Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920. Lucas A. Dietrich

Abstract

In Lucas Dietrich’s compelling exploration of the work of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century US writers attempting to bring the experiences of racially and culturally marginalized people into the mainstream, the figure of the trickster looms large. Describing writers including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Charles Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sui Sin Far as practicing a “double maneuver of entry and subversion” (5), Dietrich reads their work in terms of their attempts to appeal to white popular audiences while subtly but meaningfully challenging their assumptions about race, ethnicity, and identity. Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 imagines writers as purposefully and sometimes playfully engaging those assumptions at the same time that they undermine them, for example, by “employ[ing] the ethnic caricature in order to critique the absurdity of the depiction itself” (5). Such critiques, cunningly employed, reveal to twenty-first-century readers accustomed to reading against the grain a kind of doubled message that risked misreading at the time of publication; this book convincingly argues for a recognition of such risks—even and perhaps especially those that ended in commercial failure—as part of the larger, uneven story of an “emergent literary critique of white supremacism” (163) in the United States.