Racial Recovery, Racial Death: An Introduction in Four Parts

Abstract

In February 2005, an article appeared in the Boston Globe asserting that census records list as white the author of two novels published in the Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Jackson). The genealogical work reported in the Globe turned out be sound. Yet the researcher's not quite subtle interpretation of nineteenth-century Black writing, the repeated implication that she had solved the mystery of why Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's literature never fit with contemporaneous texts and themes (par. 4), and the popular press's eager unveiling of Kelley-Hawkins's racial mis/classification raised larger questions about nineteenth-century women and racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy. In response the new revelations, some reporters and critics have suggested that Kelley-Hawkins's work will be--and deserves be--reforgotten (McLemee, par. 2). (1) Such reviviscent insinuations recall the politics of disavowal and dismissal that are part of the reception history of nineteenth-century women's literary production. Indeed, this opposition women's putative concerns and the popular literary styles women often adopted undergirded the justifications for preserving almost exclusively male literary canons until civil and women's rights movements took root in the publishing and academic worlds of the early 1970s. Since then, more and more early Black women's writing has been recovered and reprinted. As it continues help desegregate literary canons and be placed in continually augmented historical contexts and evolving interpretative frameworks, scholars face the challenges of partial recovery and responsible speculation that are the necessary genesis of our work. It is worth recalling that our understandings of now-canonical authors such as Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances E. W. Harper, for example, have significantly evolved in the last decade as scholars have built on partial discoveries introduce new information--and whole new bodies (of work)--that inform our understanding of the period and the received paradigms that act as its scholarly prism. (2) Until 2005, Kelley-Hawkins belonged a group of authors identified as African American despite the partial or inconclusive information about their racial identity and identification. For example, despite the best-selling (twenty-first century) status of The Bondwoman's Narrative, this date, the work of some of the most noted scholars and highly skilled genealogists has yielded no definitive information confirm its author's racial identity (Andrews and Kachun, Editors' Introduction xxxviii). And although, as Daphne A. Brooks reminds us, the ethnographic facts about the wildly popular stage performer Adah Isaacs Menken and her personal life have largely remained a source of occlusion and contention (134), Menken's work, like Kelley-Hawkins's, is included in the Schomburg collection. The public attention and assumptions eddying around Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's reclassification provide an invitation for specialists in the field revisit and reframe some of the organizing themes and tropes that have come be associated with the nineteenth century: racial protest and racial uplift, passing, and the figure of the (tragic) mulatta. As Brooks puts it, such lingering controversies about race and cultural iconography force us to scrutinize critical methods for defining race and the tools that we use measure and evaluate its social and political worth and cultural authenticity (135). In this issue of Legacy, examinations of Kelley-Hawkins's work appear alongside essays that also place their analyses of forgotten, misplaced, and marginalized texts within the larger scope of nineteenth-century writing, recovery, and reception. From this vantage point, readers can reconsider the evolving politics of nineteenth-century African American canon formation, reassess how we evaluate racial evidence and authenticity, and rethink how and why racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy matter. …