Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

by Cassandra Jackson

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253110459
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	11/08/2004
Series:	Blacks in the Diaspora
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	285 KB

About the Author

Cassandra Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern
University.

Cassandra Jackson is Assistant Professor of the College of New
Jersey.

Table of Contents

<FMO>Contents<\>
Acknowledgments

Introduction:
Race and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Interracial Fictions
1. The Last of
the Mohicans or the First of the Mulattos? Slavery and Native American Removal in
Cooper's American Frontier
2. A Land without Names: National Anxiety in The
Slave; or, The Memoirs of Archy Moore
3. Reconstructing America in Lydia
Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and Frances E. W. Harper's Minnie's
Sacrifice
4. Doubles in Eden in George Washington Cable's The
Grandissimes
5. "I will gladly share with them my richer heritage":
Schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's Mandy
Oxendine
Epilogue: Formulating a National
Self

Notes
Bibliography
Index