The Specter of Race in Poe Studies

no evidence that he ever published any literary research . But Magee did leave his mark on the Modern LanguageAssociation.The “Proceedings”of the 1900 convention record that, on its last day, the MLA adopted a new policy: “[Hlereafter no title of a paper should be accepted for publication in the programme of an annual meeting of the Association that is not accompanied by a brief statement of the argument, or of the purpose, of the paper” [“Appendix : Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association,” PMLA 16 (1901): xliii]. From that time forward, thanks to Charles M. Magee, “humbleyet ardent”young Turks would have to knock and announce their intentions before any door at the MLA convention would open to them. Terry L. Meyers College of William and Mary REVIEWS The Specter of Race in Poe Studies J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, eds. Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001. xviii, 292 pp. $19.95paper. It was a hypothesis cherished by students but reviled by their teachers. It was whispered in the realm of popular culture, though silenced in serious scholarship . It appeared in the work of a prominent African American fictionwriter,while itwasdenied or ignored by official biographers. I refer, of course, to the longstanding rumors of an alliance between Thomas Jefferson and his slaveSallyHemings, which survived despite almost two hundred years of official denials. These reports were recently verified, at least in part, by DNA testing; the resulting revelations have led historian GordonWood to feel suddenlyplunged into a Southern gothic tale: At the end of Faulkner’sAbsolom, Absolom!Shreve the Canadian asks Quentin why he hates the South. “‘I don’t hate it,”’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I don’t hate it,’ he said. Z don’t hate it he thought ...Zdon ’t. Zdon’t!Zdon ‘t hate it! Zdon ’t hate it!” One can imagine the American public now askinga similarquestion-Why do historianshateThomasJefferson?-and historiansanswering in a similarmanner,quickly, at once, immediately:We don’t hate him! We don’t!We don’t!We don’t hate him! We don’thate him! [GordonS.Wood,“TheGhosts of Monticello ,” in Sally Hemings and ThomasJefferson: History, Memmy, and Civic Culture, ed.Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville:Univ. of Virginia Press, 1999),321 In the same ways that theJefferson-Hemings relationship has forced historians to rethink cherished notions of evidence and plausibility, the question of Poe and race has pushed literary scholars and students of Poe to reexamine our assumptions about the relationship between literature and the world in which it was conceived and produced. Though critics today might complain of “a superabundance in Poe criticism-the increase in recent years of critical attention to Poe’s relation to race and slavery” [Meredith L. McGill, “Introduction: New Directions in Poe Studies,” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 33 (2000): 23, as late as 1993one of Poe’s most promi70 nent biographers could claim that his fiction “offers no glimpse”of antebellum America’s most pressing controversies:“Poe’sfictionalworld usually seems to mirror no particular place or time” [KennethSilverman , introduction to N m Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993),12,241. One can almost hear the defensive chorus of scholars who focus on the relation between Poe and the racism of his particular place and time, quickly, at once, immediately: “Wedon’t hate him! We don’t!” Yetjust as the Jefferson-Hemings story survived in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), the relationship of Poe’s fiction to the question of race came to the fore in ”Romancing the Shadow,”the second chapter in Toni Morrison’s collection Playing in the Dark: Whitenessand the Literary Imagination [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 19921.By invoking Morrison in the title of their volume , KennedyandWeissbergtakeseriouslyher claim that “[n]o earlyAmerican writer is more important to the conceptofAmericanAfiicanism than Poe” [32] and use her refiguring of Poe’s place in the American literarytradition asthe conceptualstartingpoint for their collection of essays on Poe and race. The volume is also heavily indebted to a number of pioneering works on the subject, cited by almost all of the...