Charles W. Chesnutt

After the audacious study and profound interest in Latin literature by the autodidact Charles Chesnutt is presented, this contribution argues that, unlike scholarship up to now pointing to orally-passed African American folktales, many of Chesnutt's Conjure Woman stories are in fact variations of selected stories from Ovid's masterpiece Metamorphoses. This claim is underscored by citing specific incidences of conjuring of North Carolina slaves into animals and trees in Chesnutt's stories with the magic (Voodoo) transformations of characters in selections of Metamorphoses by Ovid.  This use of Ovid by Chesnutt is argued to be an example of "signifying" as described in the theory of African American rhetoric by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his study, The Signifying Monkey.

active throughout the mid-nineteenth century, wrote literature generally regarded to be part of the Romantic Movement and often dealt with themes related to New England Puritans and their society. On the other hand, Chesnutt was an African-American author who wrote literature for less than a decade, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, that explored the complexities of race relations in both the pre-and post-Civil War American South. While superficially unalike, these authors both concerned themselves with the perceived social and moral injustices of their hometowns' pasts. Born in Ohio and subsequently relocated to North Carolina at the age of eight for the remainder of his youth, Chesnutt spent most of his formative years in same region that his forebears were enslaved and that all of his conjure stories are set. Similarly, as the grandson of a judge in the Salem witch trials, Hawthorne had not only a casual interest in the history of his birthplace, but also a personal connection to the atrocities in that history and wrote about them often in his stories. It is true that Chesnutt and Hawthorne did not write about the same regions of the United States and each of these regions did have unique problems, and that this may account for the fact that these authors do not tend to be studied in conjunction; however, both of these authors confront the ugly histories of their towns and attempt to upset the oppressive power

Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay accounts for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic. In so doing, it suggests that in the late nineteenth century, the term queer, as a signifier of distorted time, became central to debates over race and the nature of folkloric belonging.

In this essay I discuss how Charles W. Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars— through the tropology of spatialization, illustrations of expansive human intimacy, and indictments of the triangulation of antinormatively gendered and sexed bodies as political capital—intervened in sexual respectability politics in the African American uplift culture of the post-Reconstruction era. In doing so I argue that Chesnutt consecrated the " noble strivings " of sexually antinorma-tive African Americans while simultaneously illustrating the way overdetermined sexual identity politics, especially those in the naturalist literary tradition, diminished black life. With Chesnutt as my starting point, I recommend a return to early Jim Crow novels—particularly those written between the years 1900 and 1905—to suggest their progenitorial role regarding recent turns in queer theory and queer of color critique. In doing so I take steps toward a literary genealogy of queer US sex politics that runs from Plessy v. Ferguson and early Jim Crow, into modernism, and down through women of color feminism of the late 1980s before its formal or academic consecration in contemporary US queer theory. I do this to emphasize an important but still-developing ethic in contemporary queer literary studies: the need to center the study of queer representation and politics on more than homosexuality and especially on blackness. Passing is often not about bold-faced opposition to a dominant paradigm or a wholesale selling out to that form. Like disiden-tification itself, passing can be a third modality where a dominant structure is co-opted, worked on and against. The subject who passes can be simultaneously identifying with and rejecting a dominant form. —José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications (1999)

This is the presentation of slides presented at the National Association of African-American Studies Conference, February 2016 in Baton Rouge, LA. The paper accompanying these slides is "Sylvia Plath's Hidden Civil Rights Issues", first presented in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Please download PPT presentation to read notes.

This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that Charles Chesnutt’s two coinciding writerly practices—stenography and fiction—are more than merely coincidental. The connection of writing to stenography and stenography to writing, far from being limited to the singular professional development of Chesnutt (the first major black American novelist), reflects some of the shared anxieties and contradictions of the racial and literary imaginations of the nineteenth century. Stenography, as a writing system that claims to record and preserve the inflections of human speech, and literary realism, a form of writing that claims to register the vicissitudes of human experience, both participate in a form of mimesis that was, by the end of the nineteenth century, the primary site of critical discord surrounding American fiction.

However, that discord was not only literary. Rather, debates about the role of mimesis in literary production, while they found their mute brother in the technology of stenography, also shaded into debates about the nature of imitativeness and, more specifically, whether or not imitativeness was an epistemic quality rooted in race.

