Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb Ian Marshall Teaching Hemingway and Race. Edited by Gary Holcomb. Kent UP, 2018, 248 pp. $35.00. In her seminal book, Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction, Amy L. Strong argues that "[o]pening the canon and recovering texts by women and people of color must happen concurrently with new readings of traditional texts" (13-14). Teaching Hemingway and Race has managed to do just that, deftly combining new readings of Hemingway's classic texts with lesser read ones and shedding new light on writers of color and the ways in which Hemingway influenced, and was influenced by them. The collection, edited by Gary Holcomb, follows in a line of books in the "Teaching Hemingway" series and is focused primarily on the subject of "race." As intimated in the Forward, written by the series editor, Mark, P. Ott, and noted in the introduction, written by Holcomb, the "collection intends to provide a practicable means for teaching the subject of race in Hemingway's writing and related texts, from how to approach ethnic, nonwhite international, and tribal characters to how to teach difficult questions of racial representation, without apology for Hemingway's sometimes troubling representation of race" (2). Its other objective is to "offer strategies to assist the instructor in teaching the contemporary student reader, trained to read through the multicultural studies lens, how to work through these troubling representations" (3). That this book tackles issues of race, racism, multiculturalism, and identity in the way that it does, makes it essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century or contemporary American literature, as well as for anyone interested in how a study of literature might provide an opportunity for dialogue, across disparate political, cultural, racial, and ethnic lines. The first part of the book (the first six of the ten essays), as Holcomb points out, is dedicated to questions of pedagogy. The remaining four essays "considers Hemingway's work in conversation with writings by black authors" (3). These, in some ways, are reminiscent of Holcomb's Hemingway and the Black Renaissance collection. The first essay, "Reading Between the (Color) Lines: Teaching Race in Hemingway's 'The Battler'" by Marc Dudley, tackles the thorny issue of racist language in Hemingway's fiction head on. Dudley takes us through a series of pedagogical steps he employs to prepare his students to read what he readily identifies as a bizarre, yet brilliant and complex text. He concludes that, because Hemingway drew on an historical newspaper account and changed one of the people presented in that account from white to black, he made [End Page 110] "this story expressly about race" (10). Dudley asks his students to probe why Hemingway so aggressively uses racial epithets in this story, and ultimately suggests to them that it is "both a false flag and a deliberate directive by the writer" (12). The racist language, then, demonstrates Hemingway's complex use of contemporary attitudes toward racial representation, and shows Bugs as both unmistakably Black, yet also unmistakably controlling in the text. The second essay, "Teaching Hemingway Short Stories through the Lens of Critical Race Theory" by Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland is focused on Hemingway's In Our Time, and excellent pedagogical strategies for the teaching of it that probe deeply into the text and the author, and the student's engagement with both. The essay grounds In Our Time in an understanding of a "racial education" and uses essential ideas from Critical Race Theory to teach the constructedness of race. The pedagogy described in this essay asks students to consider how their own society constructs races, ethnicity, social class, and nation (17) and invites them to explore in a comparative way, Hemingway's Oak Park as his first racial context. "Hemingway's Experts: Teaching Race in Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa" by Ross K. Tangedal "presents a teaching approach for Hemingway's complex nonfiction texts with a critical eye toward the complication of race" (30). Tangedal argues that Hemingway's depiction of race through his "experts" Belmonte, the Zuritos, Droopy, and M'Cola asks critics and readers to address the development of racialized characters...