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upon the Public highways travel and race in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition Walter Bosse [W]hen i hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder , shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils . . . it seems as if earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. —henry david Thoreau, Walden, 1854 not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well . . . meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. —ralph ellison, Invisible Man, 1952 in “traveling Cultures,” anthropologist James Clifford articulates a methodological problem: “twentieth-century ethnography—an evolving practice of modern travel—has become increasingly wary of certain localizing strategies in the construction and representation of ‘cultures.’” By inquiring into “[w]ho determines where (and when) a community draws its lines, names its insiders and outsiders,” Clifford asserts his intention “to open up the question of how cultural analysis constitutes its objects—societies, traditions, communities , identities—in spatial terms and through specific spatial practices of research ” (1997, 19). redefining the nature and purpose of fieldwork within anthropological practices, Clifford recognizes the importance of reading culture or community for internal or self-contained characteristics in addition to and against prevalent means of exchange—namely, via travel and the traveler. an ethnographer in his own right, Charles W. Chesnutt expresses a similar attitude toward the cultural, racial relevance of spatial mobility at the beginning of the twentieth century. as an indelibly influential writer of both race and region, Chesnutt develops travel as metaphor in a way that anticipates Clifford ’s anthropological focus on movement. additionally, his use of travel exhibits “the tension between roots and routes” that Paul Gilroy recognizes in later black moderns like W. e. B. duBois and James Weldon Johnson (1993, 133). The conditions of community and identity become spatialized and mo- 98 / Walter Bosse bilized in Chesnutt’s fiction as he works to expose and upend the constraints of both “black” and “white” in america. he employs such localizing and mobilizing strategies in his 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, which takes a historically specific incident as its launching point. as a response to the Wilmington, north Carolina, race riots of 1898, Marrow operates within a southern social milieu plagued by violent racial and political unrest. Though rooted in factual circumstance, Chesnutt’s artful rendering of the occasion requires readings that go beyond recognizing its status and utility as a historical record. furthermore, as a direct indictment of american racism, Marrow marks a significant aesthetic departure from his previously well-received The Conjure Woman, a short story collection with subtle rhetorical nuances that display what houston Baker Jr. calls Chesnutt’s “ability to give the trick to white expectations, securing publication for creative work that carries a deep-rooted african sound” (Baker 1987, 49). no such “tricks” confound expectations in Marrow; William dean howells ’s rather unforgiving critique of the novel as overly “bitter” reveals that the opposite ethos—that of outspoken invective—prevails in the text (andrews 1980, 207). however, this is certainly not to say that Chesnutt’s palpable censure of american race politics inhibits or detracts from the novel’s aesthetic complexities. to be sure, the riots provided Chesnutt with the opportunity to articulate his political disillusionment, but Marrow also—and more importantly—contains significant commentary on the nature and construction of identity and community, commentary that complicates essentialist understandings of race. under the shadow of Jim Crow arbitration, the categorical and dualistic conceptions of race—particularly in the american South—greatly inform Chesnutt’s social and artistic philosophy. yet, his take on race in Marrow goes beyond breaking down political (mis)conceptions. Chesnutt sets race in motion at the turn of the century and emphasizes the fluidity of american identity . The dramatic element of travel within the novel directly relates to racial affiliation and identity construction. Chesnutt illustrates that identity is in a state of flux and that “race” is mobile, unfixed, insecure. he presents racial identity as a fluid construct and exposes the harmfully rigid nature of institutional regulations and social mores in the South at the turn of the century. in Marrow, travel functions as a metaphor for race, as a vehicle that allows Chesnutt to test and tear down dualistic categories and to explore the social possibilities that exist during the racial nadir. ultimately, however, Chesnutt’s level of commitment to travel as...

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