Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

Notes

NOTES PREFACE 1. Scott McLemee, "The Anger and the Irony: Charles Chesnutt, the First Major Black Novelist, Regains His Former Glory," Chronicle of Higher Education, i March 2OO2, AI4. 2. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Interrogating Whiteness, Complicating Blackness," 251-52. 3. Andrews's The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) is the standard critical biography; Render's Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) surveys Chesnutt's life, his themes, and his prose style; Pickens's Charles Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement (1994) studies Chesnutt in the context of late-nineteenth-century reform.Two recent books on Chesnutt focus on formal analysis. Charles Duncan's The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt (1998) is a narratological study, and Henry B. Wonham's Charles W. Chesnutt:A Study of the Short Fiction (1999) is a close reading of Chesnutt's stories. Joseph McElrath's Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt provides a thorough surveyof Chesnutt criticism, with examples from the earliest reviews to recent essays.For dissenting voices on Chesnutt's racial politics, see SallyAnn Ferguson's articles "Chesnutt's Genuine Black and Future Americans" and "Rena Waiden: Chesnutt's Failed 'Future American' "andTrudier Harris's essay "Chesnutt's Frank Fowler: A Failure of Purpose?" 4. My approach has been anticipated in articles and book chapters. William L. Andrews, discussing Chesnutt, writes suggestively of "deconstructive acts" and "their emphasis on reality as a function of consciousness mediated through language " ("The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865-1920," 80). I have been stimulated by the chapters on Chesnutt in Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 37-47, and in Craig Hansen Werner, Playing the Changes, 3-26. Charles Duncan, in The Absent Man, also makes some suggestive observations. CHAPTER i. Chesnutt's Language / Language's Chesnutt 1. Quoted in Thomas F. Gösset, Race: The History of an Idea in America, 285. 2. Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, 45-46. 23O Notes to Pages 7-17 3. The Oxford WE. B. Du Bois Reader, 102. 4. Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v.Ferguson: A Brief History withDocuments., 77. 5. See Vernon J. Williams, RethinkingRace: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries, 22. 6. For the evolution of Du Bois's racialthinking, seeEric J. Sundquist's introduction to The Oxford WE. B. Du Bois Reader, 3-36. 7. Here is K. Anthony Appiah's account of the way the racial constructs affect individual consciousnesses: "Once the racial label is applied to people, ideas about what it refers to, ideas that may be much less consensual than the application of the label, come to have their social effects. But they have not only social effects but psychological ones as well; and they shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects. In particular, the labels can operate to shape what I want to call 'identification': the process through which an individual intentionally shapes her projects—including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good—by reference to availablelabels, availableidentities" ("Race, Culture, and Identity," 78). 8. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 129. 9. On white ideas of black "imitativeness," see Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black, 5-6,18, 43-44IQ . Frederick Douglass, The Narrative and Selected Writings, 161. 11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293-94. 12. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black, 117. 13. The story first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, June 1904, 823-30. It is included in The Short Fiction of Charles W Chesnutt, ed. SylviaLyons Render. I quote from the latter publication. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 14.1amindebted to mycolleague BobDemott for noting that evenJones's recognition of the inevitability of borrowing is itself a borrowing. The insight he hasjust offered summarizes the central premise of Emerson's essay "Quotation and Originality ": "Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited . Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair,— all these we never made, we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly said, 'What would remainto me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius?Everyone of mywritings has been furnished to me by athousand different persons, a thousand different things'" (Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8 of Centenary Edition of the Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 200). 15. Chesnutt was literally...