howells, Imperative Duty, 133. 69. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, introduction. This response recalls Morrison’s discussion of the Africanist presence in other foundational U.S. fictions that “ignite” discovery in their white male protagonists. 70. See Gillman, Blood Talk, esp. chap. 1. 71. Rydell, Finding, and Pelle, Fair America, 31–39. 72. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 1–64; Fredrickson, Black Image. 73. Howells, Imperative Duty, 143 (emphasis in original). 74. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 12. In other words, Hardin uses the power of words, along with actions, to enact Rhoda’s reoccupation of her white identity. 75. Howells, Imperative Duty, 50. 76. Ibid., 139. 77. This “death” may also function as a metaphor for the loss of the independence she would have gained had she followed her instinct to go to the South and work for the uplift of blacks. She also demonstrates her strength by deciding that she will not allow herself to go mad because of her newly discovered racial ancestry. 3. Staging the Unspoken Terror

1. Rebecca Latimer Felton, Macon Telegraph, August 18, 1897, quoted in LeeAnn Whites, “Love, Hate, Rape, Lynching: Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Gender Politics of Racial Violence,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. David C. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 148. See also H. Leon Prather, “We Have Taken the City,” in Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed, 43–72, and Alexander Manly, “Editorial,” Wilmington Daily Record, in The Literary Digest, November 26, 1898, in Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, ed. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 408. 2. Prather, “We Have Taken a City,” 18. He refers to the paper as the Wilmington Record, although other authors in the collection refer to it as the Daily Record. 3. Whites, “Love, Hate, Rape,” 18. 4. Blight, Race and Reunion, 130–38. 5. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 49–69. 6. Ibid., esp. 56–95. 7. Ibid., 94–104. 8. Fredrickson, Black Image, 117–18, 120–24, 161–62, 234–35, 277–78.

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9. Ibid. See also Gaines, Uplifting the Race, for examples of lynchings and antiblack sentiment, as well as riots. 10. In his introduction to Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993, xxi), Eric J. Sundquist claims that Chesnutt sent his novel to some members of the House of Representatives (who had already received copies of Dixon’s novel) because his use of the Wilmington riot “would stand in precise contrast to that in Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots.” 11. Although I have not located any public record that the two men met, they knew of each other’s existence and work. Not only did both of their families come from North Carolina, but the years that they lived there as young men overlapped. And even more telling is Chesnutt’s openly critical response to Dixon’s work. 12. Gillman, Blood Talk, 73, 88, 116. In her comparative readings of “procrustean” black nationalism and white supremacy in the novels of Thomas Dixon and Sutton Griggs, Gilman argues: “When we turn to the very different, conflictoriented views of the Griggs–Dixon melodramas of crisscrossing racial, political, and class tensions, a series of discrepant couplings of strange ideologies emerges as an alternative to the narrowly conceived, race-dominated conception of turnof-the-century American culture.” Although the Griggs–Dixon “coupling” cannot be conflated with the Chesnutt–Dixon pairing, it offers a critical precedent for examining how these historiographic pieces mutually reconstituted the meanings of miscegenation at the beginning of the twentieth century. 13. This reading strategy builds on the limitations of the Manichean or “procrustean” structures of melodrama — illuminated by Susan Gillman’s and Linda Williams’s work — its failure to reconcile the unreconcilable in mainstream and marginalized U.S. culture. 14. See Susan Gillman, “Procrustean Bedfellows? Black Nationalism and White Supremacy at the Turn of the Century,” in Gillman, Blood Talk, 73–116; and Williams, Playing the Race Card. 15. Two other works by the same authors — Dixon, The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1912), and Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (1900; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1993) — reemphasize the tragic rhetoric that characterizes most narratives about interracial intimacy. Although I do not analyze these texts here, it would be useful to consider how these textual repetitions of catastrophic endings reinforce the complexity of representations of miscegenation. How do reproductions, based on overdetermined formulations of black–white binaries, create space for gaps, revisions, and multiple meanings? 16. Gillman, Blood Talk; George B. Handley, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Stephen P. Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness,” American Literary History 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 426–48.

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17. Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1–34. 18. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist. These other works focus on miscegenation, as well as on the specific tropes and mythologies that accompany these liaisons. In doing so they address the silences around this issue in The Marrow of Tradition and The Clansman. 19. See Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line; Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993); Richard Yarborough, “Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism: The Wilmington Riot in Two Turn-of-the-Century African American Novels,” in Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed, 225–51; Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto,” 426–48. 20. In Chesnutt’s conjure tales, he uses the trickster figure (native informant) as a narrator who performs multiple roles within the text — both storyteller and actor. His stories about the interconnectedness of blacks and whites in the Reconstructed South offer complex formulations of race relations; see introduction to Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, ed. and introduction by Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 21. Charles Chesnutt, “A Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,” Boston Evening Transcript, September 1, 1900, in Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2002), 861. 22. William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 175. 23. Sundquist, introduction to Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, xi–xii. 24. Raymond A. Cook, Thomas Dixon (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), chronology; “Southern Horizons,” 377, cited in Raymond Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1968). 25. Because of incomplete documentation, the number of black fatalities is unknown, but reports range from six to one hundred. There were no white fatalities. 26. Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed, 3–13. 27. Sundquist, introduction to Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, xxi; Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984). 28. Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, vol. 2 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928), 147. In Howells’s letter to Henry B. Fuller, November 10, 1901: “I have been reading Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition. You know he is a Negro, though you wouldn’t know it from seeing him, and he writes of the black and white situation with an awful bitterness. . . . How such a

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Negro must hate us. And then think of the Filipinos and the Cubans and Puerto Ricans whom we have added to our happy family. But I am talking treason.” 29. Current criticism has reevaluated Chesnutt’s work in the context of his participation in broader discussions of race, the color line, black nationalism, imperialism, class, and racial uplift, attesting to the multivalence of his work rather than the flat characterizations and propaganda that he was accused of producing. See Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, and Andrews, Literary Career of Charles Chesnutt, for examples. Chesnutt’s focus on the masculinized forms of racial dissent have also been reconsidered, taking into greater account the roles played by women in the novel. For example, Samira Kawash contends that the “twinning” of Olivia and Janet speaks to the importance of domestic spaces and alternative formulations of racial relationships that are more akin to each other (since they are, in fact, sisters) than the polarized racial lines played out in the violent riots on the streets. Similarly, in Stephen Knadler’s analysis of The Marrow of Tradition, he suggests that Janet, rather than Miller or Green, represents true heroism by enacting genteel womanhood and interracial coalition by helping her “white” sister’s sick son. Both critics also contend that this pairing of Janet and Olivia also challenges the juridical and cultural belief that racial difference is clearly legible, easily classifiable, and genetically distinct. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 90–91; Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto,” 426–48. 30. Chesnutt, “Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,” 899. 31. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 238. 32. Chesnutt, “Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,” 845–50; Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto,” 433–44. 33. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 90. She suggests that the doubling of Olivia and Janet is significant because it indicates that there is no “originary”; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 433. He suggests that doubling plays an important role in The Marrow of Tradition in terms of the twinning of Tom and Sandy, who represent the old and the new South. 34. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 270 (emphasis in original). 35. Ibid., 266. 36. Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 50–51. Hodes provides multiple examples of interracial unions that were accepted in the early to mid-1800s in states such as North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia (49–50, 99–100). 37. Ibid., 253. 38. Ibid., 26. 39. Sundquist, introduction to Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, xxx. He argues along these same lines that Tom’s impersonation uses two stereotypes to justify domination over and violence toward blacks: the minstrel and the black brute. 40. Erin Elizabeth Clune, “Black Workers, White Immigrants, and the Postemancipation Problem of Labor: The New South in Transnational Perspective,” in

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Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South, ed. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 199–228. 41. Lott, Love and Theft, 6. 42. The vacillation of Tom’s and Sandy’s performances of black masculinity between feminized and predatory manhood recalls the long history of the preemancipation emasculation of black men that transmogrified to the postbellum caricature of the black male rapist. 43. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 16. 44. Sundquist, introduction to Marrow of Tradition, xxv. He argues that “ ‘Negro Domination’ did, in fact, threaten the manliness of the white southerner. . . . Male hysteria was not simply about rape or other affronts to white womanhood: It was about votes and the loss of white virility.” 45. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 57. 46. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 16–21. Grandin contends that throughout the nineteenth century, international U.S. corporations such as those of Charles Schwab, J. P. Morgan, and Solomon Guggenheim, got their start in Latin America and the Caribbean, in countries like Peru and Mexico. As early as 1855 and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. mercenaries and militarists raised armies and invaded countries like Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. Many U.S. troops saw occupation practices as an extension of experience with Jim Crow and Native American violence at home. The legacies of those invasions and occupations remain with us today. 47. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 34. 48. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 15–42. 49. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 59. 50. Sanda M. Lwin, “ ‘A Race So Different from Our Own’: Segregation, Exclusion, and the Myth of Mobility,” in Afro-Asian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 17–33. 51. Delfino and Gillespie, Global Perspectives. 52. Thomas Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden — 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902). 53. Thomas Dixon, “Why I Wrote The Clansman,” Theatre 6 (1906): 20. 54. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41–69.

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55. John C. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen: North Carolina Reacts,” North Carolina Historical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1987): 139. He claims that in 1905 “the majority of critics and reporters extoll[ed] the timeliness of Dixon’s warning and the accuracy of his depiction of the dangerous situation at hand.” In the rest of the article he describes various positive and negative responses to the play and the film version, The Birth of a Nation; Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 63–64. Slide cites a negative review from the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1906, but it also praised the staging and lighting effects. Additionally, the Constitutional League of New York, established to enforce the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments, distributed a twenty-one-page pamphlet by Ken Miller of Howard University refuting Dixon’s racist arguments. 56. Slide, American Racist, 59. 57. Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 34. 58. Ibid., 30–35, 110–76. 59. See Williams, Playing the Race Card, for a detailed description of how stereotypes function. 60. Dixon wrote the dramatic version of The Sins of the Father three years before he wrote the novel. In his autobiography, Dixon describes his composition of Sins in a matter-of-fact manner, stating: “Brenan asked me to write another Southern play and I dramatized my study of race mixing, The Sins of the Father”; quoted in Karen M. Crowe, “Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon, a Critical Edition” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, February 1982), 401; James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). He also documents the fact that Dixon wrote the dramatic version of Sins before the novel. 61. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 49. He describes the 1906 antiblack riots in Atlanta, as well as accusations by local newspapers that claimed that the “local theater performance of Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman” provoked violence. 62. Quoted in Crowe, “Southern Horizons,” 28–29. 63. Dixon, Clansman, 22. 64. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 64. Barber, whose Voice of the Negro opposed Dixon’s Clansman, “cited the performance” from “the previous winter, with its attack on Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan’s heroic role in the redemption of the South, and the rescue of the white women threatened by lustful black politicians as the first incitement to” the 1906 Atlanta riots. 65. Dixon, Clansman, stage directions, act 1, scene 1. 66. Ibid., act 1, 36. 67. Ibid., act 1, 22.

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68. Wells-Barnett, Red Record. 69. Slide, American Racist, 51–67. 70. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 152. 71. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 66–70, 135–36. She does not provide the biracial man’s name but said he was from New York. 72. Shrimp, the weak-willed white governor, is represented as easily manipulated and unable to assert his supremacy over blacks because he aligns himself with them politically. 73. Dixon, Clansman, act 2, 12. 74. Judith Jackson Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gowns,” in Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 38. She contends that Marion and her mother in the novel have a racially suggestive last name, “Lenoir” (the black), and that by having them jump off the cliff, Dixon expunges them (as well as the interracial sex they represent) from the text. White female purity must be maintained, and their “voluntary deaths guarantee that any corruption of blackness implied by their name will not corrupt their blood, blood that could have tainted future generations.” 75. Dixon, Clansman, act 3, 29. 76. Fossett, “(K)night Riders,” 40–41. She discusses how the Klan garb, especially the robe, functions as an expression of whiteness and masculinity that unsettles the stability of constructions of whiteness, as well as gender, because it can be taken on and off and because the power of the robe is “mediated through the dress, a cultural vehicle marking femininity.” 77. See Walter Benn Michaels, “Anti-Imperial Americanism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 365–91. 78. Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, “Gender and Race in Dixon’s Religious Ideology,” in Thomas Dixon, Jr., and the Birth of Modern America, ed. Michele K. Gillespie and Randall L. Hall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 82. 79. Christopher Capazzola, “Thomas Dixon’s War Prayers,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 1–5, http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc /jtas/vol1/iss1/art28. 80. David Stricklin, “ ‘Ours Is a Century of Light’: Dixon’s Strange Consistency,” in Gillespie and Hall, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and the Birth of Modern America, 105–24. 81. Dixon, Clansman, act 3, 27. 82. For examples of antiblack sentiment and its connections to U.S. expansion, shifts in economic systems, industrialization, and black migration, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 26–55, 96–97.

