Overview
This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed
African and European descent in the works of African American and European American
writers of the 19th century. The importance of mulatto figures as agents of
ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained
critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown's melodramatic stereotype of the
mulatto as "tragic figure," Cassandra Jackson's close study of nine works
of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political
ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction
about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity. She
analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the "mulatto," nation building, and
the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by
James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper,
Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles
Chesnutt.
Blacks in the Diaspora -- Claude A. Clegg III,
editor
Darlene Clark Hine, David Barry Gaspar, and John McCluskey, founding
editors