Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race

Acknowledgments

G&S Typesetters PDF proof Acknowledgments First, my thanks to the editors who first published some of these essays or parts of them: Margaret Higonnet and Joan Templeton, Karen Lawrence, Mary Lynn Broe, Florence Howe, and Mae Henderson and the Harvard English Institute. Second, thanks to the many audiences in the United States and abroad who responded to these ideas when they were presented in lecture form. Thanks as well to the University of Texas, and the City College of New York, which generously supported this work with University Research Initiative (URI), Professional Staff Congress/City University of New York (PSC/CUNY), and Eisner Scholars grants from the Simon H. Rifkind Center. In addition I want to thank the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation; Clare Hall, Cambridge; Anglia Polytechnic University; and the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (for an Andrew Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship). Thanks to Michael Marcus and his colleagues at the mathematics faculties and institutes at the University of Paris VI, at the University of Strasbourg, where much of this book was drafted and revised, and in Calcutta, India, where the chapter on The Green Hat and Coolie was written; to the research facilities of the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center, the truly helpful and devoted staff (Tom Staley, Cathy Henderson, Barbara La Borde, and Ann Paterra), and the trustees for permission to quote from the manuscripts consulted there, also to the curators of the Photography Collections, who went out of their way to be helpful. Thanks are also due to the University of Maryland Library for Djuna Barnes materials; the libraries of Cambridge, Oxford, and Strasbourg Universities; and Anthony A.R.A. Hobson, for the Nancy Cunard Literary Estate, for permission to quote from the manuscripts . I thank my students at the University of Texas, CCNY, and CUNY, and those who argued and asked questions when these ideas were tried out in talks, to the organizers of sessions at MLA and elsewhere, to my colleagues and friends who supported these inquiries in various ways, and especially to my daughter, Lisa Marcus, whose writing about race inspired my own—to Lillian Robinson, Louise De Salvo, Sabine Broeck, Alan Fried00 -R2807-FM 11/3/03 12:45 PM Page ix G&S Typesetters PDF proof man, Elizabeth Cullingford, Mary Hamer, Terri Apter, Shari Benstock, the late, lamented Berni Benstock, Jean Gallagher, Ira Elliott, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Louise Yelin, Carla Kaplan, Gillian Beer, Julia Briggs, Ingeborg O’Sickey, Gay Wachman, Robin Hackett, Nancy Berke, Cheryl Fish, Holly McSpadden, Mulk Raj Anand, Claire Tylee, Gay Wilentz, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Bonnie Kime Scott, Sandi Cooper, Harold Veeser, Sinkwan Cheng, Phyllis Lassner, and my editor and friend Leslie Mitchner. Lillian Robinson read the manuscript. Claire Tylee provided me with a copy of the Ernst Neuschul painting used on the jacket, and Julia Briggs provided the photographs of Elvedon Hall, the source of the great house in The Waves. Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Modernism of the Scattered Remnant” was a major influence. This book was beginning to take shape in Strasbourg when the news that Constance Coiner, author of Better Red, and her daughter had been killed in the crash of Flight 800, a flight I had taken two weeks before, came over the radio. I want to remember her here in the name of the common project of Left intellectuals. A N O T E A B O U T T H E C O V E R Negro Mother (oil on canvas, 100.5 x 65.5 cm, c. 1931) by Ernst Neuschul, the painting reproduced on the cover of this book and as its frontispiece, is from the Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester, England. Born in Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem), Czechoslovakia, Neuschul (1895– 1986) traveled Europe and the world as an experimental expressionist. A Jew and a leftist, he later painted in the Berlin school of Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) until expelled as a Jew by the Nazis in 1933. After some years in the Soviet Union working as a socialist-realist painter, he settled in Wales during World War II. Neuschul spent the twenties in Paris—with his model, the Dutch-Javanese dancer Taka-Taka—where his paintings of her and of workers and lovers in the twenties and thirties combined a lyrical primitivist modernism with a compassionate social criticism. Motherhood was one of his most important subjects. Hearts of Darkness deals with the exoticized and erotic black woman’s breast as the object of...