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83. Denial and systematic dismantling of black civil rights were perceived as, essentially, a way of removing black manhood and citizenship. 84. Sundquist, introduction to Marrow of Tradition, xxxv. Sundquist points out that Chesnutt’s careful reordering of historical events (the timing of Carteret’s reproduction of Barber’s scandalous editorial and the riot) allowed him to “dramatize the truth of disenfranchisement” and to demonstrate the ways in which it was the result of a calculated plan. 85. Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto,” 436; Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, ed. Sundquist, 323–25. 4. The Remix

1. Florette Henri, Black Migration Movement North, 1900–1920: The Road from Myth to Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1976), 16–17, 30. 2. Ibid., 15, 33. Georgia adopted its segregation laws in 1891, and by 1907 states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Maryland, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma had followed suit. 3. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). Instead, a new breed of self-determined African Americans, also known as “New Negroes,” persevered and flourished. In fact, Charles Chesnutt would have been considered one of the elders of this generation of blacks, referred to by Du Bois as the “talented tenth,” who were dedicated to lifting the entire race as they climbed educational, social, political, and economic ladders themselves. Although Chesnutt was certainly not alone in his aspirations for the improvement of the race or in his exploration of miscegenation, his take on the future implications of racial intermixture was distinct. Rather than adopting the separatist perspective of some aspiring members of black and white communities — a deep disdain for racial mixing because it diluted the race and strict adherence to nationalist ideologies — Chesnutt argued that racial intermingling was not only impossible to avoid, but was also a logical progression. The Census Bureau’s reports, and studies such as those by sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, Edward Reuter, and Charles S. Johnson, published during the early part of the twentieth century, supported Chesnutt’s beliefs. However, eventually the notion that the dilution of blackness would solve the race problem or make the racial distinctions disappear lost its hold. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 5. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 43. And, by 1920, the “white” foreign-born population had exceeded 13.5 million; Guterl, Color of Race, 46–47. These demographic shifts were also complicated by restrictions on immigration, such as the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the eventual passage of the 1924 National

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Origins Act, which virtually eliminated immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and the West Indies. 6. Williamson, New People, 112–15. He argues that eventually, to Census Bureau officials, all white Americans, similar to black Americans, looked alike and belonged to one of two categories. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903). 8. Melissa Stuckey, “ ‘All Men Up’: Race, Rights, and Power in the All-Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, 1903–1939” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2007). 9. William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Atheneum, 1986). His study attests to the large percentage of blacks who share ancestry and/or cultural ties with indigenous tribes since the importation of Africans as slaves to what would become the United States. 10. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 140–68. 11. Williamson, New People, 112, 120. 12. I will refer to the collaborative team of Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson as the Cole–Johnson team. Because of the inconsistency and absence of materials from this period, some questions cannot be answered definitively and must be gleaned from letters, comments, and marginalia, particularly since there is no extant script of The Red Moon. Based on my research and the work of theatre historians, it appears that James Weldon Johnson participated in the writing and production of The Red Moon, but there is not a clear consensus as to the extent to which he worked on the play. Some suggest that he did not work on it at all because he moved on to politics. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 252. In his autobiography, Johnson writes that he returned to the United States from Venezuela en route to his new post in Nicaragua in 1909. During this brief visit he stopped in Baltimore to “a new show” that Bob and J. Rosamond had written, “called The Red Moon,” which doesn’t indicate any direct involvement on his part. Because of this uncertainty, I acknowledge James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative role but focus on J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole, since they not only worked on the play but also performed central roles in it. The following chapter includes a more comprehensive discussion of James Weldon Johnson’s life and work. Theatre historian Allen Woll does not mention James in his discussion of The Red Moon and cites only Cole and Rosamond Johnson as the authors. He also indicates that James split with the duo amicably before the play was written. See Woll’s Black Musical Theatre: From “Coontown” to “Dreamgirls” (1989; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 22–27. However, Paula M. Seniors contends that James was a full collaborator; see Seniors’s Beyond “Lift Every Voice.” Other critics vary in their documentation of the play as to whether or not James Weldon Johnson collaborated, but all contend that J. Rosamond and Cole played

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vital roles. For additional examples, see Thomas L. Riis, Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Sotiropoulos, Staging Race. 13. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” 104–22. 14. Katherine Ellinghouse, “Assimilation by Marriage,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (2000): 279–304. See also Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 71–97, for detailed discussion of interracial relations at the Hampton Institute. 15. Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 1–50. 16. Paula Seniors, “Cole and Johnson’s The Red Moon, 1908–1910: Reimagining African American and Native American Female Education at Hampton Institute,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 21–35. 17. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 81–83. 18. David Krasner suggests that The Red Moon was a response to Schultz’s book; see Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness, 141. 19. See the work of Daphne Brooks, Joseph Roach, David Krasner, Jennifer Brody, and Karen Sotiropoulos for useful discussions of racialized performance as sites of dissent, unruliness, and contestation in U.S. and transatlantic contexts in the early 1900s. 20. Guy Szuberla, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot Plays Chicago,” MELUS 20, no. 3, “History and Memory” (Autumn 1995): 3–20 (Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States). He contends that there was still a great ambivalence about the fusion of these “new” immigrants, particularly Jews, who were considered aliens. 21. López, White by Law, appendix A, 164. 22. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 167–78. He describes the 1904 St. Louis Exposition’s display of varied colonized races that highlighted U.S. imperialism of the past and present, such as their linkage of living Native American encampments with Filipino villages, suggesting that both populations could be civilized. The display of Filipinos also distinguished different “types,” suggesting that the more civilized and intelligent Filipinos were more desirable than the more “primitive” “Negritos” who were more akin to Africans (167–78). 23. William S. Willis Jr., “Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast,” in Red, White, and Black: Symposium on Indians in the Old South, ed. Charles M. Hudson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 108. 24. Ibid., 99–115. 25. See Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 111–39, esp. 114–15, for extended discussion on the complexity of racial classifications and its impact on race relations

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even in “mixed” communities like those composed of Indians, blacks, whites, and mixtures of all three. 26. See Willis, “Divide and Rule,” 102. 27. Robert Warrior, “Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century: Intersections of Native American and African American Literatures,” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, ed. Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 181–95, esp. 182, 185–87. 28. Tiya Miles, “Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery,” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian–Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 137–60. 29. W. E. B. Du Bois excelled in higher education and was known worldwide for his advocacy for the black diaspora, as well as for his scholarship. Charles Eastman earned degrees at Beloit, Dartmouth, and Boston University medical school. He attended the first Universal Races Congress in 1911 that Du Bois helped lead and authored several books, including Indian Boyhood (1902). See Warrior, “Lone Wolf and Du Bois,” 188–89. 30. See Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 71–97, for a comprehensive history of biracial black–Indian schools. 31. Roger Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 140–53. 32. Don B. Wilmeth, “Noble or Ruthless Savage? The American Indian on Stage and in the Drama,” in American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader, ed. Hanay Geigamah and Jaye T. Darby (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000), 140–58. 33. See Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” for discussion of politics and culture shaping the Cole–Johnson team’s work. 34. Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 110–11. Brown also notes that Hopkins’s play differed from earlier representations of the “solitary and determined” slave represented in plays like The Octoroon and J. T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood by highlighting communal strategies and resistant and subversive networks in slave communities. 35. Nellie McKay, introduction to Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 1–20. See also Hazel Carby, introduction to Pauline Hopkins, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, Henry Louis Gates Jr., gen. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; and Gillman, Blood Talk, for excellent discussions of Hopkins, along with Hopkins, Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, ed. and introduction by Ira Dworkin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

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36. Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 532–33. Strikingly, W. E. B. Du Bois, who shared many of the same aspirations as Hopkins, did not acknowledge her achievements, a fact indicative of the gender bias in the black activist and intellectual circles that were typically (almost always) dominated by men. 37. Carby, introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxix, xxxii, xxxvii. 38. Published in Hopkins, Daughter of the Revolution. 39. Carby, introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxxii–xxxv. 40. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 127, and introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xlii–xliii; Hopkins, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, in Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 285–437. 41. Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 367. I am indebted to Lois Brown’s extensive research on Hopkins, which has contributed greatly to my understanding of the context and reception of her work. 42. Carby, introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxxv–xxxvi. Carby cites Hopkins’s preface to her novel Contending Forces, in which Hopkins advocates fiction as a powerful venue for depicting the innermost thoughts of the “Negro” and its vital role: to document progress and inspire social change. 43. Hopkins, Winona. Hopkins spells the Indian tribe “Senaca.” 44. Ibid., 287; Carby, introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xlii–xliii. Carby quotes a line from the opening paragraph to describe the community in which Hopkins set her tale of “organized political resistance.” Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 371, also discusses the idyllic representation of indigenous culture that contrasted so clearly with the antagonistic policies directed at indigenous people occupying desirable land. 45. Hopkins, Winona, 288. 46. Ibid., 290. 47. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 128. 48. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 49. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 3–5. 50. Megan Winkler, “The Yellow Rose of Texas: The Mistress of Santa Anna Who Helped Win the Battle of San Jacinto,” August 10, 2008, http://americanhis tory.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_yellow_rose_of_texas. 51. Katz, Black Indians, 174–78. 52. Ibid., 79; Kenneth Porter Wiggins, The Negro on the American Frontier (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 238–41; Charles Crowe, “Comments,” in Hudson, Red, White, and Black, 136.

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53. Miles, “Uncle Tom Was an Indian,” 147. 54. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 140–77. 55. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 127– 36. Kramer describes the racialization of Filipinos in 1899 during the war with the United States. White soldiers referred to them as “niggers.” Black U.S. soldiers, relegated to a position inferior to that of their fellow white soldiers on the field and certainly below white citizenry at home, occupied a questionable position when their role was to subordinate Filipinos. 56. Hopkins, Winona, 352. 57. Ibid., 367–73. 58. See Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 383–85, for her discussion of Aunt Vinnie, and Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 282–86, for her discussion of black female dramatic/cultural production and racial uplift. 59. See Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Gillman, Blood Talk; Gruesser, Unruly Voice. 60. Hopkins, Winona, 313. 61. Ibid., 403. 62. Michael J. Pfeiffer, Rough Justice: Lynching in American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 1–98, esp. 28, 74. For example, a sheepherder in Casper, Wyoming, who murdered a sheriff, was lynched for lawlessness in 1902, and nativism and labor disputes led to the lynchings of twenty-one Sicilians in Louisiana between 1891 and 1907. 63. Hopkins, Winona, 310. 64. Ibid., 292. Indian pipes are also native to Canada; however, they also grow in diverse regions throughout the world and have a wider distribution than almost any modern plant. Gerald Klingaman, “Plant of the Week: Indian Pipe,” Cooperative Extension Ser vice, University of Arkansas, January 12, 2007, http:// www.arhomeandgarden.org/plantoftheweek/articles/indian_pipe_01-12-07.htm. 65. Hopkins, Winona, 291–92. 66. Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 109, 494. Brown contends that despite Hopkins’s pioneering work in African American performance, Du Bois completely overlooked her vital contributions; Hopkins, along with other female literary activists of color, was excluded from the 1905 Niagara Conference (which eventually led to the founding of the NAACP), despite her qualifications and advocacy for racial uplift. 67. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 11. Seniors gathered this information based on an interview with Cole’s descendant Dr. Jewell Plumber Cobb, who reported that Cole’s father was part Seminole and African and his mother was an octoroon. 68. Riis, Just before Jazz, 26.

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69. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 14. Some of the historical names and details differ from Thomas Riis’s account. For example, she refers to Cole’s company as the All Stock Theatre Company. 70. Riis, Just before Jazz, 26–28. 71. “Bob Cole Done For,” New Jersey Review, November 12, 1910; “Bob Cole Hopeless,” Variety, November 5, 1910; “Bob Cole, Song Writer, Drowns,” Catskill (N.Y.) Morning Telegraph, August 2, 1911; “Bob Cole a Suicide,” Boston Transcript, August 3, 1911; Burton W. Peretti, Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 64. 72. Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 14. See also Sondra Kathryn Wilson, introduction to James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), vii–xvi, and Sondra Kathryn Wilson, introduction to Johnson, Along This Way, xiii–xxiv. 73. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 19. 74. Wilson, introduction to Johnson, Along This Way, xiv. 75. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 22–23. 76. Ibid., 24. 77. Johnson, Along This Way, 149; Hariilaos Stecopoulos, “Up from Empire: James Weldon Johnson, Latin America, and the Jim Crow South,” in Imagining Our Empires: Toward a Transnational Frame, ed. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 37. 78. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 109. Johnson emphasizes their inventiveness, resistance, and skill in his discussion of the Cole–Johnson team’s work. 79. Riis, Just before Jazz, 33–37; Johnson, Along This Way, 156–57. 80. Allen Woll, Dictionary of the Black Theatre: Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Selected Harlem Theatre (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 222. 81. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 24. 82. Johnson, Along This Way, 154–55. 83. Ibid., 153–54. He wrote the poem to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday (154); Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 3, 23–24. 84. Riis, Just before Jazz, 33–37. 85. Frederick Wegner, “Charles W. Chesnutt and the Anti-Imperialist Matrix of African-American Writing, 1898–1905,” Criticism 41, no. 4 (Detroit) (Fall 1999): 465. The Cole–Johnson team’s 1906–7 production of The Shoo Fly Regiment also attested to their skills as performers, businessmen, self-promoters, and cardcarrying members of the black racial uplift movement but not without a critical edge shared by many of their contemporaries. This play, set in the Philippines and Cuba, not only represented some of the achievements of the black middle class with its depiction of black educational institutions and black heroism in the U.S. military, it also served as a platform to advocate for equal rights and citizenship

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denied to black men following the Spanish–American War. Audiences were free to make correlations between violent U.S. conquest in these transnational sites and lynch-mob violence at home. This play would have echoed the anti-imperial criticisms of intellectuals like Hopkins who argued against the annexation of the Philippines and Cuba, suggesting that they were merely a transnational staging ground for continued aggressive imperialistic antiblack, anti-Indian, and antiAsian practices at home. 86. New York Daily Mirror, May 15, 1909, p. 3, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts. 87. Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 24–27. 88. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 90, 92, 119–24. Popular dramas like Bartley Campbell’s My Partner (1879–80), set in a California mining town; David Belasco’s The Girl I Left behind Me (1892), set in Montana; Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man (1907–8), set in a small town along the Union Pacific Railway; and Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1905–7) were just a few of the many that populated American culture. These four plays drew from each other and from contemporaneous sociopolitical contexts, such as a hopeful vision of law and order on the seemingly lawless frontier in the form of a trial and the punishment of the real murderer. 89. Hall, Performing the American Frontier. 90. New York Daily Mirror, May 15, 1909, p. 3. 91. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 15, 1908, Robert Locke Collection, ser. 3, Cole–Collier, NAFR+; “Here and Elsewhere,” Toledo Blade, September 27, 1909, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts. 92. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 7–9. The institute was established by former Union officer Samuel Chapman Armstrong to educate and acculturate freed blacks and indigenous students, who were added as a segregated population in 1877. 93. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 74–80. 94. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 186. 95. Riis, Just before Jazz, 135. The show opened at the New York Majestic Theater on May 3, 1909. Mary Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). This play’s run overlaps with the “Chinatown Trunk Mystery” in which the murder of a white woman in Chinatown in New York City in 1909 created a big controversy and reinforced anti-Chinese sentiment, as well as fears about interracial encounters between Asians and whites. The controversy led to different plays about the murder in 1910, which would have

