Introduction: Cross-Racial and Cross-Ethnic Collaboration and Scholarship: Contexts, Criticism, Challenges

Abstract

My interest in editing a special issue of MELUS devoted to cross-racial and cross-ethnic collaboration and scholarship evolved from my investigation of newspaper accounts by and about the nineteenth-century Northern Paiute author and activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. These items present increased evidence regarding Winnemucca’s productive interracial collaboration with her editor Mary Peabody Mann, her manager and friend Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and her husband Lewis H. Hopkins. Many nineteenth-century accounts of these relationships replicate their era’s racism, representing Winnemucca’s husband in language evoking a “squaw man” and calling Peabody’s relationship with Winnemucca “ ac urious idiosyncrasy” (“Current”). Even Mann, who, as Heidi M. Hanrahan’s essay in this issue demonstrates, had a positive relationship with Winnemucca, nonetheless called Winnemucca Peabody’s “pet Indian” (qtd. in Zanjani 280). Winnemucca, in turn, was at times accused of duping nao ¨ve non-Natives. There was something unsettling to many about the possibility that Winnemucca was working with non-Natives productively—that together they may have been enacting their versions of interracial friendship, love, or political and artistic collaboration. Critical accounts written in the past few decades replicate this suspicion, effectively stripping Winnemucca of agency in her life and work. 1 In American Indian literary studies, some scholars are reconsidering collaboration and revising assumptions about American Indian passivity or nao ¨vete ´. 2 Aware of these changes, I was curious about how new work in other areas of race and ethnic studies resulted in revised narratives of cross-racial and cross-ethnic collaboration. I had in mind neither exclusively commendatory nor condemnatory reconsiderations, wanting to avoid what Lorraine M. York describes in relation to women’s collaborative writing: scholarship that supplants “deplorably subversive” representations of collaborations with ones that are “admirably subversive” (9). I sought a diversity of scholarship urging us to consider the ethical and practical implications of the stories we tell about interracial or interethnic collaboration. The call for submissions sought new biographical information, new critical interpretations of previously studied cross-racial or cross-ethnic collaborations, reexaminations of the representation of cross-racial or ethnic collaboration within literary and cultural studies, and contemporary scholars’ reflections on their own experiences of interracial and interethnic collaboration. Because my experience with Winnemucca convinced me that in many cases, we lack or have not looked for the archival