Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912 (Race and American Culture)

✍ Scribed by Sandra Gunning

• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 208
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in "defense" of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism. In Writing a Red Record Sandra Gunning investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence through the representation of not just the black rapist stereotype, but of other crucial stereotypes in mediating moments of white social crisis: "lascivious" black womanhood; avenging white masculinity; and passive white femininity. Gunning argues that these figures together signify the tangle of race and gender representation emerging from turn-of-the-century American literature. The book brings together Charles W. Chestnutt, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, and Ida B. Wells: famous, infamous, or long-neglected figures who produced novels, essays, stories, and pamphlets in the volatile period of the 1890s through the early 1900s, and who contributed to the continual renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and boundaries of a national dialogue on racial violence.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 12
INTRODUCTION: On Literary Records and Discursive Possibilities......Page 16
ONE: Re-Membering Blackness After Reconstruction: Race, Rape, and Political Desire in the Work of Thomas Dixon, Jr.......Page 32
TWO: Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and the Politics of Literary Anti-Racism......Page 61
THREE: Black Women and White Terrorism: Ida B. Wells, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline E. Hopkins, and the Politics of Representation......Page 90
FOUR: Rethinking White Female Silences: Kate Chopin's Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy......Page 121
AFTERWORD: Cultural Memories and Critical Inventions......Page 149
Notes......Page 162
Bibliography......Page 190
B......Page 203
D......Page 204
I......Page 205
N......Page 206
T......Page 207
Y......Page 208