Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

Notes

| 211 Notes Notes to the Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 9. Notes to the Introduction 1. I borrow the phrase “the life of the mind” from Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978): “In other words, when the philosopher takes leave of the world given to our senses and does a turnabout (Plato’s periagoge) to the life of the mind, he takes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth” (23). 2. See the “postidentitarian” arguments of Walter Benn Michaels in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Kenneth W. Warren in So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 3. Garry Wills has called the three-fifths compromise an “economic and political calculus” designed mainly by Southern legislators of the era to preserve slavocratic representation in the halls of government. Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (New York: Mariner Books, 2005), 9. The three-fifths compromise so adversely affected the future of African American civil rights that, aside from the momentum of the Civil War, only amendments were able to begin overturning the act seventy-seven years later. First, the Southern states successfully inscribed the federal ratio into constitutional law. Next, by empowering slaveholders politically, the compromise protected their economic and cultural interests, including the preservation of slavery. Third, the compromise’s electoral advantage solidified the South’s claims to national representation, even though the controversy over slavery was exacerbating regional conflict between the North and South. Finally, the compromise precipitated a wave of congressional and presidential victories, benefiting a quarter of the presidents between George Washington and the Civil War, including, in 1800, Thomas Jefferson himself. Whether Jefferson was the first “Negro president,” because his election to office exploited the South’s slave power in the halls of federal government, has fueled a present-day controversy that may not end anytime soon. For the economic protection and extension of slave power, see ibid., xvi, 4, and 11; for the language of populism, see ibid., xvii and 1 (regarding the 1800 election as a “Second Revolution”); and for the congressional and presidential victories, see ibid., 5, 6, and 59. For the academic debate over whether Jefferson was elected to office in these terms, see ibid., xi–xv. 212 | Notes to the Introduction 4. In a recent article reflecting on Obama’s electoral victory, a reporter further noted, “Obama’s election also broke new ground in the mechanics of campaigning. His campaign used the Internet, e-mail, and social-networking sites as community-organizing tools more effectively than any campaign in history. On fundraising, Obama opted out of public financing—the first nominee to do so since the advent of the system in 1976—and raised at least $600 million from more than 3 million donors, another feat that defied expectations.” Linda Feldman, “Obama Victory Signals New Push for Unity,” Christian Science Monitor (November 6, 2008): 25. For the certified statistics of the popular vote, see Federal Election Commission, “2008 Official Presidential General Election Results,” http://www.fec.gov/ pubrec/fe2008/2008presgeresults.pdf. For a sample of statistics of the African American vote, see Lawrence D. Bobo and Michael C. Dawson, “A Change Has Come: Race, Politics, and the Path to the Obama Presidency,” Du Bois Review 6.1 (Spring 2009): 3. 5. Christine Smallwood, “Back Talk: Toni Morrison,” Nation (December 8, 2008), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/smallwood2. 6. John Adams to John Penn, March 27, 1776, quoted in Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 130, 131. 7. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–31. 8. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 15. 9. Waldo E. Martin Jr., No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. Martin states that the “wide-ranging political consciousness revealed both in the musics and in the larger expressive culture are intimately connected to important individual and collective forms of black struggle, to important varieties of black cultural...