Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods and the Modern Discourse of Black Criminality

Abstract

This article reads Paul Laurence Dunbar’s bleak migration novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), for its close engagement with racial criminalization. While critical discussion of this text has frequently centered on whether Dunbar capitulated to or subtly satirized dominant antiblack stereotypes, I propose reading Sport of the Gods as a prescient diagnosis of what I call the “modern discourse of black criminality.” This emergent discourse was structured around two poles: first, a sociological narrative of racial degeneration, and second, the Gothic figure of the monstrous, roving “brute beast.” Dunbar assesses the combined stigmatizing force of these two aspects of black criminality discourse in his novel. Rather than repudiating slanders leveled against the race, Dunbar maps out the network of beliefs that engendered these stereotyped images in the first place. Through its depiction of the Hamilton family’s entrapment within this ideological web, Sport of the Gods stages the impossibility of escaping from racialized criminal stigma by recourse to notions of legitimacy and innocence.