Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel

5. The Birth of Huck’s Nation

5. The Birth of Huck’s Nation My book ‘‘Huckleberry Finn’’ as Idol and Target was written to challenge dominant commonplaces of American literary study and education.1 This chapter arose from an invitation to develop the book’s perspectives for an international interdisciplinary discussion concerning the relationships between ‘‘cultural property’’ and ‘‘national and ethnic identity.’’ According to the sociologist Paul Gilroy in Against Race, his challenging attempt at ‘‘imagining a political culture beyond the color line,’’ a defining anxiety of our time is ‘‘the emphasis on culture as a form of property to be owned rather than lived.’’2 As the historian Elazar Barkan has demonstrated, in the burgeoning discussion and debate around problems of cultural property , a key term has been cultural ‘‘appropriation.’’3 Yet the negative connotation with which this term has been weighted somewhat puzzles me, given my own different use of it in the previous chapter. It doesn’t sound half so bad to me as ‘‘expropriation.’’ Appropriation focuses on the beneficiary of the process, expropriation on the loser, and I have far warmer fellow feeling for someone who likes something (and so appropriates it) than for someone who takes it away from someone else (expropriates it). These issues of appropriation and expropriation bear on the history of debates concerning a great American novel, for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is implicated in a process of cross-cultural transactions that may not be so benign as give-and-take. For nearly a century in the United States, beginning in the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy was a widely popular form of entertainment . It allowed many white people to make a living by rendering their impressions of art forms and cultural practices that had originated with African Americans, who were denied access to the financial rewards a white audience could provide. Eric Lott’s study of blackface minstrelsy transforms the terms ‘‘appropriation’’ and ‘‘expropriation,’’ with straightforward power, into Love and Theft. In the 1970s, Ralph Ellison wrote with relief that in the United States the age of cultural expropriation was over: 62 The Birth of Huck’s Nation 63 ‘‘[W]e’ve reached a stage of general freedom in which it is no longer possible to take the products of a slave or an illiterate artist without legal consequence .’’4 But the love and theft that produced minstrelsy also made possible the art of Huckleberry Finn, as Ellison pointed out in ‘‘Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke’’ (1958), in which he identified Twain’s figure of the fugitive slave Jim as ‘‘fitted into the outlines of the minstrel tradition.’’5 It causes trouble to this day that Mark Twain’s novel, first published in 1885, this product of radically unequal relations of power, has been widely taken as an icon of American identity, as the book that ‘‘we have embraced as most expressive of who we really are.’’6 Who is ‘‘we’’ here, and what is real? Some Americans gain a desired identity by this process, but at a cost to other Americans. Writing for an interdisciplinary and global audience makes me want to be certain that we hold in common a few fundamental facts about Huckleberry Finn as a cultural object in the United States. To this end, I begin with a moment of controversy in my home state of Pennsylvania, and after rather rapidly working through this incident, I then reprise the issues, both on a larger scale and in more detail. Huckleberry Finn is the most widely known work of American literature, both the most admired and the most loved. In the United States, there is no nationally mandated curriculum, yet this book is taught in most schools across the nation. Since the 1950s it has been widely claimed by teachers and scholars as a weapon against racism in the classroom. For them it has become an idol of interracial goodwill. This educational role is the focus of my inquiry. Most of what is imagined to be the defense of Huckleberry Finn against banning is in fact argument over its place in the schools. It is not a first-amendment, free-speech issue, but a question of educational policy. In February 1998, as part of what in the United States is Black History Month, the Pennsylvania state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) put forward a resolution requesting schools not to require Huckleberry Finn.7 The NAACP targeted it as racially offensive. How can this...