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been concurrent with the run of The Red Moon. This sensationalized murder speaks to the growing anxiety of whites, as well as an intensified fascination with the increasingly nonwhite presence that both unsettled the black–white binary and reformulated it to vilify other nonwhite bodies, such as that of the Chinese American man. 96. Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 190. 97. “Here and Elsewhere.” 98. Philadelphia Times, September 15, 1908. It is not clear why the reviewer suggests that the school is in the Southwest, except to distance it from the doorstep of the nation’s capital or because of the ambiguity of the hybridized settings. 99. New Jersey Dramatic News, May 15, 1909, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts. 100. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 171. 101. Toledo Blade, December 14, 1908, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts; Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 161, lists the actresses in the chorus of The Red Moon whose roles depicted them as cosmopolitan and reputable. They include Bessie Tribble, Lulu Coleman, Mayme Butler, Tillie Smith, Bessie Sims, and Blanche Deas. The screenplay also indicates that there are six members in the chorus. The Red Moon screenplay and notes, John Rosamond Johnson Papers, Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, box 6, folder 14. 102. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 159–69. 103. Ibid., 159–72. 104. Ibid., 171. 105. Brown, Babylon Girls, 95. 106. “Life Is a Game of Checkers,” words by Cole and Chas Hunter, music by J. Rosamond Johnson, Yale University Beinecke Special Collection, James Weldon Johnson papers, JWJ–V3 J633 L93. 107. Katherine Ellinghouse, “Assimilation by Marriage,” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (2000): 279–304. See also Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 71–97, for detailed discussion of interracial relations at the Hampton Institute. 108. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 126–27, 133–37. 109. Inscription on a photograph of J. R. Johnson in native dress, Yale University Beinecke Special Collection, James Weldon Johnson papers, JWJ–V3 J633 B49. In a conversation I had with J. Rosamond Johnson’s granddaughter, she showed me a larger version of the same photograph and told me about the Iroquois. 110. Materials related to Red Moon (sheet music, notes, and photographs), Yale University Beinecke Special Collection, James Weldon Johnson papers, JWJ–V3 J633 B48, B49.

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111. “When Bob Cole Met Geronimo,” Kansas City Post, November 7, 1908, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Robinson Locke Collection, ser. 3, Cole–Collier, NAFR+. 112. Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 126–27. 113. “When Bob Cole Met Geronimo.” 114. “At the Lyceum,” Philadelphia Times, December 14, 1908; “The Red Moon Begins Return Engagement,” Philadelphia American, January 19, 1909, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 115. “Bleeding Moon,” Yale University Beinecke Special Collection, James Weldon Johnson papers, JWJ–V3 J633 B61. This phrase comes from the song’s lyrics. 116. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 148. 117. Toledo Blade, September 27, 1901; Des Moines Register, October 25, 1909 (New York Public Library, Performing Arts Library, under Cole and Johnson). 118. Taylor, In Search of a Racial Frontier, 171. 119. J. Rosamond Johnson’s note to Carl Van Vechten, Yale University Beinecke Special Collection, James Weldon Johnson papers, JWJ–V3 J633 B49. 120. Bert Williams (1874–1922) and George Walker (1873–1911) toured vaudeville, performed on Broadway, and formed their own theatrical troupe. See Woll, Dictionary of the Black Theatre; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 121. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 109. 122. Seniors, “Cole and Johnson’s The Red Moon,” 29. 123. The Red Moon screenplay and notes, John Rosamond Johnson papers, Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, box 6, folder 14. 124. Ibid. 5. The Futurity of Miscegenation

1. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent. My discussion of the intersection of Hopkins and Johnson builds on Brooks’s insights about how Hopkins “inherited and translated the field of historical and cultural performance into popular fiction paradigms” and thus empowered “performance as the insurgent site for dismantling imperialist and patriarchal discourses” and emphasizing “the resilience of black women’s bodies.” Her reading of Of One Blood interrogates how Hopkins reformulated black nationalism, agency, self-representation, spectatorship, and PanAfricanism through an intertextual representation of black women’s performance (301–2). 2. Ibid., 301. Brooks argues that Hopkins recovered the erasure of black subjectivity by representing the cross-cultural and racial exchange of performance

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culture. She also talks about the interracial dynamic of the audience and performers (301–2). 3. See Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in the Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line; Gruesser, Unruly Voice. 4. Gillman, Blood Talk; Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching; Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins; Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 5. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 301–2. I build on Brooks’s contention that Hopkins “sustain[ed] a textual dynamism throughout the narrative” by capturing the shifting tensions between performers and spectators in her representation of the theatrical “contact zone” as “terrain[s] of exchange and struggle.” 6. Ibid., 301–2. Brooks talks about the interracial dynamic of the audience and the performers that gestures toward the productive possibility of staging miscegenation. 7. McKay, introduction to Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 2–5. 8. Ibid., 18. 9. Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 407–41, 526–40. Brown provides a detailed account of Hopkins’s challenges in a male-dominated profession and of the calculated restructuring of the Colored American Magazine that pushed her out. 10. Johnson, Along This Way, 238. 11. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” in The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 377–87. 12. Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood Or, the Hidden Self, in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, Henry Louis Gates Jr., gen. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 504. 13. Ibid., 570. 14. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 145. Hopkins also authored her own text linking black Americans with classical culture and Africa, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants (Cambridge, Mass: P. E. Hopkins and Co., 1905); Gillman, Blood Talk; Gruesser, Unruly Voice; Thomas J. Otten, “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race,” English Literary History 59 (1992): 248–49. 15. In order to disrupt notions of classic culture, the narrative emphasizes the authenticity of Ethiopian heritage. Although this attempt to present a cohesive and positive image of Africa can be read as essentializing African identities, it can

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also be read as a move to legitimize Africa in relation to the already established history of white Western (classic) civilization. 16. It is important to note that Hopkins had a significant interest in Africa and its connection to Western civilization. She authored various essays on Africa and was certainly influenced by exploration in Africa, particularly Ethiopia and Egypt. At this time, exploration and imperialist expansion exposed Western countries to populations that they considered exotic and ripe for colonization. Hopkins linked domestic racism with imperialism and civilizing missions abroad (Cuba and the Philippines, for example). See Kevin Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 433–55. See Susan Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” American Literary History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 57–82, for an excellent discussion of Hopkins’s use of both scientific and historical research in her writings, especially black diasporic histories. See Cynthia Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and Politics of Race,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 182–210, for a useful examination of Hopkins’s linking of the discourse of blood with essential notions of race that connect blacks to a common African origin. 17. Pauline E. Hopkins, preface to Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13–14. I am indebted to Kate McCullough, “Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, for pointing to the significance of this preface (27). 18. Ann Allen Shockely, “Pauline Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity,” Phylon: Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 33, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 22. 19. Claudia Tate, “Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 64. Tate reemphasizes this point by claiming that Hopkins’s “entire milieu” allows her to “display the breadth of her knowledge in the arts and sciences, as if she were using her own writing in a self-conscious attempt to prove that the inherent intellectual capacity of black Americans was equal to that of their own Anglo-Saxon counterparts.” 20. Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult,” 66. 21. See C. K. Doreski, “Inherited Rhetoric and Authentic History: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American Magazine,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 72–91. 22. Editorial and Publishers’ Announcements, Colored American Magazine, March 1903, p. 398, and “Venus and the Apollo, Modeled on Ethiopians,” Colored American Magazine, May/June 1903, p. 465.

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23. Tate, “Pauline Hopkins,” asserts that in Of One Blood Hopkins’s “effort to escape becomes total and comprehensive, as the story moves beyond the American social scene to a mysterious Atlantis-like region of an underground city in Africa” and that “instead of finding urgent social problems dramatized in a somewhat realistic fictional setting, we find remote landscape of science fiction” (62). In contrast, others argue that Hopkins used forms such as melodrama to challenge and interrupt the unquestioned legitimacy of forms like biography, history, and science; Sean McCann, “ ‘Bonds of Brotherhood’: Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama,” English Literary History 64 (1997): 789–822; Doreski, “Inherited Rhetoric,” 71–97. 24. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 157–58. She contends that Kirkland Soga’s documentary article “Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century” ran concurrently with Hopkins’s fiction, reinforcing Hopkins’s assertion that contemporary black Americans were related to Ethiopians. 25. Ibid., 145. In addition to the citation listed in the previous note, Carby asserts that Hopkins incorporated formulas from various genres, like sensational fiction, dime, and detective novels. Some of the characteristics Carby lists are suspense, action, adventure, complex plotting, multiple/false identities, and use of disguise. 26. Gillman, Blood Talk, 9–10. 27. Ibid. Gillman draws from the works of Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993]) and Homi K. Bhabha (“Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 85–92) to discuss how even the “miming of dominant racial tropes and discourses,” through its repetition and reiteration, can produce a counter-reiteration that “renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses.” 28. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 291, 293; Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 394– 95. Brown cites William James’s 1890 Scribner Magazine review “The Hidden Self,” where he discusses the unconscious; Gillman, Blood Talk; Cynthia Schraeger, “Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 182–210. All these critics note the racialization of James’s ideas, as well as the intersections between Hopkins’s fascination with James and Du Bois, particularly his ideas of a second self and double-consciousness espoused in The Souls of Black Folk. 29. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 396. He asserts that “miscegenation was also frequently enough literal incest.” 30. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 72. 31. Dianthe’s apparent lack of agency recalls Rena’s lack of self-will in Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars; she submits to her manipulative brother’s desires rather than identifying her own needs.

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32. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 292. Brooks rereads Dianthe’s role through the “dual prisms of postbellum black theatre culture and Pan-Africanist spiritualist practices” to contextualize her role as “diva choir soprano and spiritualist medium” as a gendered and performative reconstitution of black nationalism. 33. Hopkins, Of One Blood, 568. 34. He is also punished for murdering his white fiancée, Molly, whom he drowned so that he could get her out of the way while he pursued Dianthe. 35. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 156–61. 36. Gillman, Blood Talk, 9–10. 37. Hopkins, Of One Blood, 607. 38. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8 (Fall 1988): 53. 39. Carby, introduction to Hopkins, Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxxi–xlix. 40. Johnson, Along This Way, 3–8. 41. Ibid., 61–63; Seniors, Beyond “Lift Every Voice,” 22. 42. Wilson, introduction to Johnson, Along This Way, xiii–xxiv. 43. Noelle Morrissette, introduction to James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007), xi–xii. 44. James Weldon Johnson, Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, June 6, 1906, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 9: 1906–8, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 27. Johnson admitted that he was uncertain of the “exact status of the pure blacks” because his stay was too short and he had no “confidential” source of information. 45. Ibid. 46. Johnson, Along This Way, 151. 47. See Stecopoulos, “Up from Empire,” 34–62. 48. Johnson, Along This Way, 64. 49. Wilson, introduction to Johnson, Along This Way, xvii. 50. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 97–105. Stepto asserts that Johnson’s novel is a synthesis of Afro-American narrative history that fuses aspects of authenticating rhetoric to aspects of the generic narrative forms, like slave narratives and antislavery literature; Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority, 50. Smith also argues that Johnson “simulated autobiography” in order to “explore a path he did not choose in life, but one that fascinated him”; Donald C. Goellnicht, “Passing Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” African American Review 30, no. 1 (1996): 18–21. He also asserts that Johnson’s text is a “parody” of “black autobiography” and that it plays with the promise of revealing a “total revelation” of the “exotic.” 51. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 147–55. Kawash argues that critiques of passing in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man still adhere to a presumption that underlying racial identities exist but that this narrative successfully demon-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

287

strates the fallacy of that logic by depicting the narrator’s inability to name or perform any fixed racial identity. 52. Johnson, Autobiography, 504, 510. 53. Ibid., 499, 510–11. 54. This assertion is informed by Butler, Bodies That Matter, and Gillman, Blood Talk, 24. 55. Johnson, Along This Way, 168–69. He provides a terrifying account of his experience of almost being lynched because the woman with whom he was meeting privately appeared to be a white woman but was actually legally black. He narrowly averted mob violence and was cleared by a local authority who knew him and the woman. 56. Johnson, Autobiography, 499. 57. Ibid., 404. 58. Ibid., 403. 59. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 153–54. 60. Eugenia Collier, “The Endless Journey of an Ex-Colored Man,” Phylon 3 (Winter 1971): 372. 61. Johnson, Autobiography, 499. 62. Ibid., 503. 63. Ibid., 432. 64. Ibid., 429. 65. Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). The labels certified white workmanship over the “alien” Chinese. 66. Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “The Afro-Cuban Community in Ybor City and Tampa, 1886–1910,” OAH Magazine of History 7, no. 4 (Summer 1993), http://www .oah.org/pubs/magazine/africanamerican/mirabal.html. 67. Ibid. 68. See Johnson’s discussion of his experiences as U.S. consul in Along This Way. 69. Johnson, Autobiography, 504. 70. Ibid. 71. Mumford, Interzones, 135–37. 72. Johnson, Autobiography, 473. 73. Ibid., 477. 74. Samira Kawash, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: (Passing for) Black Passing for White,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 70. 75. Johnson, Autobiography, 507. 76. This repeats the same outcome of John’s marriage in Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars. He marries a white woman and she dies in childbirth, but their son survives.

