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©2019 Gabrielle Kunti Marie Everett ALL ©2019 Gabrielle Kunti Marie Everett ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BLUSHING BITTERLY: AN AFFECTIVE AND LITERARY HISTORY OF RACIAL UPLIFT AFTER RECONSTRUCTION By GABRIELLE KUNTI MARIE EVERETT A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfilment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Douglas A. Jones, Jr. And approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2019 Abstract of the Dissertation Blushing Bitterly: An Affective and Literary History of Racial Uplift After Reconstruction by Gabrielle Everett Dissertation Director: Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “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 ii 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. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe so many thanks to the teachers, scholars, and friends who made this project possible. My dream team of a committee, Douglas A. Jones, Dana Luciano, Cheryl A. Wall, and Gene Andrew Jarrett provided encouragement and inspiration. Beginning with coursework, Doug pushed my thinking and writing every step of the way. He has been the best director, mentor, and teacher for me. I appreciate so much the time and care he put into bettering my project and helping me become a better scholar. Dana has been an especially generous and incisive reader. Her work, as with all my committee members, continues to inspire my own. I’m especially honored that Cheryl joined my committee. Beyond the dissertation, she has shown me what it means to be a kind, brilliant teacher and scholar of African American literature. I’m beyond grateful to have had her guidance throughout my time at Rutgers. I thank, too, Gene Jarrett, for kindly agreeing to serve as my outside reader. I couldn’t have asked for a better committee, and I’ll consider myself quite the success if I can go on to teach and write just a little bit like they do. In coursework, in orals, as advisors and mentors, and in conversation, Michelle Stephens, Evie Shockley, Stéphane Robolin, Carter Mathes, Brad Evans, Elin Diamond, and Meredith McGill encouraged me to think more deeply about the relationship between form and feeling and helped me in so many other ways. I’m grateful to the Rutgers English Department and Mellon Foundation for funding archival research that proved invaluable for this project. In the graduate office, big hugs and thanks go to Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack for the endless candy, kindness, and care. iv At Rutgers, I have been especially lucky to make excellent friends. I’m so grateful to Margarita Castromán, Tara Gildea, Moyang Li, Will Burch, Michael Monescalchi, and Rebecca Lipperini for their friendship and their intellectual generosity. I can’t thank them enough, not just for all the hours they spent talking this project through, but for making New York and Rutgers feel like my home away from home. I can’t imagine graduate school without them, and I certainly can’t imagine writing this dissertation without their company. I wrote at least half this dissertation at coffee shops with Margarita, so here’s to all the cappuccinos and treats that got us through. My parents have always supported my love of reading and writing, even when this meant I regularly disappeared with a book. My sisters and brother, my nieces and nephews, and my friends keep me grounded, busy, and happy. Kishori Drivas, Govinda Jones, and Jahnava Chan Edwards are the best friends I could ask for. Kish and Govi, my “girl family,” have been part of this since the beginning. This project is dedicated to my family and friends, and to my Grampa Tex, who gave me my first books of poetry. This project has been a labor of love—for these authors and these texts. And, while Frederick Douglass does not appear extensively in these pages, his work is also at the heart of this project. I’m so happy that I’ve found my way to this place, these people, and these texts. I’m privileged to do this work and to have been guided by this group of scholars. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation …………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………...vi Introduction: “What Does It Feel Like to be a Problem?”: Racial Uplift’s Affects………………………………………………………………….………1 Chapter 1: Beyond “Standards of Feeling”: Bitterness in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition………………………………………………......28 Chapter 2: Tasting Bitterness: Family Affects and Blues Naturalism in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of Gods………………….…………...94 Chapter 3: Suspending Animation: Racial Uplift’s Mind/Body Problem in Pauline E. Hopkins’ Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self…………………....163 Chapter 4: “Some Vast Emancipation of the World”: Affective Transparency and (Inter)National Attachment in W.E.B Du Bois’ Dark Princess: A Romance…………………………………………………….……………...224 Epilogue: “Free Within Ourselves”: Affective Strategies for Gaining Agency……...289 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….………….299 vi 1 Introduction “What Does It Feel Like to be a Problem?”: Racial Uplift’s Affects Between the other world and me there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly: How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem, I seldom answer a word. —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) “Blushing Bitterly: An Affective and Literary History of Racial Uplift After Reconstruction” takes W.E.B. Du Bois’ opening question in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as its critical directive. While Du Bois states that “he seldom answered a word” when asked how it feels to be a problem, the passage nonetheless offers several ways to think through a response. In the first sentence, we see that feeling operates as a racialized affective barrier: this question lies “between the other world and me.” Du Bois also shows that this question can neither be asked nor answered directly, so attempting to discuss racial feelings necessitates formal creativity. This passage also demonstrates that Du Bois must manage his own affects, especially when the question of racial feeling arises. As he states, he modulates his response according to the context in which the question is asked. What might happen, though, if Du Bois did not manage his affects, if the boiling weren’t “reduced”? What shifts in race relations might then occur? In seeking to answer Du Bois’ query, this dissertation turns to the dominant literary form of the racial uplift movement: the novel. It therefore asks further: How do the novels of the 2 racial uplift movement at once register affect management and the surfeit of racial feeling that cannot be managed? Racial uplift writers had immense faith in their ability to transform the nation, race, and even the world by successfully transmitting affect through the novel.
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