Introduction

What is there to say about James and race? If we look at the history of James criticism before 1990, we would have to say “nothing.” “Nothing” in the sense that James, writing universally about matters of high art, transcended such petty particulars; or “nothing” in that James’s retreat from the realities of his own time and place left him in willed ignorance of such vital matters; or, finally, “nothing” in that James’s racist, elitist work warrants only dismissal. As several of the contributions to this Forum note, however, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Kenneth Warren’s Black and White Strangers have helped us to recognize that there is a great deal more to be said. We have begun to realize how hard one has to work to see nothing of race in James. And we have begun to learn, as Morrison has suggested, the ways in which race is also a medium for writerly exploration of narrative, representation, consciousness, and identity, as well as a means of raising ethical, political, and cultural questions.

The American Scene is perhaps the most obvious James text with which to begin a discussion of race, and the contributions by Eric Haralson, Beverly Haviland, Sara Blair, Ross Posnock, and Ken Warren to this Forum all focus on James’s 1904 depiction of his native land. Yet each of these critics describes a very different American Scene, as well as very different American scenes—New York’s lower East Side, Florida swamps, the mountains and mansion (Biltmore) of North Carolina, Washington, D.C.—in which James confronts, constructs, and, occasionally, covers over race.

For all of The American’s Scene’s complex diversity, the Jamesian experience of race (his own as well as others’) was neither limited to one visit nor confined to one text. Walter Benn Michaels takes up the (non-)representation of race in What Maisie Knew, Leland Person traces the positionings of race and gender in The Bostonians, and several contributors show how race recurs throughout James’s letters, criticism, and autobiographical writings. Reading for race in James also alters and expands our notions of the Jamesian text by inviting us to read James with a different set of writers, with Cable, Dixon, DuBois, Douglass, Riis, and Stowe. In this way, we are able to re-open one of the central cultural discussions of James’s own time.

The importance of this topic to James studies now is perhaps indicated by the variety of venues that produced these contributions. Eric Haralson’s and Lee Person’s essays were originally given as papers at the international James-Conrad conference at the University of Kent in July 1995. Sara Blair’s essay and Ross Posnock’s response to it, a response which brings Blair’s and Ken Warren’s readings of James to mutual interrogation, were part of a session on “Henry James and Cultural Criticism” at the 1994 MLA. Blair and Warren agreed to respond, in turn, to Posnock in this Forum. Walter Michaels’ and Beverly Haviland’s essays stem from larger, forthcoming book projects. Claire Garcia’s contribution is important for the personal and professional story of reading and writing James that it tells. Garcia also brings James and race into the classroom, the space where many of us struggle most with this topic, learning as we teach James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” with Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison” or Morrison’s “Recitatif” how much more than “nothing” there is to be said.