Anthology of Interracial Literature : Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

by Sollors, Werner

• ISBN13: 9780814781449
• ISBN10: 0814781446
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-01
• Publisher: New York University Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.Thanks again to Werner Sollors for oxygenating our thoughts on race and identity, and their relationship to that holy dunce, the literary imagination. Intelligently multicultural, this compendium provokes and entertains even as it exposes still-live nerves. Sollors' scholarship is erudite but relevant; his choices speak with tactful passion about matters which touch us all. --Gish Jen, author of Mona in the Promised LandMany startling textual artifacts included.--The New York TimesThe first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.--New York TimesThe scope of this collection is impressive. The introduction is invaluable, providing much-needed context. The volume's topic and scope make it a valuable resource.--ChoiceNo one has done more important work to place interracial association at the center of American culture than Werner Sollors. This extraordinarily rich anthology is an excellent addition to the study of this fascinating subject.--Randall Kennedy, author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity & AdoptionWerner Sollors's dazzling collection will enrich our understanding of constructions of race and identity in fresh and provocative ways and will intrigue anyone who cares about literature.--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University An essential book for those contending with race and literature. With this collection it is clear that race is a category that has been marked both as a boundary that cannot be crossed and as a separation that is constantly breached. A necessary and crucial contribution.--Gerald Early, Washington University in St. LouisRecommended for academic libraries and for any reader working around the race rubric--Library JournalA white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross--or are crossed by--what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(6)
Before Color Prejudice
``Riddle'' (5th century B.C.)	7	(1)
Cleobulus
From Parzival (1197--1210)	8	(49)
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance Novellas
From The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night	57	(12)
From Il Novellino (1475)	69	(16)
Masuccio Salernitano
From Hecatommithi (1565)	85	(12)
Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio
Love Poetry in Black and White
``The Beautiful Slave-Girl'' (1614)	97	(2)
Giambattista Marino
``A Negress Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Colour'' (1633)	99	(2)
George Herbert
``A Faire Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her'' (1658)	101	(2)
John Cleveland
``The Inversion'' (1657), ``One Enamour'd on a Black-moor'' (1657), ``A Black Nymph Scorning a Fair Boy Courting Her'' (1657)	103	(4)
Eldred Revett
``To Mrs. Diana Cecyll'' (1665), ``The Brown Beauty'' (1665), ``Sonnet of Black Beauty'' (1665), ``Another Sonnet to Black It Self'' (1665)	107	(3)
Edward Herbert
``In Laudem Æthiopissæ'' (1778)	110	(5)
James de la Cour
From Colonial Exoticism and the Noble Savage to Antislavery Writing
The Isle of Pines (1668)	115	(17)
Henry Neville
From Oroonoko: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1696)	132	(11)
Thomas Southerne
``On a Young Lady's Weeping at Oroonooko'' (1732), ``To a Gentleman in Love with a Negro Woman'' (1732)	143	(2)
John Whaley
Two Versions of the Story of Inkle and Yarico	145	(7)
The Dying Negro (1773)	152	(9)
Thomas Day
John Bicknell
Letter to James Tobin (1788)	161	(6)
Olaudah Equiano
Black and White in Europe and the Americas, 1800--1870
The Engagement in Santo Domingo (1811)	167	(22)
Heinrich von Kleist
Ourika (1823)	189	(19)
Claire de Duras
The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827--1828)	208	(24)
Alexander Pushkin
``The Quadroons'' (1842)	232	(8)
Lydia Maria Child
From Georges (1843)	240	(13)
Alexandre Dumas
From Beyond the Seas (1863--1864)	253	(25)
Theodor Storm
``The Quadroon Girl'' (1842)	278	(2)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
``The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point'' (1848)	280	(8)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
``The Pilot's Story'' (1860)	288	(4)
William Dean Howells
From Mulatto: An Original Romantic Drama in Five Acts (1840)	292	(8)
Hans Christian Andersen
The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana: A Play in Five Acts (1859)	300	(37)
Dion Boucicault
From Black and White: A Drama in Three Acts (1869)	337	(13)
Wilkie Collins
Charles Fechter
From Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1863)	350	(33)
David Goodman Croly
George Wakeman
Realism and Local Color
Madame Delphine (1881)	383	(38)
George Washington Cable
From ``The Pariah'' (1895)	421	(3)
James Edwin Campbell
``Boitelle'' (1889)	424	(7)
Guy de Maupassant
``The Father of Desiree's Baby'' (1893)	431	(5)
Kate Chopin
``Uncle Wellington's Wives'' (1899)	436	(25)
Charles W. Chesnutt
Harlem Renaissance and Modernism
``The Mulatto to His Critics'' (1918)	461	(1)
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.
``The Octoroon'' (1922), ``Cosmopolite'' (1922), ``The Riddle'' (1925)	462	(2)
Georgia Douglas Johnson
From The Vengeance of the Gods (1922)	464	(9)
William Pickens
``Hope'' (1922)	473	(3)
Waldo Frank
``Withered Skin of Berries'' (1923)	476	(22)
Jean Toomer
``Confession'' (1929)	498	(6)
Margery Latimer
All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)	504	(26)
Eugene O'Neill
``Near White'' (1925), ``Two Who Crossed a Line'' (1925)	530	(2)
Countee Cullen
``Cross'' (1925), ``Mulatto'' (1927), Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South (1935)	532	(27)
Langston Hughes
``The Mulatto'' (1925), ``Near-White'' (1932)	559	(14)
Claude McKay
``The Pink Hat'' (1926)	573	(4)
Caroline Bond Day
``Ballad of Pearl May Lee'' (1945)	577	(6)
Gwendolyn Brooks
From the 1960s to the Present
The Owl Answers (1963)	583	(11)
Adrienne Kennedy
From Oxherding Tale (1982)	594	(12)
Charles Johnson
From The Darker Face of the Earth (1994)	606	(28)
Rita Dove
From Buck (2001)	634	(19)
Francesca J. Petrosino
From The Secret Life of Fred Astaire (2001)	653	(14)
Itabari Njeri
Sources	667	(6)
Index	673	(2)
About the Editor	675