Blushing bitterly: an affective and literary history of racial uplift after Reconstruction
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Everett, Gabrielle Kunti Marie.
Blushing bitterly: an affective and literary history of racial uplift after Reconstruction. Retrieved from
https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-5r9t-cb23Export
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TitleBlushing bitterly: an affective and literary history of racial uplift after Reconstruction
Date Created2019
Other Date2019-05 (degree)
SubjectAfrican American literature, Literatures in English, African American authors -- 20th century, Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963 -- Dark princess -- Criticism and interpretation, Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932 -- The marrow of tradition -- Criticism and interpretation, Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 1872-1906 -- The sport of the gods -- Criticism and interpretation, Hopkins, Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth). -- Of one blood -- Criticism and interpretation
Extent1 online resource (vi, 316 pages)
Description“Blushing Bitterly” asks: how did African American writers manage, deploy, and even circumscribe feeling during the era of racial uplift? African American writers and activists understood the question of feeling as central to national belonging. When the Supreme Court passed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision on the basis that it protected public feeling, the nation thereby segregated sentiment and belonging along racial lines. At the same time, racial uplift leaders and institutions espoused a politics of respectability that asked African Americans to monitor their affect. Yet novels by Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline E. Hopkins, Sutton Griggs, and W.E.B. Du Bois unleash unmanaged feeling to articulate claims to belonging within and beyond the US. “Blushing Bitterly” therefore complicates our understanding of the racial uplift movement as an affectively conservative project. Against uplifters’ explicit advice to temper feelings of anger or bitterness, many creative works of this era privilege an uncontainable, unmanageable surfeit of feeling. This surfeit is the location, I argue, of progressive potential.
This project takes up the question of literary form to rethink the racial uplift movement’s affective parameters. It argues that the novel is the central medium through which uplift authors theorized affect. Each chapter positions such uplift novels as Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1902-3), and Du Bois’ Dark Princess alongside racial uplift manuals, essays, speeches, and journals. These chapters then consider the affective aims of racial uplift philosophy in the spheres of the public and the private, the body and mind, and the globe. While Chesnutt and Dunbar remain firmly situated in the US, their novels reveal a deep frustration with the nation. In contrast, the novels of Hopkins, Griggs, and Du Bois imagine transnational forms of belonging that shatter the national frame and refuse citizenship as the horizon of politics. “Blushing Bitterly” shows that racial uplift philosophy, and the affect management it demands, often fails in practice. The authors in this study encourage expressing unmanaged feeling. The novel’s formal characteristics allow freer forms of feeling than permitted by uplift philosophy. Their novels make room for negative feelings and model how to make way for individual agency in feeling. Theorizing these writers emphasizes the import of affect in African American literature and revises the genealogy of contemporary affect studies. While scholars attribute the “affective turn” in critical theory and literary studies to the early 2000s, “Blushing Bitterly” contends that African American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had already made this turn by engaging in vital affective work.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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