Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity , and: A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Abstract

Writing Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity. Edited by Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 330. Cloth, $84.95; Paper, $23.95.)A Faithful Account of Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth- Century America. By Stephen G. Hall. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 334. Cloth, $65.00; Paper, $22.95.)Reviewed by Robert S. LevineThe two books under review share an interest in crucial role of in American history. Baum and Harris's edited collection traces racial conflict and ideologies from early national period to election of Obama; Hall provides an account of nineteenth-century African American historians' efforts to make sense of these conflicts and ideologies from ancient times to their present moment. Both books offer important insights on and American history, though Baum and Harris's volume would have profited from more nuanced approach to racial conflict and to ideologies of itself.The fourteen essays in Writing (five of which focus on pre- 1865 period) explore what editors call the debasing role of 'race' and racism in development of American political thought and national identity (2). For Baum and Harris, American political history can be understood in terms of conflict between canonical thinkers (4), who are invariably white, and generally (5), and race rebels (4), or brave souls (2), invariably nonwhite, who resist racism and inspire us, as George Lipsitz puts it in his Afterword, to address our own challenge of Racially Righting Republic (281). There is of course considerable truth to editors' vision. Slavery and freedom were intertwined in minds of Jefferson and other founders, and as essays in this collection clearly show, racism can be found even among those who espouse democratic beliefs. But in overall volume, there are relatively few considerations of conflict and division within particular individuals, or black, and scant consideration of fluidity of race. Historical continuity rather than contingency guides overall collection. Harris's and Baum's own contribution, Legacies: Racial Intimacies and American Identity, adds little to recent work of Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and Hemings, and insists instead on trajectory running from Jefferson to Strom Thurmond. Harris and Baum conclude their essay by calling on America to offer reparations to America, but overlook how notions of white and black become destabilized through interracial sexuality. Moreover, as their volume makes clear, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos have also experienced racial injustice.Although there is much to learn from all of essays, some are more tendentious than others. Catherine Holland argues that Lincoln's turn to Jefferson also entailed an embrace of Jefferson's nationalism (99). Without taking account of diachronic unfolding (and possibility of change), Holland maintains that even when Lincoln appeared to imagine possibilities for blacks in United States, he embodied an American liberalism that found coherence only through displacement of racial equality (100). In this volume, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Samuel Gompers, whose anti-Chinese racism is discussed by Gwendolyn Mink (in an essay drawn from her 1986 Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development), are basically all of piece. The race rebels are similarly flattened in some essays, most of which deal with post-Civil war America figures, such as Sara Winnemuca, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida ?. Wells Barnettt, and Carlos Bulosan. Jerry Thompson provides an interesting biographical sketch of Mexican rebel Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (1824-1894), who resorted to violence to challenge U.S. imperial rule along Rio Grande, though I'm not fully convinced that illiterate Cortina imagined his actions as an attack on a racist system (86). …