Introduction: Matters of Race in the Age of Realism

This special issue marks key developments that make apparent the social and cultural processes of racial formation and representation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Here visual culture opens and closes the issue to different ends. Adam Sonstegard's discussion of Clyde DeLand's illustrations of Charles Chesnutt's The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line recounts the negotiations between author and illustrator, between story and image, and between the collaborative production of their literary-graphic illustrations and the prevailing racialist codes that Chesnutt's readership expected. Marissa K. López's closing essay examines the relationship between oral narratives (testimonios), their translated transcriptions, and photographic representations of the interviewees that, combined, construct California's history through a process of inclusion and occlusion that focuses or puts out of frame stories about race. Where Chesnutt reluctantly negotiates the color line through image and text, however, the Californio women in López's account challenge us to see them through their images and words more clearly. In the issue's closing photo, the daughters Vajello reject the racial gaze altogether by turning their backs on the camera, the viewer, and the technologies of racial realism that emerged alongside literary realism and naturalism of the day.

The two essays stage the difference between negotiating the color line, as Chesnutt did, and rejecting it, as did the Vajello sisters, with degrees of accommodation, mediation, and resistance enacted in the lives and writings of other authors along the color line. For instance, Alicia Contreras argues that, with The Squatter and the Don (1885), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton uses the language of realism to resist her social and literary disenfranchisement, but her publisher and the literary marketplace nevertheless relegated her to the margins of regionalism in an act of literary displacement akin to the dispossession Ruiz de Burton and her fellow landed Californios struggled to avert. Maria A. Windell similarly argues that S. Alice Callahan's much-debated Wynema (1891) deploys different forms of realisms that trouble the project of labeling the novel as either an accommodationist narrative or a protest novel; rather, its layered ethnic sentimental realisms resist canonical American and indigenous literary realisms, giving us instead "the complex, conflicting possibilities of Native life."

In this vein, the issue takes up the question of what realism is precisely, as each author maintains that traditional definitions of realism elide the historical contingencies of racial and ethnic specificity. What, they ask, would it mean to construct a methodology that made "other" realisms central? It would mean understanding that literary representations of race emerge from other forms of cultural production that are also invested in the social construction of identity. As Jesús Costantino explains, cultural projects as seemingly disparate as boxing and urban planning shape how realist and naturalist writers imagined race, class, and ethnicity. Here the visual meets the visceral in the literary squared circle as prizefighting, housing tenements, and the working class laborers whose lives are like so many rounds of boxing all operate metonymically to shore up the violent production of race and space.

An emphasis on collaborative work, visual culture, and the influence of technology and marketing foreground the issue's interdisciplinary approach. Yet each essay also relies on archival research, reminding us, as Jana Koehler's note on a recently found Francis E. W. Harper letter does, that studies of race and people of color still require digging. For Koehler, Harper's published letter corresponds with what we already know about her creative imagination and political activism. However, the letter also speaks with prescience and contemporary relevance. Harper not only pleads the innocence of Jeff Gee, a young African American man convicted of murder and slated to be hanged, but makes a case that his life—and the lives of others like him caught in systemic racism—matters.

We thank ALR, its editor, Gary Scharnhorst, the issue's contributors, and the English Department at the University of New Mexico for welcoming, facilitating, contributing to, and supporting the following discussion on race and realism. [End Page...