288

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

77. Johnson, Autobiography, 510–11. 78. Jennie A. Kassanoff, “The Politics of Representation,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 174–75. She argues that Mira’s role is in fact revolutionary because as “the renegade mother” who appears as an apparition to her children, she cannot be contained by the text, and her utterances work to “destabilize the social order.” She goes on to assert that by “revealing her identity to her children, Mira reappropriates her own maternal body and thereby deconstructs all of the previously accepted genealogical structures in the novel.” 79. Hopkins, Of One Blood, 621. 80. Doreski, “Inherited Rhetoric,” 90. 81. Johnson, Along This Way, 238. 82. Richard Yarborough, introduction to Hopkins, Contending Forces, xxvii–xxviii. 83. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 214. He refers to the double-consciousness or the bifurcated view that blacks in the United States develop because of segregation as a “second sight,” an insight unique in the history of enslavement and discrimination. Johnson, Autobiography, 403. The narrator gives an extended description of how he learned to look at the world through “coloured” eyes. 84. See Mumford, Interzones, for a discussion of this useful term to characterize historical sites of racial interactivity in Chicago and New York. Conclusion

1. Blight, Race and Reunion, 4. Blight contends that “race was so deeply at the root of the [Civil] war’s causes and consequences, and so powerful a source of division in American social psychology, that it served as the antithesis of a culture of reconciliation. The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism.” 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet,” in Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920; repr., New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 195–209. All subsequent references to the story are from this edition. Although the collection of works included in Darkwater was published in 1920, some of the pieces were published elsewhere in earlier years. See David Levering Lewis, introduction to Du Bois, Darkwater. 3. Du Bois, “Comet,” 195. 4. Ibid., 209. 5. Ibid., 206. 6. For further discussion of Du Bois and spectacular new births, resurrections, and Adam–Eve tales, see Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 163–80. 7. Du Bois, “Comet,” 207.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

289

8. Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 207. She asserts that Jim’s descent into the “bowels of the Earth” as a black workingman in Harlem “evokes the work of colonial laborers and links them to the financial center of New York.” 9. Du Bois, “Comet,” 209. 10. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” and other articles in W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, ed. Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005). 11. Du Bois, “Comet,” 203. This language takes its cue from the orientalizing discourse used to distance all nonwhites, especially Asians and certain immigrant groups, from white U.S. and western European culture, crystallized by the term “Yellow Peril,” that was deployed to mark and police Chinese and later Japanese immigrants imported to the United States as laborers. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). He indexes this process and popularizes the critical term “orientalism” in this groundbreaking study. 12. Morrison, Playing in the Dark. She coins the term “Africanist presence” in this powerful rereading of foundational U.S. literature and the representation of whiteness as inextricably linked to the “unknowable” presence and symbolic power of blackness. 13. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). 14. Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 207. She provides an insightful reading of Du Bois’s Darkwater and notes that Julia’s role as photographer gives her cultural power. 15. Saidiya Hartman discusses the unremarkable and invisible diffusions of power that were enacted on a regular basis in nineteenth-century U.S. slave society as opposed to more spectacular moments, such as lynching, in Scenes of Subjection, 4. 16. Du Bois, “Comet,” 204. 17. Ibid., 202. 18. Ida B. Wells’s antilynching writings document the innumerable and unsubstantiated crimes that led to countless murders and mob violence directed primarily against black men but also against black women and European immigrants. See Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings. 19. Du Bois, “Comet,” 199. 20. I am indebted to Mary Lui for drawing my attention to these alternatives. 21. Matea Gold, “CNN Chief Addresses Obama Birth Controversy,” http:// articles.latimes.com/2009/july/25/entertainment/et-cnnobama25; Amy Hollyfield, “Obama’s Birth Certificate: Final Chapter,” Politifact.com, June 27, 2008; Tim Jones, “Court Won’t Review Obama’s Eligibility to Serve,” http://www.chicagotri bune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama-birth-certificate1dec08,0,7258812.story. 22. Barack Obama, “Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention,” Boston, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19751-2004July27.

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NOTES TO CONCLUSION

23. “The Democratic Presidential Nominee’s Speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday Night,” CBS News, August 28, 2008, http://www .cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/28/politics/main4394905.shtml. 24. Don Ellzey, “JP Refuses to Marry Couple,” Free Republic, October 15, 2009, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fnews/2363408/posts (or: http:// www.hammondstar.com/articles/2009/10/15/top_stories/8847.txt); Elyse Siegel, “Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License by Louisiana Justice of the Peace,” Huffington Post, October 16, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com /2009/10/15/interracial-couple-denied_n_322784.html; “Judge Crawls Out of Medieval Times, Denies Marriage License to Mixed-Race Couple,” The Root, October 16, 2009, http://www.theroot.com/buzz/judge-crawls-out-medieval -times-denies-marriage-license-mixed-race-couple.

Index

Aarim-Heriot, Najia, 262n14 Abbott, Lynn, 280n93 abolitionism, 2, 32, 86, 96; Alcott and, 29, 30, 44, 258nn85–86; depiction of abolitionist in Dixon’s The Clansman, 125–26; Howells and, 85; “M.L.” as allegory for white women’s participation in, 44 Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), 119 acculturation, 160, 162; of Indians, 145, 176; of nonwhite bodies, exemplars of, 151 Ackerman, James, 29, 257n73, 258n75 Adams, Rachel, 260n115 Addams, Jane, 63 African American artists and performers, 142; increasing interest in black cultural producers, 225–26. See also Chesnutt, Charles Waddell; Cole, Robert Allen (Bob); Hopkins, Pauline E.; Johnson, James Weldon; Johnson, J. Rosamond African and Western civilization, fusion of in Hopkins’s Of One Blood, 195–96, 197, 201, 284n16, 285n24 Africanist Presence, 249n22, 261n129, 265n67, 266n69, 289n12 Afro-Cubans, 216 Afro-Indian intimacies, 141–85; anxiety about, 144–45; attempts to prevent, 150; Boley, Oklahoma township

and, 143–44; Cole–Johnson team’s The Red Moon, xxiv, 145, 146, 168–85, 274n12; complex triangulated history among indigenous nations, U.S. whites, and blacks and, 150–52, 159, 180; evidence of, 144; fascination with Native Americans in early twentieth century, 151–52, 168; in Hopkins’s Winona, xxiv, 145, 155–65, 211; Jim Crow segregation and, 144 agency: black, 45, 141, 146, 190; of women, 32, 41, 42–44, 47–48, 77, 108, 199, 219 Alcott, Bronson and Abigail, 27 Alcott, Louisa May, xi, xxiv, 2, 27–48, 52, 93, 96, 154, 260n117; abolitionism and, 29, 30, 44, 258nn85–86; agency of white females unleashed in stories of, 41, 42–44, 47–48; biblical imagery used by, 261n125; black male–white female intimacy in fiction of, 31–48; body politic reconstructed in shape of woman in fiction of, 27–28; characterization of progressive white females, 79; chronology and optimism of stories of, 32–33; gendered and racial hierarchies engaged in works of, 257n71, 257n74; journals of, 258n76, 258n79, 258n85; literary career, 27; shift from

· 291 ·

292

INDEX

Alcott, Louisa May (continued) idealized romanticism to realism and social reform, 39, 47; stories’ references to her own life and work, 39, 42, 47; use of term “master,” 260n113; voting rights, involvement in conflict over, 46; white middle-class women’s identity reconfigured by, 33–34; white women’s liberatory experience in stories of, 44, 45, 46 Allen, Mrs. John, 7 Allen, Sarah, 153 Allen, William G., 30, 258n79, 261n126 All-Star Stock Company, 165–66 Along This Way ( Johnson), 206, 229, 274n12, 287n55 Althusser, Louis, 265n55 American Indians. See Afro-Indian intimacies; Indians/indigenous tribes American literary realism, 86 American Prejudice against Color, The (Allen), 30 American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, 205 Andrews, William L., 268n22 antimiscegenation legislation, xix–xx, 101–2, 256n65; among American Indian nations, xxi, 24; expansion to include other nonwhite groups, 102; overturning of, 240–41 anxiety, white, xvii, xxi–xxii, xxiii; about Afro-Indian intimacy, 144–45; contemporary, about ongoing racial and cultural variegation, 242; over Ghost Dance movement, 173, 181; illegality of miscegenation and, 102; in post-emancipation period, xviii, 59–60, 65; over “race”

problem, 63; about status of whiteness, 84–85; of women, over responsibility of reproducing racial “purity” and familial sanctity, 114 Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 145, 151, 280n92 Arrow Maker, The (Austin), 152 assimilation, 170; complexities of, 147–48 Astor Place riot (1849), xiv atavism, racial, 90, 149, 222, 265n58 At Jolly Cooney Island, 166 Atlanta race riots (1906), 124, 127, 271n61, 271n64 Atlantic Monthly, 29, 85, 225 audiences, diversity of, xv, 283n2, 283nn5–6 Austin, J. L., 76, 249n19, 264n46, 266n74 Austin, Mary, 152 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The ( Johnson), 187, 188–90, 191, 192, 206, 207–22, 223, 225–27, 274n12, 286nn50–51; critics on, 209; homoerotic miscegenous alliance in, 217–20; individual losses, collective cultural gains in, 223, 225–27; lynching in, 212, 213, 215, 222; multilayered reading invoked by staging of miscegenation in, 211, 213; narrator’s bodily self-inspection highlighting black–white binary in, 214; narrator’s performance of race in, 209–11, 212, 215, 216–17, 220; racial passing in, 207–8, 209, 213, 221; racial reclassification and mobility of narrator in, 214–15, 220–22; recent scholarship on, 191; story of, 212–13; strategy of anonymity in writing, 208

INDEX

Bank, Rosemary K., 248n8 Barber, J. Max, 127, 271n64 Bardwell, Justice Keith, 241, 242 Barnett, Ferdinand L., 51 Bauerlein, Mark, 271n57 Belasco, David, 152, 280n88 Belmonti, Louis, 73 Bennett, James Gordon, 11–12, 254n35 Berlin, Irving, 205 bestialization of black men, 128–29, 131–32 Bhabha, Homi K., 285n27 “Big Indian Chief ” (song), 176, 177 “Big Red Shawl” (song), 176 bi-racialism, x–xi Birth of a Nation, The (film), 110, 124, 138, 231, 271n55 black diaspora: black-diasporic global visibility in western Europe, 213; history, Hopkins’s Of One Blood and, 193–204 black elitism: idealized portraits of, 173–74; middle class, 100–101, 151, 173–74, 279n85; migration north of educated and professional blacks, 142 blackface minstrelsy, xiii, xiv, xv, 37, 265n63; appeal of, 117; Chesnutt’s invocation of, 116; Cole’s refusal to wear exaggerated black makeup in The Red Moon, 181–82; minstrelization of characters in Campbell’s The White Slave, 80–81; minstrelization of characters in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 88, 90–91 Black Hills Gold Rush, 57 “black-identified,” use of term, 36, 259n95. See also racial passing Black Manhattan ( Johnson), 170, 206 black middle class, 100–101, 120, 151, 205; in The Shoo Fly Regiment,

293

279n85; womanhood, black women in The Red Moon redefining ideals of, 173–74 black migration, 60, 63, 122, 141, 142, 146, 231 black nationalism, 25, 31, 181, 267n12, 286n32 blackness: agency of Alcott’s white females through contact with, 41, 42–44, 47–48; black cultural producers’ attempts to define, 153; internalization of racist notions conflated with, 222; representations and enactments of variegated, 190; shift in attitude toward, at close of nineteenth century, 94; signs and markers of, 39–40, 74, 80, 93; social construction of, 202–3; stereotypes of, 116–17, 118 Black Patti’s Troubadour Company, 166 black separatism, 190 black uplift. See racial uplift movement black–white binary, ix–xxviii; artificiality of, 121–23, 163–64, 212; complications of, 103; development of U.S. nationhood and, xvii–xviii; different types of interracial and transnational intimacies challenging, 142; difficulty of eradicating, 236, 238, 242; heightened polarization at turn of century, 145–46; legitimacy of, drama and fiction questioning, xvii; narrator’s bodily self-inspection highlighting, in Johnson’s Autobiography, 214; power of, as “cover story,” xxv–xxvi; preoccupation with interracial unions, in postbellum period, ix–x, xvi–xvii, xxiv, 2; reductive formulation of miscegenation and,

294

INDEX

black–white binary (continued) xxii–xxiv; reformulated as duality, 242; renewed commitment to maintaining, xix; rereading of historical representations of miscegenation, xii; resiliency and (in)adequacy of, xxiv, 230, 234, 237, 238–39; resistance of pull of, in Du Bois’s “The Comet,” 232–33, 235–36, 237; as static formulation of race, x–xi, 209; variation inherent in multiracial, multinational communities unaccounted for by, 26. See also Afro-Indian intimacies; race black women: performers, 71, 173–74; silence around white male sex with, 123; as spectacle, history of, 173; tragic mulatta trope, 5–6, 17–18, 34, 68, 71–72, 73, 81, 89, 174, 183. See also Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, The (Boucicault) Blight, David, 248n12, 288n1 blood, exoticizing of “drop” of black, 4–27, 36, 91–93 Blum, Edward J., 33, 256n58, 288n6 Boley, Oklahoma, all-black township of, 143–44 Boston Herald, pro-expansion commentaries in, 53 Boucicault, Dion, xi, xvi, 1, 2–27, 47, 48, 52, 96, 214, 253n13; background of, 4–5, 252n10, 253n19; exoticizing “drop” of black blood in The Octoroon, 4–27. See also Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, The (Boucicault) boycotts, black, 142 Branded Hand, The (Little), 30 Brent, Linda, 77 Brindis de Salas, José, 154 Brodhead, Richard, 249n24

Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 7; “mulattaroon,” use of term, 13, 251nn4–5, 254n30 Brooks, Daphne, 7, 253n24, 276n35, 282nn1–2, 283nn5–6, 286n32 Brown, Jayna, 71, 174, 253n16 Brown, John, 2, 5, 13, 29, 32 Brown, Lois, 276n34, 277n36, 277n41, 277n44, 278n58, 278n66, 283n9, 285n28 Brown, William Wells, 5, 73 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 241 Butler, Judith, 285n27 Cable, George Washington, 67, 71, 73 Cadman, Charles, 152 Calhoun, John, 64, 263n21 Campbell, Bartley, xi, xvii, 62, 66–85, 97, 280n88; background of, 68–70; fascination with the “other,” 55. See also White Slave, The (Campbell) Canada, as “land of freedom,” 157 Capazzola, Christopher, 272n79 Carby, Hazel, 204, 251n5, 254n30, 258n81, 276n35, 277n42, 277n44, 285nn24–25 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 151 censuses, U.S., racial classification on (1890, 1910, 1920), 61, 143 Central and South America, Johnson’s travels in, 206–7, 217, 218, 219, 226 Chang, Hong Yen, 64 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, xi, xxiv, 100, 102–23, 142, 225, 267n11, 267n15, 268n21, 268n28; as anti-imperialist, 121; background of, 108; conjure tales of, 268n20; current criticism reevaluating work of, 269n29; destabilization of reproduction of propaganda, 138–39; as elder of

INDEX

“New Negroes,” 273n3; eugenics theories used in “Future American” series, 108–9, 112, 113; intersection of fictional and nonfictional work of, 108–9; intersections in work of Dixon and, 104–5, 106, 107, 140; political agenda of, 102, 106, 108–9; on racial “fusion” as natural alternative to white-Anglo-Saxon homogeneity, 108–9, 112, 113, 273n3; staging of black–white rape exposed by, 138. See also Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) Chicago Daily News, reviews of Campbell’s The White Slave, 70 Chicago Tribune, reviews of Campbell’s The White Slave, 70, 80 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 51–57, 58; challenges to white supremacist and imperialist leanings, 51, 56; “Colored People’s Day” at, 62–63; ethnological displays, 54, 56–57; promotion of white supremacy underlying, 52, 55, 56–57 children of interracial unions, xx; denial of inheritance to, 115; laws limiting possibility of “mongrel,” 61; as threat to white supremacy, 49, 222; unclassifiable mixed-race, issue of, 48–49 Childs, Lydia Maria, 9, 154 Chiles, Katy L., 255n50, 256n68 “Chinatown Trunk Mystery,” 280n95 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 54, 57, 273n5 Chinese in United States, 56, 57, 83, 137, 146; coolies, 122, 248n11; discrimination against, 64, 216; Page Law and, 60, 72; “Yellow Peril,” 191, 289n11 Chopin, Kate, 55, 67, 71, 77, 262n10

295

citizenship: for Chinese migrants, impossibility of, 122; of indigenous tribes, 159; Irish immigrants and, 15–17, 21; legal decisions on race and, 65; tenuous position of those excluded from, 81; whiteness and, xix, 64–65, 73, 89, 91, 96, 143, 147–49; whiteness and, in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 6, 15–17, 19–20, 22 civilizing mission of empire, 34, 44, 64, 77, 90, 145, 257n74. See also imperialism and colonialism, U.S. civil rights, black, 32, 34, 101; denial of, 52, 57, 102, 107, 263n27, 273n83 Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, 101 Civil War: Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband” as response to, 28, 29; antislavery and sentimental melodramas during, xiv; contradictory visions of U.S. future after, 58; cross-dressing of women soldiers in, 260n109; distancing of white women’s organizations from black civil rights after, 34; idealistic possibilities during, 33, 48–49, 52; “new” nationalism emerging after, 231; racialized, economic, and imperial concerns staged by, 27, 256n68; tensions over growing immigrant and free black population after, 58–59, 65 Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, The (Dixon), 103, 105, 119, 123–40, 170; absence of black or mulatta women from, 132; Atlanta riots and, 124, 127, 271n61, 271n64; based on two Dixon novels, 123, 131; bestialization of black men in, 128–29, 131–32; The Birth of a Nation based on, 110, 124, 138, 231; as epitome of extreme

296

INDEX

Clansman, The (continued) racist doctrines, 124–25; Flora’s death/suicide in, 131–32; Lynch as embodiment and enactment of miscegenation in, 129–31; polarized models of black male and white female identity in, 134–35; popularity of, 123–24; promoting (the fallacy of) white supremacy, 135–38; racial liminality in, 129–30; reviews of, 124, 271n55; story of, 125–26 Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (Brown), 73 Clune, Erin Elizabeth, 269n40 Cobb, Jewell Plumber, 278n67 Cole, Robert Allen, Sr., 165 Cole, Robert Allen (Bob), xi, 142, 144, 145, 146, 168–85; background of, 165–66; multilayered process of identity formation engaged by, 147; multiple functions of works by, 149; travels across Southwest, 176–79, 180. See also Red Moon, The (Cole–Johnson team) Cole–Johnson team. See Cole, Robert Allen (Bob); Johnson, James Weldon; Johnson, J. Rosamond collective black resistance, 142, 154, 191, 196, 231 Collier, Eugenia, 215, 287n60 Collins, Julia C., 71 Colored American Magazine, 154, 188, 197, 225, 283n9 Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company, 154 color line. See black–white binary “Color Line Belts the World, The” (Du Bois), 229, 230 Columbus, Christopher, 56 “Comet, The” (Du Bois), 231–37,

288n2, 289n11; bleak outlook ending, 234; initial response to black man in, 235; phallic imagery in, 236; resistance to pull of black–white binary in, 232–33, 235–36, 237; return of civilization in, 233–34 Commonwealth, The (antislavery weekly), 29 Compromise of 1850, 6 Compromise of 1877, 60, 69 concubinage, 5, 8, 15, 71, 77, 79, 218, 220. See also slavery Confederacy, Reconstruction and, 59–60 conjure tales, Chesnutt’s, 268n20 Constitutional League of New York, 271n55 Contending Forces (Hopkins), 196 contract rights, 101 Cook, Raymond A., 268n24 Cook, Will Marion, 166 coolies, 122, 248n11 Cooper, Anna Julia, 65–66, 93, 187 Cooper, James Fennimore, 9, 256n61 Cooper, Patricia A., 287n65 corruption, bodily metaphors used to characterize, 18 Cott, Nancy, 258n82 Courtney, Susan, 250n27 Coviello, Peter, 249n18 Cox, Mary Jane, 101 Creek-Seminole College, 144 Creole Show, The, 71, 165 Creole woman in The Red Moon, radical revision of, 174–75 creolized interculture on Caribbean model, paradigm of, 254n33 criminalization of interracial union, xix–xxi, 101–2, 127 Cripps, Thomas, 270n54 Croly, David, xix, xxi–xxii, 109

INDEX

cross-dressing of women soldiers in Civil War, 260n109 Crowe, Charles, 277n52 Crowe, Karen M., 271n60 Cuba, 40–41, 62, 112, 135, 179, 279n85 Cuban community in Florida, racial hybridity and access to, 212, 216–17 cult of true womanhood, 31 cultural miscegenation, 144 Curse of Caste: or, the Slave Bride, The (Collins), 71 Daileader, Celia, 250n27 “dark” other, popularization of notion of, 92 Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Du Bois), 231, 288n2, 289n14 Darwin, Charles, 7, 14, 63, 106 Dawes Act (General Allotment Act, 1887), 150 Degen, John, 254n34 Deloria, Philip, 277n49 democracy and freedom, nation’s exportation of. See imperialism and colonialism, U.S. demographics, shifting U.S., x, xxv, 141–43, 146, 273n5 Denning, Michael, 257n70 desegregation, resistance to, 241. See also segregation “Desiree’s Baby” (Chopin), 67, 71 Dixon, Thomas, xi, xvii, xxiv, 102–10, 123–40, 165, 170, 231, 267nn10–12, 267n15; background of, 109–10, 130; fictional portraits of southern white supremacy and black degeneracy, 102; intersections in work of Chesnutt and, 104–5, 106, 107, 140; political agenda of, 105–6; promoting (the fallacy of) white supremacy, 135–38; public

297

addresses and sermons, 135; The Sins of the Father, 267n15, 271n60. See also Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, The (Dixon) documentary tableaus, 13 Donovan, Brian, 263n29 Doreski, C. K., 224, 284n21 Douglass, Frederick, 51, 56, 100 Dove, Rita, 263n37 Doyle, Laura, 283n4 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Obama), 238–39 Dred Scott decision (1857), 19–20 Du Bois, W. E. B., xviii, 108, 151, 153, 165, 193, 273nn3–4; “The Comet,” interracial intimacy of, 231–37; education of, 276n29; gender bias against Hopkins, 277n36, 278n66; on growing significance of interracial relations, 229, 230; ideas of second self and doubleconsciousness, 198, 285n28, 288n83; The Philadelphia Negro, 142; The Souls of Black Folk, 143, 209, 285n28 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 265n63 Dunham, Ann, 238, 239 Dunham, Stanley and Madelyn, 238 Dworkin, Ira, 276n35 Eastman, Charles, 151, 276n29 education: black colleges, development of, 151; industrial schools, 145, 151; schools for blacks and Indians, 144–45, 169–70 Elbert, Sarah, 30, 257n69, 258n77, 258n80, 258n86, 259n94, 260n110, 260n117, 261n125, 261n128 Ellinghouse, Katherine, 275n14, 281n107

298

INDEX

Ellzey, Don, 290n24 empire. See imperialism and colonialism, U.S. English, Daylanne K., 268n17 Ethiopia, 195–96, 197, 201, 283n15, 284n16 eugenics, x–xi, 7, 63–64, 92, 122, 132, 197; Chesnutt’s use of theories of, 108–9, 112, 113; increasing popularity of, 104, 106, 149; racial classification in, 91, 235 exoticism of a drop of blood, 4–27, 36, 91–93; in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 4–27; in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 91–93

Freud, Sigmund, 92 Fugitive Slave Act, 6, 156; cases involving, 30 Fuller, Margaret, 27 Fusion Party/Fusionist movement, xxi, 118 “Future American” series (Chesnutt), 108–9, 112, 113 futurity of miscegenation, 187–227; in Hopkins’s Of One Blood, 188, 189–205, 223–27; individual losses, collective cultural gains in, 222–27; in Johnson’s Autobiography, 187, 188–90, 191, 192, 205–22, 223, 225–27

family: as microcosm for nation, xix, 13–14, 24; “purity” and morality embodied by Anglo-Saxon, 72 Faulkner, William, 119 Fawkes, Richard, 7, 252n10, 253n20 federal equal protection laws, 101 Felton, Rebecca Latimer, 99–100, 114, 118, 134, 165, 266n1 feminism and feminists, 38, 75, 79, 86, 93, 152, 261n125 Finding, John E., 262n3 Flowers, Mamie, 166 Foner, Philip, 263n21 Fossett, Judith Jackson, 272n74, 272n76 Foucault, Michel, xvi, 248n10 Fredrickson, George M., 249n17, 262n20, 263n28 free blacks, 99, 103, 127, 130, 150, 157, 263n20; debates over the status of, 144; denial of civil rights for, 52, 57, 102, 107, 263n27; hostility of white laborers toward, 25, 69; tensions over growing population, 58–59, 60, 63, 65, 68. See also segregation

Gaines, Kevin, 267n9, 271n61, 272n82, 284n16 Galton, Francis, 7, 63, 106 Garvey, Marcus, 190 gender: gender dynamics in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 95; gender inversion in Alcott’s stories, 41–43, 45; mainstream notions of, 107, 118; white women reduced to property, 130–31. See also women General Allotment Act (Dawes Act, 1887), 150 Geronimo, 177 Ghost Dance movement, anxiety over, 173, 181 Gibson, Charles Dana, 173 Gibson, Thomas, 101 “Gibson Girls,” African American versions of, 173–74 Gillman, Susan, 67, 191, 247n1, 249n23, 262n2, 267nn12–14, 276n35, 284n16, 285n27 Gilmore, Glenda, 130, 272n71 Girl I Left Behind Me, The (Belasco), 280n88

INDEX

Girl of the Golden West, The (Belasco), 152, 280 Goellnicht, Donald C., 286n50 Gold, Matea, 289n21 Grandin, Greg, 270n46 Grandissimes, The (Cable), 71 Grant, Ulysses S., 59 Great Migration (1910–1930), 122, 142, 231 Griffith, D. W., 110, 124, 231 Griggs, Sutton, 267n12 Gross, Ariela, 157, 256n66, 275n25 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 248n11, 253n26 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 19, 255n50 Gunning, Sandra, 77, 264n49 Guterl, Matthew, 247n3, 273n5 half-breeds, census category of, 143 Hall, Roger, 276n31 Halladijan, Jacob Henry, 148 Halttunen, Karen, 257nn73–74 Hampton Institute, 145, 151, 169–70, 280n92; strict policing of blacks and Indians at, 176 Hampton Normal and Agricultural School, 169 Handley, George B., 267n16 Harlan, John H., 122 Harlem Renaissance, 187, 206, 208 Harper, Frances, 71, 93 Harpers Ferry raid, 5, 13, 29 Harper’s Magazine, 225 Harris, Joel Chandler, 81–82 Hartman, Sadiya, 249n24, 289n15 Hawaii: Obama’s birth in, 238, 240; U.S. imperial designs on, 25, 39, 56, 61, 63, 66, 145, 167, 207 Hayes, Rutherford B., 60 Henri, Florette, 273n1 Hines, Maude, 257n74

299

Hodes, Martha, 61, 100, 248n13, 251n1, 262n18, 269n36 Hoffman, Frederick L., 52, 146 Hoganson, Kristin L., 270n48 Hollyfield, Amy, 289n21 homoerotic miscegenous alliances, 20–26, 217–20 Hopkins, Northrup, 153 Hopkins, Pauline E., xi, xxiv, 141, 142, 144, 146, 155–65, 189–205, 276nn34–35, 283n14, 284n17; advocacy of fiction, 277n42; as African American cultural emissary, 187–88; background of, 153–55; black intellectual capacity displayed in writing of, 196, 284n19; challenges in male-dominated profession, 283n9; contributions overlooked by black activists, 277n36, 278n66; interconnectedness of her different voices and positions, 196–97; interest in Africa and its connection to Western civilization, 195–96, 197, 201, 284n16, 285n24; multilayered process of identity formation engaged by, 147; multiple functions of works by, 149, 224–25; nonfictional publications, 154–55, 196; racial uplift and, 164, 204; representations and enactments of variegated “blackness,” 190; transformation of family dynamics by, 225. See also Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self (Hopkins); Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (Hopkins) House Behind the Cedars, The (Chesnutt), 267n15, 285n31, 287n76 Howells, Mildred, 268n28

300

INDEX

Howells, William Dean, xi, xiv, xxiv, 51, 55, 62, 66–68, 85–97, 102, 225, 265n56; background of, 85–86; fascination with the “other,” 55; influential role in literary and dramatic arts, 85–86; review of Chesnutt’s novel, 112. See also Imperative Duty, An (Howells) humanism, notion of shared blood and, 204 humanitarian policies, contradictions in United States, 66 Hunter, Charles, 174 Hyers sisters, 154 identity formation, multilayered process of, 147 Ignatiev, Noel, 262n17 immigration and immigrants, 21, 57, 104; citizenship and reconfiguration of whiteness in United States, 15–17, 19–20; corrupting influence of “new” immigrants, 72–73; Cuban, 216; diversity of white immigrant population, 142, 143, 148; eastern European and Asian, heightened tensions around, 58–59, 60; Irish, 15–17, 21, 68–69, 75, 88, 255n48; Italian, 78; labor unrest and, 53; legislation restricting, 61, 273n5; massive influx between 1901 and 1910, 142, 146; orientalizing discourse used to distance all nonwhites, 289n11; racial classifications, 102–3, 137 Imperative Duty, An (Howells), xxiv, 52, 58, 86–97, 266n77; ambiguous and contradictory “liberal” politics of Olney in, 88; competing domestic and transnational narratives about progress and

primitivism in, 58; complexity of whiteness in, 88–90, 93–94; as critical enactment of miscegenation trope, 67–68; exoticizing of “one drop” of black blood in, 91–93; gender dynamics in, 95; minstrelization of black (and Irish) characters in, 88, 90–91; multiple readings suggested by, 95–96; performative utterance at work in, 86, 94–95; progressive “new” feminist white woman, Rhoda as, 93; story of, 86–87; third-person point of view in Dr. Olney, 87–88; tragic mulatta trope in, 68 imperialism and colonialism, U.S., xviii–xix, 25, 80–81, 150–51; Alcott’s work linked to imperial projects, 28; black–white binary and increased interracial contact with, 229, 230; civilizing mission, 34, 44, 64, 77, 90, 145, 257n74; colonized races displayed at world’s fair and expositions, 54, 56–57, 149, 275n22; Cuba and, 40–41; Dixon’s promotion of nation’s “divine” mission, 135–36; domestication and eroticization of colonial women, 71–72; domestic racism and, 196, 284n16; interactivity of southern segregation and, 120–23; international U.S. corporations in Latin America and Caribbean, 270n46; Johnson ( James Weldon) and, 207, 217, 226; late nineteenth-century expansionist policies, 52–53, 55; legitimization and romanticization of, 44; manifest destiny, xviii, 53, 55, 254n33; under McKinley, 63; opposition to, 40, 121, 208, 226,

INDEX

280n85; Philippines and, 52, 63, 71, 121, 135, 153, 160, 275n22, 278n55, 279n85; The Red Moon’s critique of, 179; Seminole uprising (1855–58), 19, 20, 159–60; sexual manifestation of, 61–62; slavery and practices of empire, 8; stagings of victory of Western civilization over wilderness, 168; U.S.–Mexican War, 19, 159, 255n50; “white man’s burden” and, 66, 136 incest, miscegenation and, 194, 198–99, 200, 203–4 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( Jacobs), 15, 77 Indianapolis Freeman, 66 Indian nationhood, 181 Indian removal policies, U.S., 21, 57, 146, 150, 159 Indians/indigenous tribes: antimiscegenation laws of, xxi, 24; changing status of, 145; citizenship of, 159; fascination with, in early twentieth century, 151–52; interracial alliance with black, in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 20–26; language of, 22–24; mythology around American, struggle to negotiate, 26; slaves kept by, 150; stereotypes of, 21, 22, 151–52, 168, 182–83. See also Afro-Indian intimacies Indian Wars, 19 Indian–white intermarriage, 103 industrialization, 60, 108, 141 industrial schools, U.S., 145, 151 inheritance of property: by children of black–white unions, 115; Indian– white intermarriage and property transfer, 103; whiteness and, 32, 36, 49, 89 Inscoe, John C., 271n55

301

international boundaries, struggles over, 19 International Exposition in Omaha (1898), 55 interracial cooperation, potential for, 256n58 interracial marriage. See miscegenation intimacy, use of term, 249n18 intraracial relationships, encouragement of, 176 Iola Leroy (Harper), 71 Irish immigrants, 88; antagonism toward blacks, 68–69, 75; citizenship and, 15–17, 21; militarization of, 69; racialized stereotype of “stage Irish,” 17, 255n50. See also Campbell, Bartley Italian immigrants, 78 Italy, relocation in Howells’s An Imperative Duty to, 94–95, 97 Jack, Sam T., 165 Jack and Jill: A Village Story (Alcott), 257n74 Jackson, Andrew, xviii, 256n61 Jackson, Cassandra, 250n27, 254n30 Jacobs, Harriet, 15, 260n108 Jacobson, Matthew Fryed, xviii, 247n2, 255n48, 273n5 James, William, 92, 198, 285n28 Jim Crow segregation, 62, 65, 73, 83, 103, 122, 127, 143, 231; migration into “Indian territory,” 144; overturning of, 241 Johnson, Andrew, 59 Johnson, Billy, 166 Johnson, Helen Dillett, 167 Johnson, Jack, 220 Johnson, James, 167

302

INDEX

Johnson, James Weldon, xi, 142, 144, 145, 146, 187, 231, 279n78, 286n44; as African American cultural emissary, 187–88; background of, 166–68, 205–7; Black Manhattan, 170, 206; multilayered process of identity formation engaged by, 147; multiple functions of works by, 149; representations and enactments of variegated “blackness,” 190; on sex factor, 229–30; on success of The Red Moon, 182; testing public’s response to overt violation of black–white binary, 225; transnational perspective of, 206–7; travels across Southwest, 176–79, 180; as U.S. representative in Central and South America, 206–7, 217, 218, 219, 226; visibility of, compared to Hopkins, 192. See also Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The ( Johnson); Red Moon, The (Cole–Johnson team) Johnson, J. Rosamond, xi, xxiv, 142, 144, 145, 146, 181–82, 207, 281n109, 282n119; background of, 166–68; collaboration on The Red Moon screenplay, 184; on Indian appreciation of his “Indian” songs, 176, 178; multilayered process of identity formation engaged by, 147; multiple functions of works by, 149. See also Red Moon, The (Cole– Johnson team) Johnson, Walter, 15, 254n28 Jones, Tim, 289n21 Jung, Moon-Ho, 247n2, 248n11 Kansas City Post, article on The Red Moon in, 176 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 156

Kaplan, Amy, 27–28, 247n2, 289n8, 289n14 Kassanoff, Jennie A., 288n78 Katz, William Loren, 274n9 Kawash, Samira, 129, 209, 250n27, 269n29, 269n33, 286n51, 287n74 Kennedy, Adrienne, 263n37 Kerry, John, 239 King, Mary, 1, 30, 258n79, 261n126 Kinney, James, 271n60 Kipling, Rudyard, 66 Klingaman, Gerald, 278n64 Knadler, Stephen, 139, 267n16, 269n29 Koshy, Susan, 60–61, 262n19 Kramer, Paul A., 278n55 Krasner, David, 275n12, 275n18 Ku Klux Klan, 59, 104, 109; The Birth of a Nation on, 110, 124, 138, 231; in Dixon’s The Clansman, 126, 131–38; garb, 272n76; resurgence at turn of twentieth century, 190–91 “La Belle Zoraide” (Chopin), 67 labor disputes, 53 LaFeber, Walter, 262n2 Lakota Ghost Dance, 181 Lane, Jill, 249n21 language: cultural work of, 42; Indian, 22–24; structures of race and hierarchy beneath, 238, 239 Larsen, Nella, 206 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 9, 256n61 Latimer, George, 30 Leach, William, 261n125 Lemire, Elise, 249n17 Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of White Man’s Burden, The (Dixon), 123, 131 Levander, Caroline, 260n105 Lewis, David Levering, 288n2

INDEX

“Life Is a Game of Checkers” (song), 175 “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ( Johnson and Johnson), 167–68, 205 Lincoln, Abraham, xxi, 59 Lindsey, Donal F., 275n15, 280n92 Little Women (Alcott), 27 López, Ian Haney, 65, 263n22 “Lost Cause,” 262n11 Lott, Eric, 247n6, 248n9, 250n27, 259n100 Loving v. Virginia, 12, 240 Lowe, Lisa, 249n18 Lucas, Sam, 154 Lui, Mary, 280n95, 289n20 Lwin, Sanda M., 122, 270n50 Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn, 272n78 lynchings, 63, 66, 189, 256n67, 263n20, 263n27, 278n62, 287n55; across Atlanta (1906), after showing of Dixon’s The Clansman, 124, 127; bestialization of black men to justify, 128–29, 132; Felton’s call for, 99, 100; in Hopkins’s Winona, 161, 162–63; in Johnson’s Autobiography, 212, 213, 215, 222; mass spectatorship of, 138; miscegenation and, 112–13, 129, 212, 213, 215, 222; Wells’s antilynching writings, 63, 66, 289n18 Madame Butterfly (Belasco and Puccini translations), 152 “Madame Delphine” (Cable), 67 manifest destiny, xviii, 53, 55, 254n33 Manly, Alexander, 99, 100–101, 110, 165, 266n1 Mann Act (White Slave Traffic Act of 1910), 219 marriage: English colonial law preventing cross-class, xx; feminist

303

advocacy of, 261n125; as institution representing microcosm of nation, xix; interracial, Chesnutt’s legitimizing portrait of, 114–15; interracial, criminalization of, xix–xxi, 101–2, 127; interracial, legality in early colonial times, 1–2; patriarchal authority associated with heterosexual, 201; similarities between slavery and, 34 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt), xxiv, 103, 105, 110–23, 267n10, 268n28, 273n84; artificiality of black–white binary in, 121–23; confronting challenge of interracial contact in, 110–23; fallacies inherent in articulations of white supremacy in, 118–20; idealized “future American” subject in, 120; interactivity of southern segregation and Western imperialism in, 120–23; miscegenation’s potential to reformulate racial differences in, 139, 140; reviews of, 112; role of alternative historical documentation, 107–8; spectacular staging of miscegenation in, 115–18; staging of black–white rape exposed in, 138; story of, 110–12; twinning in, use of, 113–14, 269n29, 269n33; violence linked to criminalization and misrepresentation of miscegenation in, 112–13 Martí, José, 217 masculinity, 15, 255n50; conventionally gendered roles, 107; hypermasculine black stereotype, 36, 41–42, 59, 113, 116, 119, 130, 132, 137, 236, 258n83, 270n42; performance of, 199, 201, 270n42; racial “otherness” as an integral component of, 36;

304

INDEX

masculinity (continued) white, 119, 131, 139, 201, 270n44; white, Klan’s objective to restore and assert power of, 134, 137–38, 272n76 McCann, Sean, 285n23 McCullough, Kate, 284n17 McDermott, Douglas, 248n8 McKay, Nellie, 276n35 McKinley, William, 63 Mead, Elinor, 85 melodramas, race, xiv, 247n1 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 147, 170 “melungeons,” tri-racial communities of, 26 Michaels, Walter Benn, 272n77 Micheaux, Oscar, 231 middle class: black, 100–101, 111, 120, 151, 173–74, 205, 279n85; white, 34, 173 migration, black, 141, 142, 146 Miles, Tiya, 276n28 Miller, Ken, 271n55 Miller, Sally, 73, 74. See also “Salome Muller, the White Slave” (Cable) minstrelsy. See blackface minstrelsy Mirabal, Nancy Raquel, 287n66 miscegenation, ix; in Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband,” 29–30, 47–49; coining of term, xix, xxi– xxii, 109; criminalization of, xix–xxi, 101–2, 127; cultural, xiv, 144; emancipation and, connection to, xxi–xxii; endless cultural ramifications of trope of, 189, 190; gendered and eroticized power dynamics in, 199–200; generative potential, 125, 127, 128, 140, 146–47, 165, 179, 183, 185, 190, 200, 212, 216, 221, 230, 237; incest and, 194, 198–99, 200, 203–4; Indian–white, 103; lynching and,

112–13, 129, 212, 213, 215, 222; multiple stagings of, as “cover story” for racialization processes, xii–xiii; national landscape transformed into spectrum of “hues,” 185; naturalizing effect of ubiquitous discourse on, 105; between nonwhite partners, xxi; octoroon as iconic sign of, 13–14; performative stagings of race as sites of, 117; performative trope of, as tool of black–white binary, xxv–xxvi; persistent pull in popular imagination, 57–68; preoccupation with, ix–x, xvi–xvii, xxiv, 2, 229; production and transmission of discourse, xxii–xxiv; racial mixing within black population, 143; reductive formulation of, xxii–xxiv; as relic of past in Campbell’s The White Slave, 83; same-sex, 20–26, 43, 44, 118, 136–37, 217–20; as staging ground for battle to define identity and future of United States, 106–7, 140; stagings of, orchestration of culture and, xxvii; as threat to family and nation, 3; transgression of established societal rules invoked by mixedrace body, 10; twenty-first-century stagings of, 229–42; typical punishments for, 84; unmarried couples, xx. See also Afro-Indian intimacies; futurity of miscegenation Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the White Man and the Negro (Croly and Wakeman), xxi Missouri Compromise, 156 Mitchell, Abbie, 173

INDEX

Mitchell, Michele, 255n44 “M.L.” (Alcott), 2, 27–48, 96, 258n76, 258n86, 260n110; gender inversion in, 41–43; hero status of “black” man in, 37; idealized conclusion of, 46–47; mobility and agency of women in, 41, 42–44, 47; publication of, 29; racial liminality in, 37–38, 47–48; sources for, 30; story of, 35–40; surrogation used in, 39–40, 43, 47 Moctoroon, 13 monoculturalism, doctrine of, 254n33 Morrison, Toni, 249n22, 261n129; on Africanist Presence, 265n67, 266n69, 289n12 Morrissette, Noelle, 286n43 mulatta: inability to reproduce, common belief in, 24; radical revision of, in The Red Moon, 174–75, 183; tragic mulatta/ octoroon conventions, 5–6, 17–18, 34, 68, 71–72, 73, 81, 89, 174, 183 “mulattaroons,” 13, 251nn4–5, 254n30 mulatto: contradictions in Dixon’s construction of threatening, 129–30; literary device of, 254n30; male mulatto figures in Alcott’s fiction, 33, 34–48; tragic mulatto narrative, 44–46 multiracial society: of Hopkins’s Winona, 157; promotion of, 204 Mumford, Kevin, 250n27, 288n84 Music School Settlement for Colored People of New York, 168 “My Contraband” (Alcott), 2, 27–48, 84, 89, 96, 259n102; elevation of “black” man in, 36–37; gender inversion in, 41–42, 43, 45; mobility and agency of women in, 41, 47; publication of, 29; racial liminality

305

in, 37–38, 47–48; shift from idealized romanticism to realism and social reform in, 39, 47; story of, 34–40; tragic mulatto narrative in conclusion of, 44–46 My Partner (Campbell), 69, 280n88 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 108, 138, 167–68, 205, 231 Najour, Costa, 148 nation, family as microcosm for, xix, 13–14, 24 National Council of Negro Women, 173 nationalism: black, 25, 31, 181, 267n12, 286n32; revised American, xviii–xix National Origins Act (1924), 61, 273n5 nationhood, U.S.: concept of race and Americans’ vision of, xi; development of, xvii–xviii; dichromatic composition of, xix–xx; historical formulations of miscegenation as critical enactments of, xxiii; Indian, 181; mixed-race body as threat to white-supremacist doctrines used to cohere, 14, 18–19, 49, 53. See also imperialism and colonialism, U.S. Native Americans. See Indians/ indigenous tribes “Negro problem,” debate over, 107, 136, 142 New Jersey Dramatic News, review of The Red Moon in, 172–73 “New Negroes,” 142, 273n3. See also Harlem Renaissance New Orleans, 248n11, 255n42; cosmopolitanism of, 8–9, 253n26; slave-trade economy and, 9, 15, 16 “New South,” 81–84, 121, 122, 129

306

INDEX

New York Age, 206; “The Red Moon Rays” column in, 174 New York City, 1900 antiblack attacks in, xiv, 153 New York Daily Mirror, review of The Red Moon in, 169 New York Dramatic Mirror, review of The Clansman in, 271n55 New York Herald, review of Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 11–12 New York Herald Tribune, review of Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 22 New York Illustrated Times, reviews of Campbell’s The White Slave, 70 New York Times, review of Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 6–7 Niagara Conference (1905), 278n66 Nian, Kanaka, 64 Nigger, The (Sheldon), 148, 170 Nwanko, Ifeoma Kiddoe, 249n21 Nyong’o, Tavia, 250n27 Obama, Barack, ix, 238–40, 241, 289n22; electability of, progress suggested by, 240; negotiation of black–white binary, 239–40; racial identity of, 238–39 Obama, Barack, Sr., 239 octoroon: in Campbell’s The White Slave, 73–78, 81; use of term, 8 Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life, The (Picquet), 15 Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, The (Boucicault), 1, 2, 4–27, 45, 47, 48, 214, 253n17, 253nn20–22, 254n33; alternate matrices of relations in, xvi–xvii; black and Indian interracial alliance in, 20–26; citizenship and whiteness in United States and abroad and, 6, 15–17, 19–20, 22; contradictory

responses to, 10–12, 26–27; contrast between Alcott’s stories and, 31–32; disposal of mixed-race, destabilizing bodies in, 17–19, 22, 25, 26; ending of, 11, 12, 17–18, 84; “Irishness” in, 15–17, 21, 255n50; mixed-race character as literary device, 9–10; pro- and antislavery productions fostered by, 13; productions of, 7–8; racialized and gendered performances in, 20–21; racial liminality in, 9, 14, 17, 21, 38; reviews of, 6–7, 11–12, 22; revisions of, 8, 12, 18–19; setting and characters, 8–10; tropes and themes about interracial unions, 5–6; Zoe’s embodiment of interracial sex in, 13–18 Octoroons, The (staged performance), 71 Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self (Hopkins), 188, 189–205, 211, 214, 220, 223–27, 285n23; Brooks on, 282nn1–2, 283n5; counter-reiteration of conventional narratives in, 197–98; disruption of binaries in, 191–92; fusion of traditions in, 195–97; incestuous relations in, 194, 198–99, 200, 203–4; individual losses, collective cultural gains, 223–27; instability of racial categorization highlighted in, 202–3; integration of contemporaneous texts in, 197; interpretations of, 194–95; performance of race in, 201–2; potential future of miscegenation represented in, 200–201; recent scholarship on, 191; reframing of racialized passing, 193–94, 196, 198, 199–200, 202; story of, 193–94; strategy for

INDEX

recuperating lost history in, 224; twinning in, use of, 200 Omi, Michael, 247n4 “one-drop” rule of “negro” identity, challenges to, 157, 199. See also exoticism of a drop of blood On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 7 “On the Road to Monterey” (song), 179 Oriental America (musical), 71, 167 original sin, notion of, 255n43 Ossawattomie Brown (Swayze), 13 Otten, Thomas J., 283n14 Pace, Tony, 101 Page, Thomas Nelson, 56, 117 Page Act (1875), 60, 72 Pan-Africanism, 188, 201, 282n1 Pankey, Theodore, 179 Parkin, Andrew, 252n11 parochialisms, xix partus sequitur ventrum (legal doctrine), 156 Pascoe, Peggy, ix, 102, 249n14, 250n27, 256n65 passing. See racial passing patronizing stance, interracial and intercultural contact eliciting, 39 “Pauline Passion and Punishment” (Alcott), 257n74 Pearson, Harry, 7 Pelle, Kimberly D., 262n3 Penn, Irvine Garland, 51 Peretti, Burton W., 279n71 performative utterance, 76, 264n46; in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 86, 94–95 Pfeiffer, Michael J., 278n62 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), 142

307

Philadelphia North American, review of The Red Moon in, 180 Philadelphia Times, review of The Red Moon in, 172, 180, 281n98 Philippines, United States and, 52, 63, 71, 121, 135, 153, 160, 275n22, 278n55, 279n85 Picquet, Louisa, 15 Pittsburgh Leader, 69 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 99, 122, 123, 241, 254n33 Portable Theater (Ackerman), 258n75 post-Reconstruction era: conservative racial ideologies characterizing, 52, 60; historical reality of, 127. See also Imperative Duty, An (Howells); White Slave, The (Campbell) power dynamics of racial difference, 67, 219, 234, 235 Prather, H. Leon, 266n1–2, 268n27 Pratt, Mary Louise, 277n48 prejudice, 30, 38, 54, 57, 65, 87, 88, 95, 117–18, 206 primitivism, racist pseudoscientific theory of, 58, 64, 87, 90, 92 Progressive Era, 104; early feminist ideologies, 79; progressives cloaked in white supremacy, 72; social concerns and reforms of, 63, 108 property inheritance. See inheritance of property Puccini, Giacomo, 152 Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 53 Quadroon: or, a Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana (Reid), 5 race: biologically based defi nitions of, critique in The White Slave of, 75–76, 78–79; citizenship and, 64–65; complexity of, fi nding

308

INDEX

race (continued) language to represent, 238, 239; concept of, in Americans’ vision of nationhood, xi; degeneracy and supremacy as inherited traits genetically predetermined by, 89; performance of, 148–49, 226; performance of, in Campbell’s The White Slave, 73–78, 80, 81; performance of, in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, 116–18; performance of, in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 88–90, 93; performance of, in Johnson’s Autobiography, 209–11, 212, 215, 216–17, 220; performative utterance and ambiguity of, 76, 86, 94–95, 264n46; permeability of racial boundaries, 117; precedence of nationality over, 221; processes of creation and performance, xii; racial “interzones,” 226; scientific/ pseudoscientific discourse on, 5–6, 14, 62, 63–64, 89, 90, 103, 106, 108, 113, 132, 147, 211, 222, 265n58; social construction of, 221, 259n95; spectrum of racial difference at turn of century, growth of, 148–49. See also black–white binary race melodrama, 67, 247n1 Race or Mongrel (Schultz), 146 Race Traits and the Tendencies of the Negro, The (Hoffman), 52, 146 racial atavism, 90, 149, 222, 265n58 racial categories/classification: artificiality of, 121–23, 148–49, 163–64, 212, 227; exposure of arbitrariness of, 38; instability of, 148–49, 202–3; melding diverse populations in rigid, 102–3; “types”

of African American in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 91; by U.S. Census, 61, 143 “racial islands,” 157 racialization: of diverse population to fit black–white binary, xxv, xxvi; of idealized Anglo womanhood, 72 racial liminality, 90; in Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband,” 37–38, 47–48; in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 9, 14, 17, 21, 38; in Campbell’s The White Slave, 74–75, 79; in Dixon’s The Clansman, 129–30; impact on reductive definitions of racial and gendered identities, 214 racial mediators, mixed-race figures as, 68 racial passing, 149, 188, 193; Hopkins’s reframing of, 193–94, 196, 198, 199–200, 202; in Johnson’s Autobiography, 207–8, 209, 213, 221; paradox of, 264n45. See also Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, The (Boucicault) racial uplift movement, 5, 52–54, 87, 93, 94, 100, 141, 151, 256n62; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and, 103; Hopkins and, 164, 204; Johnson’s commitment to, 205; “New Negroes” and, 142, 273n3; through performance and professionalization of black arts and letters, 166; The Red Moon and, 174, 175, 182 racism, xxvi; Chesnutt’s inclusion of northerners in white, 117; Dixon’s The Clansman as epitome of extreme, 124–25; global structures of, paralleled in U.S. industrial schools, 145; interracial alliances challenging, 20, 25; narratives of

INDEX

progress and, 64; of post-Reconstruction period, 52; racial hierarchy, 88–89; refusal of marriage license to interracial couple (2009), 241, 242 rape: bestialization of black men reinforcing accusations of, 128–29, 131–32; Chesnutt’s exposure of staging of black–white, 138; suspicion of, in Du Bois’s “The Comet,” 233 realism, American literary, 86 Reconstruction, 59–60, 100; antimiscegenation laws reinstated after, xix, xx; collapse of (1877), 60, 150; depiction in Dixon’s The Clansman, 125–26; failures of, 52; resistance to dismantling of rights gained during, 100–101 Redeemer governments, whitesupremacist, 60 Red Moon, The (Cole–Johnson team), xxiv, 145, 146, 168–85, 274n12; alternative types of nationhood and manhood suggested in, 181–82; diversity of cast and legibility of multiracial performance, 175–76; entirely black cast of, 169, 170, 172, 173–76, 180–81; female performers, 173–75, 281n101; fusing of traditions in, 180–81; hierarchization of “black” and indigenous cultures in, 182–83; insistence on visibility of native– black culture, 183; landscapes depicted in, 172; lyrics of songs in, 175, 176–79; research on Indians for, 176–79, 180; reviews of, 169, 170–73, 180; screenplay (1938) with all-white cast, 183–84; story of, 168, 169–70 Re-Forging America (Stoddard), x–xi

309

Reid, Mayne, 5, 253n15 resistance: collective black, 142, 154, 191, 196, 231; of mixed-race women to sexual exploitation, 76–77; potential sites of, in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 19; to white supremacy, 65–66 Richardson, Gary A., 248n8, 253n25 Riis, Thomas L., 275n12, 279n69, 280n95 riots: Astor Place (1849), xiv; Atlanta (1906), 124, 127, 271n61, 271n64 Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, The (Stoddard), 235 Roach, Joseph, 10, 252nn6–9, 254n29, 254n33, 255n42, 256n67 Robertson, Agnes, 4, 7, 13 Roediger, David R., 264n39 Romance of the New Republic, A (Childs), 9 Romero, Lora, 257n74, 261n118 Roosevelt, Teddy, 165, 205 Royle, Edward Milton, 152, 280n88 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 263n25 Rydell, Robert, 55, 262nn3–4, 275n22 Said, Edward, 289n11 Saks, Eva, 286n38 “Salome Muller, the White Slave” (Cable), 73. See also Miller, Sally same-sex interracial unions: Alcott’s staging of miscegenation as surrogate for, 43, 44; in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 20–26; in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, 118; in Dixon’s The Clansman, 136–37; in Johnson’s Autobiography, 217–20 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 259n96, 264n44

