Reviewed by: Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race ed. by Harriet Pollack Suzan Harrison Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race. Ed. by Harriet Pollack. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013. 288 pp. 8 photos. $69.95/$24.95. Ever since Diana Trilling took Eudora Welty to task for what she considered a celebration of “the parochialism and snobbery” of white, southern privilege in a 1946 review of Delta Wedding, critics have debated the treatment of race and racism in Welty’s art and life. Welty’s own essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?,” which articulated the author’s rejection of fiction with an overtly political agenda, led others to read, or as this collection of essays argues, to misread Welty’s work as apolitical, as avoiding the racial and social injustices of the Mississippi in which she lived and wrote. The twelve essays Harriet Pollack has collected in Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race extend the examination of the political dimensions of Welty’s art that the essays in Pollack’s earlier collection, Did the Novelist Crusade? Eudora Welty and Politics, co-edited with Suzanne Marrs, advanced thirteen years ago. In this new collection, the issue of race takes center stage. Thanks to the critical discussion included in and spawned by the earlier collection, these essays do not merely address the question of whether Welty’s work confronted the complexities of racial identities and racial interactions in the twentieth-century South but, instead, explore the nuanced strategies Welty’s works use to make visible the color line, to racialize whiteness, and to reveal race as a social performance. The approaches taken by the essays differ widely, opening new avenues for critical exploration of Welty’s play with the intersections of race and identity, injustice and resistance. In the collection’s opening essay, “Welty, Race, and the Patterns of a Life,” Marrs writes from her position as Welty’s official biographer and close friend, puzzling her way toward a way of understanding four disturbing instances in which Welty used the term “nigger” as a descriptor in letters written between 1946 and 1948 to John Robinson, a dear friend and at one time romantic interest of Welty’s. Against these instances, Marrs sets the context of Welty’s large body of correspondence, essays, editorials, interviews, and activities that persuasively document her lifelong commitment to a liberal political agenda; her abhorrence of the racist politics of Theodore Bilbo, John Rankin, Ross Barnett, and their ilk; and [End Page 173] her insistence on integrated audiences for her lectures at Millsaps College. Marrs concludes that despite these four references and despite occasional reticence in speaking publically about the racial situation in Mississippi, Welty “did not feel ambivalent about racism” (44). Essays of similarly nuanced attention to Welty’s fiction and photography follow Marrs’s reading of the writer’s life. In “Parting the Veil: Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and the Crying Wounds of Jim Crow,” Susan Donaldson reads Welty’s first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, in conversation with Richard Wright’s first collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. Donaldson finds in these works by two writers born in the same time and place but separated by the racial politics of the Jim Crow South a shared critique of the dehumanizing, alienating power of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “sombre veil of color” and of the violence inherent in and necessary to the perpetuation of the racial divide (qtd. in Donaldson 49). Donaldson illustrates the similar strategies Welty and Wright employ to figure resistance to the white gaze and to part the veil. Welty’s photographs are central to two essays in the collection. In “Eudora Welty’s Making a Date, Grenada Mississippi: One Photograph, Five Performances,” Keri Watson offers a perceptive analysis of the presentation and reception of Welty’s photograph in five different settings. Watson reads these five “politicized performances” of Making a Date in ways that capture Welty’s ongoing and changing challenges to the cultural construction of race (89). Mae Miller Claxton also considers the cultural implications of Welty’s 1930s photographs as well as several of Welty’s stories in “‘The Little Store’ in the Segregated South: Race and Consumer Culture in...