Anti-Race Race Men

ANTI-RACE RACE MEN 729 would literature, driven by a similar cuiturallogic, have to follow in that pursuit.' This second formulation indicates that the novel and literature must have an'outside / even if that boundary always shifts. If so, how and where that boundary is placed must be essential to constituting and comprehending the genre, but Brown allows this idea only at the very end of his work. This placement-allows institutions to sidestep the question of why these values, why these defirutions, and with it, questions of why its own values and definitions - that is, why George Ellis instead of Charlotte Lennox on the subject of romance, why Samuel Richardson'5 Pamela rather than Aphra Sehn's Love-Letters betweeJ1 aNobleman and His Sister, which was based both on letters and gossip and predates Pamela by fifty years. In light of Brown's sensitivity to shifts in generic fashion and his concern with the use of literature as a culturally defining and defined force rather than an essential entity unto itself, some of the flaws in this study are almost more ironic than disappointing. Methodologically, Institutions of the English Novel is very interestin~ connecting the incisive attention of close reading with the broad view of cultural studies, especially in the way it ties to the growing number of studies examining the way reading creates genre and vice versa. As such, it seems one possible union of the oft-separated formal and contextual methods used on eighteenthcentury fiction. But what ultimately disappoints about Institutions of the English Novel is not what it does accomplish, but that it accomplishes incompletely what it sets out to do. It might be a lesson about the problems of separating male- and female-authored texts, but it is also a reassuring indicator of the pOSSibilities, even in this much-discussed field, of the narratives of the English novel still to be told. Anti-Race Race Men MICHAEL NOWLIN Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making ofthe Modern Intellectual Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1998. 353. us $54.00 OUf modern sense of the tenn 'intellectual' originated, Ross Posnock reminds us, as a term of abuse hurled by zealous French nationalists intent onprotecting France from traitorous, impure outsiders. The context was the Dreyfus case at the end of the nineteenth century, which made transparent the relationship between antiSemitism and French nationalism that had its counterparts in other European nationalisms and would manifest itself most horrifically in the Holocaust nearly a half-century later. In the eyes of Dreyfus'S enemies, Dreyfus's supporters (most famously, Emile 201a) represented something equally traitorous in their disdain for a national interest grounded in racial solidarity. Not only were intellectuaJs like 201a guilty of confusing the realms of art 'and politics; but by appealing to universalist values they were undermining the authority of race and nationality as identitarian categories. Hence 'intellectual' was born as a term cOIU1oting someone 730 MICHAEL NOWLIN who was suspiciously d&acine- uprootedI or un-raced. Taken more positivelYI the term signified a critically minded citizen of the world - free floatin~ cosmopolitanI and decidedly 'modem' in his or her repudiation of traditions built on tribal imperatives. Ross PosnockIs Color and Culture argues that the ideal of the cosmopolitan 'unraced ' intellectual was ironicallybroughtto American shoresbythe man commonly thought of as the model Irace man': W.E.B. DuBois. Though Posnock credits DuBois's former teacher William James with making cultural currency of the term 'intellectual,' it was DuBois who best dramatized the difficulty of becoming deracinated and entering a 'kingdom of culture' above nations and races while committing himself to the betterment of his race. DuBois's famous appeal to a 'talented tenth' both affinns the obligation of educated blacks to their people, and forwards the possibility of universal African-American access to the aesthetic culture and individual freedom that democracy must afford if it is to be worthy of the name. As he wrote in The Souls ofBlack Folk: 'Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul...