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  • Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin
  • Joseph Fruscione (bio)
Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 336 pages. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

Between the Civil War (1861-65) and World War I (1914-18), writes Diana Rebekkah Paulin in Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction, “Americans … literally could not stop writing about—and talking about, and enacting—the union between black and white” in fiction and theater. Paulin asserts that such literary and dramatic works telescope how “racialized citizenship and national identity formation … coalesced” in this period (x). Positioning Imperfect Unions within evolving critical conversations about writing, race, and nation, Paulin outlines her book’s central focus and questions in the introduction:

Rather than remaining hidden, this great American fear [of black-white unions] 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? (xii)

Paulin explores and complicates these questions by analyzing works by Dion Boucicault (The Octoroon, 1859), Louisa May Alcott (“M. L.” and “My Contraband,” 1863), Bartley Campbell (The White Slave, 1882), William Dean Howells (An Imperative Duty, 1892), Charles W. Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition, 1901), Pauline Hopkins (Winona, 1902-03), Thomas Dixon, Jr. (The Clansman, 1905), Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson (The Red Moon, 1908), and James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912). Paulin’s clear and thorough introduction sets the stage, as it were, for the interdisciplinary work of Imperfect Unions.

Paulin illustrates how “the cultural production of miscegenation and anti-miscegenation discourse” gave various types of interracial relations entrée into a highly visible political, cultural, social, and public arena (xxiii), such as the racially contested mise-en-scène of Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. Paulin juxtaposes Chesnutt’s “controversial black resistance and uplift novel” with Dixon’s The Clansman, an “explosive white-supremacist drama” (103), arguing that “Chesnutt emphasizes the constructed orchestration of white-supremacist propaganda,” which complements Dixon’s “strategic staging of violent antiblack sentiment [End Page 180] based on the crime of miscegenation” (138). Paulin sets up her dialectical analysis by first discussing the very public interracial clash between black journalist Alexander Manly and white so-called reformer Rebecca Latimer Felton over issues of lynching, interracial romance, and racial stereotyping. Paulin’s reading of The Marrow of Tradition and The Clansman seeks complementarity, not “oppositionality,” to examine how Chesnutt and Dixon foreground their stagings of miscegenation against the historical backdrop of the 1898 interracial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, in order to “develop their ‘utopian’ visions of civilization and humanity” (104). Overall, as Paulin claims, the intensification of anti-miscegenation discourse in the post-Reconstruction era bespoke the “deepening anxiety of a white population desperate to protect its social status and the institution of marriage” that Chesnutt and Dixon address in distinct yet connected ways (102).

The pairing of Chesnutt and Dixon represents the kind of dialectical work Paulin does very well in Imperfect Unions; in other chapters, she similarly juxtaposes Hopkins’s Winona with Cole and Johnson’s The Red Moon and Howells’s An Imperative Duty with Campbell’s The White Slave. Alcott and Johnson receive equally engaging treatment; Paulin examines, for instance, the interracial “possibilities … deemed premature and potentially volatile in the North as well as in the South” that Alcott wove into “M. L.” (29), as well as how, in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, “Johnson contests the hierarchical and reductive binaries that structure race, class, and transnational relations” (207).

Paulin’s visual analysis of several period illustrations augments her literary and historical analysis, such as cover art for The White Slave and an advertisement for The Octoroon that sharply others Wahnotee. The emphasis on skin color and racial difference in such visual texts echoes that of the literary and dramatic works Paulin examines, as...

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