Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature

Notes

| 207 Notes Notes to Introduction 1. Though illuminating in their own terms, the majority of book-length studies situated at the interdisciplinary crossroads of architecture and literature, even those that treat the American context specifically, have paid virtually no attention to race as a category of analysis. These works include Frank, Literary Architecture; Knapp, Archetype, Architecture, and the Writer; Fryer, Felicitous Space; Ruzicka, Faulkner’s Fictive Architecture; Antoniades, Epic Space; Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books; Olsen, Transcending Space; and, most recently, Bernstein, Housing Problems. One notable exception is Lois Leveen’s unpublished dissertation, “The Race Home,” which examines the ways American houses articulate and enforce constructions of identity, particularly race and gender. The few published book-length studies of literature and architecture (or related intersections , such as literature and material culture, or literature and geography) that include at least partial discussions of race and the built environment (and from whose examples I have benefited) include Chandler, Dwelling in the Text, half of whose last chapter analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Hines, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past, which in part considers how race and class help structure Faulkner’s architectural imagination; Villa, Barrio-Logos, which analyzes the production and regulation of Chicano social space and the built environment in Los Angeles; Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, which examines the spatial transformation of the American Southwest in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Heneghan, Whitewashing America, which includes architecture among the “white things” that helped define race through objects in antebellum America (xiii); Luria, Capital Speculations, which includes a chapter on Frederick Douglass’s role in the creation of a “new social landscape” in Reconstruction-era Washington, D.C. (75); Klimasmith, At Home in the City, which includes a chapter on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand; Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, which includes a chapter that examines the relationship between slavery and privacy in Stowe and Douglass; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, which includes a chapter on Harriet Jacobs’s garret in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Faherty, Remodeling the Nation, which briefly discusses the role of slavery in the design of Jefferson’s Monticello and also assesses the impact of Native American architectural relics in the formation of early American national identity. A small number of important individual essays on race, architecture, and American representation may supplement this list, including Smith, “‘Loopholes of Retreat’”; Curtis, “Race, Realism”; Gelder, “Reforming the Body”; Kawash, “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships”; and Machlan, “Diseased Properties and Broken Homes.” 208 | Notes to Introduction 2. Although vernacular architectural historians, material culture scholars, and cultural geographers, whose discoveries have been crucial to my work, have paid more attention than literary critics to the intersections of race and architecture in the U.S., no single architectural study treats in detail the period that is the focus of this book, roughly 1850–1930. And despite important early calls for more attention to race within architectural theory and collateral fields by such figures as Cornel West (including “A Note on Race and Architecture”) and such publications as the interdisciplinary journal Appendx (founded in 1993), the turn to race as an analytical category within architectural studies has nonetheless been slow to develop and selective in its areas of inquiry. While my work is thus also informed by the important contributions to this field made by such edited volumes as Noble’s To Build in a New Land; Lokko’s White Papers, Black Marks; Barton’s Sites of Memory; Breisch and Hoagland’s Building Environments; and Schein’s Landscape and Race in the United States, this study breaks new ground through its extended focus on the U.S. cultural context at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. 3. Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” 59. 4. This study also draws crucially on the work of countless scholars who have helped make race a central category in the analysis of literary representation. The title of this introduction, “Race, Writing, Architecture,” is meant to evoke one of the pioneering efforts in this regard, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Much as Gates asks in his introduction to that volume, “What importance does ‘race’ have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory?,” Sites Unseen in effect begins by asking: What importance does race have in the study of literature and architecture? One additional field that has only recently experimented with putting race at the center of its place-based inquiries is landscape architecture...