Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt

Contributors

127 Contributors Margaret D. Bauer, author of The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (1999) and William Faulkner’s Legacy: “What Shadow, What Stain, What Mark” (2005), is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature, editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, and Professor of English at East Carolina University. Her articles on Southern writers have been published in such venues as Mississippi Quarterly and Southern Literary Journal, and her monograph Understanding Tim Gautreaux is forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press. Keith Byerman is Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies at Indiana State University. He is the author or editor of six books on African American literature and culture, including Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction (2005) and Seizing the Work: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois (1994). He serves as associate editor of African American Review. Martha J. Cutter is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut and the editor of MELUS: MultiEthnic Literature of the United States. Her first book, Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women’s Writing, won the 2001 Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association. Her second book, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity, was published in 2005. Her articles have appeared in American Literature, African American Literature, Women’s Studies, Callaloo, Arizona Quarterly, Legacy, Criticism, and in the collections Mixed Race Literature (2002) and Passing and the Fictions of Identity (1996). SallyAnn H. Ferguson is Associate Professor of African American and American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her latest publications include Charles W. Chesnutt: Selected Writings (2001), a reprint edition of Chesnutt’s novel The Colonel’s Dream (2004), and Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Literary Emergence: Evolutionary Spirituality, Sexuality, and 128 Contributors Identity (2008). She is also a past two-term president of MELUS (The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States). Donald B. Gibson, Emeritus Professor of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, is among those of an earlier generation responsible for establishing during the 1960s and ’70s the study of African American Literature as a discipline within the traditional study of English and American Literature. The trajectory of his Five Black Writers: Essays on Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones (1970) (among the earliest of such modern collections of literary criticism of black writers) finds a fitting culmination in this essay on Chesnutt, his final formal critical effort after his 2001 retirement. Scott Thomas Gibson is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research interests include multiethnic American Literature, multicultural theory, and composition pedagogy. Particular interests include the intersection of “race,” culture, and nationality in novels, theories of amalgamation and hybridity, and representations of whiteness in novels by authors of different ethnic backgrounds. Currently, he is investigating the projection of future American racial identities by twentieth-century American writers. Ernestine Pickens Glass is Professor Emerita, Department of English, Clark Atlanta University. She is co-founder of the Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association and a recipient of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award for her contribution to Chesnutt scholarship. She is author of Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement (1994) and editor of Frederick Douglass by Charles W. Chesnutt: A Centenary Edition (2001). Aaron Ritzenberg teaches writing and American literature in the English department at Yale University. His research explores the relationship between literature and social change. His recent publications include articles on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sherwood Anderson, and Michael Chabon. He is currently working on a book, The Sentimental Touch, which investigates emotion in American literature during the rise of managerial capitalism. Werner Sollors teaches African American Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of the books Beyond Ethnicity and Neither Black nor White yet Both and the essay “The Goopher in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales: Superstition, Ethnicity, and Modern Metamorphoses.” He also edited Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical 129 Contributors Reader (1996), An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (2003), and the Library of America edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Novels, Stories, and Essays. Susan Prothro Wright, Associate Professor at Clark Atlanta University, has published articles on Chesnutt and other nineteenth-century American authors in...