Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892; reprint, New York: Mentor , 1992), 84. 2. Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 37. 3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993), 52. 4. Sterling Brown outlines his theory of the “tragic mulatto” in The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, D.C.: The Association in Negro Folk Education, 1937), 43–44; he makes the point that the character was used mostly by white writers in the introduction to The Negro Caravan, ed. Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 5–6. 5. For a thorough discussion of the “tragic mulatto” in literary criticism, see Werner Sollors , Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 220–245. 6. Deborah McDowell, “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39. 7. Houston A. Baker Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25. 8. Ann Ducille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7. 9. Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 238. 10. Suzanne Bost, “Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the ‘Tragic Mulatta ’ Tradition,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 675; Ducille, The Coupling Convention , 24–25; Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 197–198. 11. Yellin, Women and Sisters, 53. 12. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xvi. 13. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89. 14. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi. 15. According to Winthrop Jordan, many whites saw miscegenation as a sign that the American experiment had failed and that sin dominated in the New World. White over Black: Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 543. 16. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5. 17. Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 241. 18. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 45. 19. Ibid. 20. For a discussion of myths of racial signs, see Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 143–161. 21. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 33. 21. Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113. 22. Ducille, The Coupling Convention, 9. 1. The Last of the Mohicans or the First of the Mulattos? 1. For a discussion of this revised masthead, see Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830’s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 36–37. 2. Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition,” 17. 3. The Liberator, April 23, 1831. 4. Sterling Brown is credited with identifying Cora as the first mulatto figure in American literature. Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, D.C.: The Association of Negro Folk Education, 1937), 8. 5. Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 5. 6. David T. Haberly, “Women and Indians: The Last of the Mohicans and the Captivity Tradition,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 439; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 106–109. 7. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 203–205. 8. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams, Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 72. 9. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 203–205. 10. James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1865), 516. Madison made this statement in a February 10, 1826, letter to Thomas L. McKenny. 11. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier , 1600–1860 (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 464. 12. Linda Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History 62, no. 2 (1975): 271. 13. Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1989), 4–5. 14. Ibid., 13. 15. Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975...