In this article, I read Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the background of realism to unravel the novel's distinct critique of racial discourse. I argue that realism's characteristic technique of appealing to the visible to establish the reality and realness of its fictions enables the novel to trace a similar operation in the discourse of race.

The realist and naturalist traditions constitute the longest aesthetic era of American literature.  This course introduces significant texts from the Civil War to post-World War I.  It examines literary responses to issues of race and violence, labor and commercial life, gender and family relations, immigration, and US class structure.

Literature of the U.S. South. Our focus in the American Literature seminar this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature, especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. The South has given the U.S. some of its greatest writers, while also enacting perhaps more powerfully than any other region the nation's ongoing internal debate regarding the nation's ideals vs. its realities, equality vs. rampant inequities, an obsession with the past and yet also a propulsive drive to seize the future. Most well known for a focus on the paradoxes of "race" in both the individual and national psyche, southern literature also exemplifies imaginative writers' concerns with regional history and memory; oral story-telling as a source of inspiration for textual experiment; and a long tradition of understanding that local, regional, ethnic, and racial identities are always marked by global connections and crossings-especially the U.S. South's deep cultural connections to "other" tropical Souths in the Caribbean and Latin American that also experienced plantation slavery, colonialism, civil wars, and nationalism.

... With the help of a dropped garment and an eager lance Rena is suddenly thrust into the center of the white fantasy. ... The Bedford Reader. Ed. XJ Kennedy et al. Boston: Bedford, 2003. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse Crisler, eds. and intro. ...

It is an intellectual and historical commonplace today that African American literature is central to an informed understanding of American literature and culture.  Yet one of the persistent features of our understanding of African American literature is that it arose relatively late in US history. 

This course emphasizes that the origins of African American literature lie in the eighteenth century, and that this literature echoed with many issues that have troubled the American republic since its foundation.  Using recent scholarship and newly-available materials, the course traces out the transatlantic advent of African American literature in narratives and poetry.  It later examines the post-Reconstruction use of the novel to dramatize and oppose white supremacism.  We shall locate further expression of this literary resistance in the prose and rhetoric of anti-lynching campaigns that energized African American political life in the late nineteenth century. The readings conclude with W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, and their perspectives on the problem of the ‘color line’ in the early twentieth century.

In this essay, I analyze the complex cultural role of the plantation fiction that appeared in elite magazines. I argue that the genre reveals the struggle between sentimental and realistic modes of representing racial difference. I then use this analysis to situate Chesnutt’s “Uncle Julius” tales not in a tradition of folklore or subtle subversion, but rather at the heart of late nineteenth-century American literary culture.

Livro que busca, a partir de conceitos da Análise dialógica do discurso, analisar, em especial, em "O Mulato" de Aluízio Azevedo e "The house behind the cedars" de Charles Chesnutt, o discurso do narrador, visando encontrar marcas de racismo mesmo em obras cujo enredo parece condená-lo. Diante do aporte teórico abraçado, obras anteriores à obra brasileira e afro-americana também são analisadas por serem vistas como elos precedentes cujo discurso racista é por elas reverberado.

Editora Universitária UFPE
Publicação Étnico Racial - Série comemorativa de 10 anos da lei 10.639
Ano: 2013
ISBN: 9788541504218

O documento anexo é uma resenha da obra feita pelo Prof. Dr. Rubens Pereira dos Santos. Ela foi publicada na Bakhtiniana, 10 (1), Jan./Abril. 2015 - http://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/bakhtiniana/article/view/22154 - The English version of the review is also available.

“Beyond ‘Bitter’: Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition” challenges the popular critical narrative about Marrow’s reception, which claims the book was uniformly poorly-received. Instead, I show that not only does the reception of the novel breaks down along sectional lines, but also that reviewers were engaging with the novel’s readers in much more complex ways than critics currently recognize. The reviews show that, more than responding to the readings The Marrow of Tradition implies or prompts, reviewers were themselves imagining publics for the novel, as well as predicting ways those publics might respond to the book. In doing so, reviewers displaced the novel’s criticism and persuasive work onto those geographically or ideologically removed imagined publics, and away from themselves and their readers. Mapping the process by which reviewers engaged with and displaced The Marrow of Tradition’s racial critique highlights the complicated sectional politics of both the novel and its reception, and emphasizes the need for scholars to consider the ways public discussion of The Marrow of Tradition shaped and limited the available contexts for understanding the novel at the turn of the century.