Notes
109 Notes Introduction 1. See Erich Segal’s introduction to The Dialogues of Plato, Bantam ed. 2. The simultaneous elevation of inspiration and denigration of invention are key concepts in W. Ross Winterowd’s work. 3. For a more detailed discussion of the One Mind, consult the section entitled “Consciousness” in ch. 1 of Matthiessen 5–14. 1. The Color of Literacy: Race, Self, and the Public Ethos 1. Sundquist’s first chapter in To Wake the Nations remains among the best scholarship on Douglass. Particularly engaging is Sundquist’s argument regarding how Douglass seeks to revise societal perceptions of his own racial identity as well as the slave insurrections, so that the Americanness of both enterprises becomes evident. 2. See William L. Andrews’s introduction to Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass and John Blassingame’s introduction to The Frederick Douglass Papers , vol. 1. 3. Heteroglossia, a pivotal theoretical term in Bakhtin’s work, is predictably among the most difficult of his concepts to grasp. The reader is encouraged, therefore, to consult Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination in its entirety. 2. From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading 1. I adapt the idea “race as a hermeneutic” from Uzo Esonwanne. There are, however, a few principal differences between his use of the phrase and mine. For example, he is concerned neither with replacing the metaphor of race as a text with race as a hermeneutic nor with the implications of race as a hermeneutic for constructing authorship generally and for composition theory specifically . Moreover, although Esonwanne begins suggesting a basis for cultural critique, his analysis is more philosophical, global, and less taken with rethinking American social history than is mine. Most important, he does not expose the fallacies associated with other figurative readings of race. See Esonwanne. 2. See the first chapter of Stanton and ch. 3 of Gossett. 3. The cursory discussion that unfolds here is largely taken from Thomas F. Gossett’s and William Stanton’s respective treatises. In ch. 4 of his book, Gossett provides a more focused treatment of the rise of the polygenetic view than Stanton does. Nevertheless, Stanton’s remarks, which are scattered throughout his book, are also somewhat helpful. 4. Note the arguments Ann Douglas and Michael North make respectively in Terrible Honesty, ch. 2, and The Dialect of Modernism, ch. 1. 5. Du Bois, a contemporary of James Weldon Johnson’s, virtually eliminated dialect from his fiction, as he believed that in using it, he would perpetuate the stereotype of the “ignorant Negro.” 6. See chs. 1 and 5 of Jones’s Liberating Voices. 7. Eric Sundquist has provided a most insightful discussion on this case. See To Wake the Nations, ch. 3. 8. Consult Fauset, “The Negro, the Blue Man, and the New Race” (sec. 3 of Rusch); and Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing. 9. See also The Philosophy of Alain Locke (L. Harris 31, 284). 10. Consult Huggins. 11. For an appreciation of the context of this observation, see Zack, ch. 10. 12. Toomer spent most of his life vacillating between various racial and ethnic designations, even though as early as 1914 he began pondering the concept “American race.” Indeed, he took offense at being classified as a “Negro artist .” Refer to Nellie Y. McKay’s article on Toomer. 13. The editor of “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Gates writes two essays that, like the entire collection, are worth greater consideration by composition scholars than is The Signifying Monkey. However, the latter has received more critical attention. 3. Chesnutt’s Reconstruction of Race and Dialect 1. Compare Richard H. Brodhead’s introduction to The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales with ch. 4 of Donald B. Gibson’s The Politics of Literary Expression. 2. Andrews’s introduction to the Collected Stories of Charles Chesnutt (Mentor ed., 1992) suggests that Chesnutt’s choice to reveal his race after the publication of The Conjure Woman collection was largely prompted by “Black readers and pundits” who “demanded that Chesnutt be recognized as an African American whose achievements spoke well of the artistic capabilities of people of color” (xiii). 3. Naomi Zack numbers Chesnutt among those “Black writers who were tolerant toward passing.” She believes his tolerance stems from the “social chasm” he observed between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks. Given Chesnutt’s own social station and particularly his views on racial and cultural amalgamation, “empathetic” is a more appropriate description than is “tolerant.” 4. J. Noel Heermance writes a helpful synopsis...
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