Earth-Eating, Addiction, Nostalgia: Charles Chesnutt’s Diasporic Regionalism

Abstract

Earth-Eating, Addiction, Nostalgia: Charles Chesnutt’s Diasporic Regionalism Jennifer L. Fleissner (bio) Jennifer L. Fleissner Indiana University Jennifer L. Fleissner Jennifer L. Fleissner is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University and the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004) as well as of essays in Critical Inquiry, ELH, American Literature, Novel, and other journals. Footnotes For their helpful responses to earlier versions of this project, I’d like to thank Jonathan Elmer, Joshua Kates, and wonderfully receptive audiences at MLA, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and Washington University. In addition, an especially big thanks to Kevis Goodman, for her insights and support, and to Molly Hiro, assistant extraordinaire. 1. F. W. Cragin, “Observations on Cachexia Africana or Dirt-Eating,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 17 (February 1836): 357. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 2. See Cragin 357–58; W. M. Carpenter, “Observations on the Cachexia Africana, or the habit and effects of dirt-eating in the negro race,” New Orleans Medical Journal 1 (1845): 154; and J. Imray, “Observations on the mal d’estomac or cachexia Africana, as it takes place among the Negroes of Dominica,” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal LIX (1843): 307. Subsequent references to the latter two will occur in the body of the text. 3. William L. Andrews, “Introduction,” Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt (New York: Mentor, 1992) vii. 4. I borrow the usefully dialogic term “Julius and John stories” from Dean McWilliams rather than using the common term “conjure tales,” since, as McWilliams notes, several, including the tale that is my focus here, do not employ the conjure trope. See McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2002) 76. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 5. For a good summation of Chesnutt’s changing critical fortunes over time, see Henry B. Wonham, “‘The Curious Psychological Spectacle of a Mind Enslaved’: Charles W. Chesnutt and Dialect Fiction,” The Mississippi Quarterly 51 (Winter 1997): 55–69. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 6. On the relation between Chesnutt’s tales and the Uncle Remus stories, sec Lome Fienberg, “Charles W. Chesnutt and Uncle Julius: Black Storytellers at the Crossroads,” Studies in American Fiction 15.2 (Autumn 1987): 161–74, 163–64. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 7. See, for example, Craig Werner, “The Framing of Charles W. Chesnutt: Practical Deconstruction in the Afro-American Tradition,” in Jefferson Humphries, ed., Southern Literature and Literary Theory (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990) 339–65. 8. Qtd. in Ben Slote, “Reading ‘The Goophered Grapevine’ and Hearing Raisins Sing,” American Literary History 6.4 (Winter 1994): 684–94, 686. 9. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980) 42; Richard Brodhead, “Introduction,” in Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 2. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 10. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Mars Jeems’ Nightmare,” in Collected Stories 25 (my emphasis); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CS. 11. See, e.g., Amy Kaplan, “Region, Nation, and Empire,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 241–42. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 12. On Aunt Jemima, see Alice A. Deck, “‘Now Then–Who Said Biscuits?’: The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905–1953,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001) 69–93. 13. See Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literatim’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 380–81. Subsequent references will occur in the body of the text. 14. Kenneth M. Price, “Charles W. Chesnutt, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Intersection of African-American Fiction and Elite Culture,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995) 266. Even Chesnutt supporters such as Andrews and Sundquist admit instances...