Romancing the Shadow: Poe and RaceJ. Gerald Kennedy, Liliane Weissberg The nine essays gathered here pursue the provocative implications of Toni Morrison's claim that no early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of "American Africanism," an image of racialized blackness destined to haunt the Euro-American imagination. As contributors to this volume reveal, Poe's response to the "shadow" of blackness--like his participation in the cultural construction of whiteness--was both problematic and revealing. Born in Boston but raised mostly in Richmond, surrounded by the practices of slaveholding culture, Poe seems to have shared notions of racial hierarchy and Anglo-Saxon supremacy pervasive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. That he promulgated racist stereotypes in depicting black servants--his Jupiters and Pompeys--cannot be denied; that he complicated these stereotypes with veiled, subversive implications, however, gives his fiction peculiar relevance to the task of historicizing racial attitudes in antebellum culture. Was Poe an unabashed proslavery apologist, a careerist who avoided racial politics, a "gradualist" who hoped slavery would just disappear, or an ideological chameleon? Were Poe's views on race extreme or unusual? Overtly, in tales such as "The Gold-Bug," "The Journal of Julius Rodman," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and covertly in such works as "The Black Cat" and "Hop-Frog," Poe alternately caricatured and demonized the racial Other, yet he often endowed such figures with shrewdness and resourcefulness, at times portraying their defiance as inevitable and even understandable. In Romancing the Shadow, leading interpreters of nineteenth-century American literature and culture debate Poe's role in inventing the African of the white imagination. Their readings represent an array of positions, and while they reflect some consensus about Poe's investment in racialized types and tropes, they also testify to the surprising ways that race embedded itself in his work--and the diverse conclusions that can be drawn therefrom. |
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Page xi
... color - blind " democracy as misguided , how- ever , Michael Eric Dyson has asserted that " we cannot overcome the history of racial oppression in our nation without understanding and ad- dressing the subtle , subversive ways race ...
... color - blind " democracy as misguided , how- ever , Michael Eric Dyson has asserted that " we cannot overcome the history of racial oppression in our nation without understanding and ad- dressing the subtle , subversive ways race ...
Page xiv
... color white with mystical , even sacred , significance -- as epitomized by the huge " shrouded human figure " at novel's end , whose skin is " of the perfect whiteness of the snow " ( CW , 1 : 206 ) . Poe also laced several reviews with ...
... color white with mystical , even sacred , significance -- as epitomized by the huge " shrouded human figure " at novel's end , whose skin is " of the perfect whiteness of the snow " ( CW , 1 : 206 ) . Poe also laced several reviews with ...
Page xviii
... Color - Blind " Racism . 2. Shelley Fisher Fishkin , Was Huck Black ? Mark Twain and African - American Voices ; Dana Nelson , The Word in Black and White : Reading " Race " in American Lit- erature , 1638-1867 ; Eric Lott , Love and ...
... Color - Blind " Racism . 2. Shelley Fisher Fishkin , Was Huck Black ? Mark Twain and African - American Voices ; Dana Nelson , The Word in Black and White : Reading " Race " in American Lit- erature , 1638-1867 ; Eric Lott , Love and ...
Page 42
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Contents
3 | |
2 The Poetics of Whiteness | 41 |
3 Edgar Allan Poes Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier | 75 |
4 Poe Persons and Property | 106 |
5 Black White and Gold | 127 |
6 Presence of Mind | 157 |
7 The Murders in the Rue Morgue | 177 |
8 Poes Philosophy of Amalgamation | 205 |
9 Trust No Man | 225 |
Bibliography | 259 |
Contributors | 277 |
Index | 279 |
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Page 51 - TO HELEN. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.
Page 64 - And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor: And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted — nevermore...
Page 63 - Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door: Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, — "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,
Page 208 - And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country...
Page 63 - Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, 'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one burden bore, — Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore Of Never — nevermore.
Page 131 - This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the main-land by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen.
Page 65 - It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us - but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.
Page 245 - For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine ; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.
Page 58 - ... of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate ; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate !) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.