310

INDEX

San Francisco Midwinter Exposition of 1893–94, 55 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 159 Scharnhorst, Gary, 265n57 Schrager, Cynthia, 284n16, 285n28 Schultz, Alfred P., 146 Scott Act (1888), 57 “Secret Nine, The,” 110 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 255n57, 260n116 segregation: Colored People’s Day at Chicago World’s Fair, 62–63; focus on corrupt blood to support, 204; in industrial schools, 145; interactivity of Western imperialism and southern, 120–23; Jim Crow, 62, 65, 103, 127, 143, 231, 241; Plessy v. Ferguson and institutionalization of, 99, 122, 123, 241, 254n33; policies in early twentieth century, anxieties fueling, 146; restrictions of, 141–42, 149; social engineering and aggressive, 64; state legislation, 273n2; Stoddard on, x–xi self-improvement, black. See racial uplift movement Seminole War in Florida (1855–58), 19, 20, 159–60 Seniors, Paula Marie, 166, 173, 179, 256n62, 274n12, 275n14, 275n16, 276n30, 276n33, 278n67, 279n69, 281n101, 281n107 sensational writing, 250n26, 257n70 separatism, black, 190 Seroff, Doug, 280n93 sex factor, 229–42; in Du Bois’s “The Comet,” 231–37; Johnson on, 229–30 sexuality, Foucault on, 248n10 Sexual Naturalization (Koshy), 60 Sheldon, Edward, 148, 170

Shockely, Ann Allen, 284n18 Shoo Fly Regiment, The (Cole–Johnson team), 179, 279n85 Showalter, Elaine, 258n80, 261n121 Siegel, Elyse, 290n24 Simpson, O. J. and Nicole, 258n83 Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South, The (Dixon), 267n15, 271n60 slavery: abolition movement and, 2; of black women, 15, 75–76; colonial law preventing cross-class marriage, xx; conflict and motivation in interracial desire, 15, 32; convention of labeling human property with owner’s own surname, 115; debate in fictionalized dramatizations, 2–3, 6; “fancy girl” auction, 15, 254n31; legal, interracial marriages and, 1–2, 251n1; legal abolition of (1865), 58–59; legal abolition of (1865), white anxiety following, xviii, 59–60, 65; miscegenation leading to incest and, 199; New Orleans and slave-trade economy, 9, 15, 16; patronizing justifications for, 83; practices of empire and, 8; similarities between marriage and, 34; slaves kept by Indians, 150; transnational significance of, 7–8, 13–14; white, xvii, 60, 72–73. See also “M.L.” (Alcott); “My Contraband” (Alcott); Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, The (Boucicault) Slave’s Escape, or a Leap to Freedom, The (Brown), 5 Slaves’ Escape: or, the Underground Railroad, The [Peculiar Sam] (Hopkins), 154 Slide, Anthony, 271n55

INDEX

Smith, Valerie, 209, 264n45, 283n3, 286n50 Smith-Rosenburg, Carol, 260n116 social Darwinism, 118, 179 social engineering, 7, 64. See also eugenics socialism, Howells and, 85 Soetoro, Lolo, 239 Soetoro-Ng, Maya, 239 Soga, Kirkland, 285n24 Sollors, Werner, 250n27 Somerville, Siobhan B., 191, 283n4 Sotiropoulos, Karen, 248n7 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 143, 209, 285n28 Sousa, John Philip, 205 Spanish–American War, 55, 207, 280n85 Spencer, Herbert, 106 Spillers, Hortense, 258n84 Squaw Man, The (Royle), 152, 280n88 Stecopoulos, Hariilaos, 279n77 Stepto, Robert, 209, 283n3, 286n50 stereotypes, xv, 269n39; in The Birth of a Nation, Micheaux’s challenge to, 231; of blackness, 116–17, 118; cultural information in, 2, 251n2; defiance of, by female performers in The Red Moon, 174–75; degeneracy associated with Asians and other nonwhites, 60–61; Dixon’s The Clansman as epitome of extreme racist doctrines, 124–25; evidence of inaccuracy of racist, 100; in Hopkins’s Winona, 162; hypermasculinized black virility/ sexual predator, 36, 41–42, 59, 113, 116, 119, 130, 132, 137, 236, 258n83, 270n42; of Native Americans, 21, 22, 151–52, 168, 182–83; racial, rigidifying race with, 153; of “stage

311

Irish,” 17; of Wild West, 168; zip coon, 116, 202 Stevens, Thaddeus, 125 St. Louis Exposition (1904), 128, 149, 275n22 Stoddard, Lothrop, x–xi, 235, 247n3, 289n13 Stokes, Mason, 250n25 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 12, 37, 107, 251n3 Streeby, Shelley, 27–28, 257n70, 257n74 Stricklin, David, 272n80 Stuckey, Melissa, 274n8 Sundquist, Eric J., 267n10, 268n19, 269n33, 269n39, 270n44, 273n84, 285n29 Supreme Court, U.S.: desegregation decision, 241; Loving decision, 12, 240; Plessy v. Ferguson, 99, 122, 123, 241, 254n33; social-legal performance of race and, 148–49 surrogacy, late nineteenth-century, 51–97; in Campbell’s The White Slave, 52, 57–58, 70–85, 96–97; in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 52, 58, 86–97; miscegenation’s persistent pull in popular imagination, 57–68 surrogates, interracial unions as, 1–49; in Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband,” 27–48; in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 4–27; national concerns exhibited through process of, 3–4 surrogation, process of, 30, 252nn6–9, 254n29, 254n31 Swayze, J. C., 13 Szuberla, Guy, 275n20 “tableau vivant” (living picture), 254n37 Talbott, Arthur, 179

312

INDEX

Taney, Roger, 19 Tate, Claudia, 284n19, 285n23 Taylor, Quintard, 281n100 Terrell, Joseph, 124 Texas, mythology of independence of, 159 theatre: alternatives developing in, xv–xvi; blackface minstrelsy, xiii, xiv, xv, 37, 80–81, 88, 90–91, 116, 117, 181–82, 265n63; diversity of audiences, xv; historical shifts filtered onto stage, xv; Howells’s influence in formulating “American” national, 85–86; riots and violence instigated by, xiv, 124, 127, 271n61, 271n64; stereotypes displayed in, xv; subjects represented in, xiv–xv Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 252n7 Thompson, Carlyle Van, 250n27 Thoreau, Henry David, 27 Tilden, Samuel J., 60 Tolosa (Johnson brothers), 167, 179, 207 Tompkins, Jane, 250n26, 251n2 tragic mulatta/mulatto convention, 34, 89, 174, 183; in Alcott’s “My Contraband,” 44–46; in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 5–6, 17–18; in Campbell’s The White Slave, 68, 71–72, 73, 81 transnationality in black and white, 205–22 Trip to Coontown, A (Cole), 166 Trowbridge, J. T., 276n34 true womanhood, cult of, 31 Turner, Nat, 27 Twain, Mark, 53, 154, 262n2; construction of Americanized “self,” 56 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 12, 37, 107, 248n9, 251n3, 253n13, 253n17

Underground Railroad, 146, 154, 156, 157 Up from Slavery (Washington), 209 urbanization, 53, 59, 104, 108, 141 U.S. Census, racial classification on (1890, 1910, 1920), 61, 143 U.S.–Mexican War, 19, 159, 255n50 utopian futures for nation and world, promotion of, 140 Vechten, Carl Van, 176 “Venus and the Apollo, Modeled on Ethiopians” (Hopkins), 197 violence: linked to criminalization and misrepresentation of miscegenation, 112–13; against people of color, legal and cultural sanctions of, 19. See also lynchings; riots virtues of “true” women, 31 Wakeman, George, xix, xxi–xxii, 109 Walker, Ada Overton, 181 Walker, George, xiv, 282n120 Walsh, Townsend, 252n10, 253n19 Warren, A Tragedy (Whitney), 30 Warrior, Robert, 276n27 Washington, Booker T., 108, 143, 151, 153, 206, 209 Wegner, Frederick, 279n85 Weldon, Isabella Thomas, 165 Wells, Ida B., xviii, 51, 55, 63, 66, 93, 100, 165, 289n18 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 262n20, 263n28 Welter, Barbara, 31, 258n81 West, Emily D., 159 Wexler, Laura, 77, 262n11, 264n49 white anxiety. See anxiety, white “white man’s burden,” 66, 136 whiteness: as ambiguous category, 78–79; anxiety about status of, 84–85; in Campbell’s The White

INDEX

Slave, 57–58, 88; citizenship and, xix, 64–65, 73, 89, 91, 96, 143, 147–49; citizenship and, in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 6, 15–17, 19–20, 22; class and elite culture and, 217; complexity of, in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 88–90, 93–94; complicated representation of, in Boucicault’s The Octoroon, 9–10, 14, 15–17; intraracial hierarchy and, 88–89; invisible blackness as threat to “purity” of, 90, 91–92; ongoing consolidation of, 52, 55, 62, 73, 85; performance of, 88–90, 117, 201, 217; signs and markers of, 74, 78, 80, 81; social construction of, 81, 202–3. See also black–white binary; race Whites, Lee-Ann, 266n1 White Slave, The (Campbell), 52, 57–58, 69–85, 96–97; authentication of “whiteness” at end of, 76, 77, 78, 81–83, 94; “blackface chorus” of slaves in, 80–81; as critical enactment of miscegenation trope, 67–68; critique of biologically based racial definitions in, 75–76; Lisa’s resistance and agency in, 76–77; Lisa’s surrogate role as octoroon in, 73–83; minstrelization of black characters in, 90; performance of race in, 73–78, 80, 81; as platform to address moral urgency associated with redemption of whiteness, 57–58; productions of, 70; racial liminality in, 74–75, 79; return to status quo of the past in, 82–84; reviews of, 70, 80, 83–84; similarity to Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 88, 89, 90, 93,

313

94, 95; story of, 70–71; tragic mulatta trope in, 68, 71, 73, 75, 76, 81 white slavery, xvii; genre of fiction and drama, 72–73; Page Act to prevent, 60, 72 White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 (Mann Act), 219 white supremacy: black–white binary deployed by, xi, 148; challenges to, 47, 53, 56, 100, 215; citizenship decisions and, 64–65; Dixon’s The Clansman and, 103, 105, 119, 123–40, 170; eugenics and, 64; fallacies inherent in articulations of, 118–20, 130; global solidification of, 149–50; hypocrisy of, in Hopkins’s Of One Blood, 202; legitimacy of U.S. pedigree and, xxiii; miscegenation among nonwhites as alliance contesting, 179; mixed-race body as threat to, 14, 18–19, 49, 53, 222; “New South” movement and, 83; patriarchal ideology, 47; postReconstruction efforts to redeem, 62; promotion of, underlying Chicago World’s Fair, 52, 55, 56–57; “purity” and morality embodied by Anglo-Saxon family, 72; reassertion of white masculinity, 137–38; Redeemer governments resuscitating, 60; resistance to, 65–66; simultaneous enablement and prohibition of interracial encounters reinforcing, 61–62; as (trans)national cause, 136, 137; Wilmington riots (1898) and, 106, 110, 267n10 white womanhood: challenge to, in Howells’s An Imperative Duty, 93–94; focus on preserving, 59, 61, 63, 72–73; gender politics reducing

314

INDEX

white womanhood (continued) white women to property, 130–31; idealized role of nineteenth-century, 92–93; polarized definitions of womanhood, 75, 79; protection of “purity” of, 59, 61, 119–20; women as uplifters of white race, white supremacists’ belief in, 134 white women: civilizing mission of empire and, 77; complicity and silence of, around issues of racial discrimination, 132–34; mobility and agency, in Alcott’s stories, 41, 42–44, 47–48; responsibility for reproducing racial “purity” and familial sanctity, 114; women’s movement in Campbell’s The White Slave, 79. See also women Whitney, David S., 30 “Why I Wrote the Clansman” (Dixon), 123 Wiggins, Kenneth Porter, 277n52 Wiley, Stella, 165 Wilkes, Mattie, 166 Willard, Frances, 72 Williams, Bert, xiv, 282n120 Williams, Jennie, 101 Williams, Linda, 247n1, 249n23, 267n13, 271n59 Williamson, Joel, 273n3, 274n6 Willis, William S., Jr., 275n23 Wilmeth, Don B., 276n32 Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898 racial violence in, 106, 110, 267n10. See also Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, The (Dixon); Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) Wilmington Record, 100 Wilson, Harriet, 259n90 Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, 279n72

Wilson, Woodrow, 109 Wilt, Napier, 69, 263n30 Winant, Howard, 247n4 Winchester, Richard C., 263n21 Winkler, Megan, 277n50 Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (Hopkins), xxiv, 145, 155–65, 211; discordant contrast with contemporaneous violence and conflicts, 158–60; dramatic version of, 155, 160, 161; embodiment and social construction of characters in, 160, 163–64; legitimate interracial marriages in, 161–62; performative dimensions of characters, 160–61, 164; productive possibilities of crossing color line in, 164–65; racial categories and dynamics of nationhood reconfigured by miscegenation in, 155–56, 157; story and setting of, 156 Within Our Gates (film), 231 Woll, Allen, 274n12, 279n80 womanhood, polarized definitions of, 75, 79. See also white womanhood women: agency of, 32, 41, 42–44, 47–48, 77, 108, 199, 219; nonwhite, post–Civil War stereotypes of, 60–61. See also Alcott, Louisa May; black women; white women Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 34, 72, 259n88 Wood, Fernando, 5 Woodhouse, Elizabeth, 69 Woodson, Carter, 248n13 world color line, 234 world’s fairs and expositions, 64, 104, 153; Chicago World’s Fair (World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893), 51–57, 58, 62–63; “exotic” and “primitive”

INDEX

exhibits at, 54–57, 58, 81, 90; St. Louis Exposition, 128, 275n22 Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), 173

Young, Elizabeth, 257n71, 258n80, 260n109 Yun, Lisa, 247n2

Yarborough, Richard, 268n19, 288n82 “Yellow Rose of Texas, The” (song), 159

Zabel, William D., 249n13 Zangwill, Israel, 147, 148, 170 “zip coon” stereotype, 116, 202

315

DIANA REBEKKAH PAULIN is associate professor of American

studies and English at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.