Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt's work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt's own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels. I draw on Victor Turner's definition of liminality, which comes from Turner's rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt's characters frequently attain liminal status in his work--they take on the "betwixt and between" characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt's characters end up as marginals--Turner's term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century in America. Chesnutt's novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself. And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

This dissertation examines slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, and histories of slavery. Using critical race theory, narrative theory, and philosophical critiques of objectivity, I trace how academic histories, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, developed a grammar of white supremacy that excluded African-Americans from equal citizenship. These texts claimed to present a “transparent” view of the past by highlighting the perceived (through physical, documentable evidence) and eliding the role of perceiver and of language in the creation of narrative history. In order to write themselves into history, I argue, both fugitive slaves and contemporary novelists have drawn on the oral conjure and trickster tales that enslaved African-Americans told as a means of subverting the masters' authority. Both conjure and trickster narratives deny that narrative can present a transparent description of the past, and yet they work in contradictory, sometimes antagonistic ways. To counter the grammar of white supremacy and its Cartesian claim to a “universal,” disembodied perspective, conjure narratives emphasize the embodied perceiver, while trickster narratives emphasize language, as the mediums through which we know both history and identity. Conjure narratives such as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt's conjure tales, Bontemps's Black Thunder, and Morrison's Beloved depict the dominant discourse as a “magic” rhetoric that transforms reality while claiming to simply describe it. Invoking magic and ancestral spirits, conjure discourse disrupts mechanistic assumptions about reality, reunites body, mind, and spirit, and creates a communal, participatory history. In contrast, trickster narratives such as Bibb's Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Chesnutt's “The Dumb Witness,” Reed's Flight to Canada , and Johnson's Oxherding Tale present the master narrative as a set of generic conventions that we have been duped into accepting as reality. Through anachronism, parody, mixed genres, and linguistic “sleight of hand,” trickster narratives disrupt teleological history, erase distinctions between slave and free, black and white, past and present, and remind readers that narrative constructs both history and identity. Finally, I examine Johnson's Middle Passage, which integrates trickster and conjure narrative to explore the tension between self and community.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1962. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Francis Shoemaker. Dissertation Committee: Lennox Grey, Leland B. Jacobs, . Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-301).

In this study I provide close textual analysis of the novels of three women writers whose work displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examine the ways in which their racial representations interplay with their depictions of gender and sexuality. Writing from a consciously gendered and racialized position, I combine personal narrative with theoretical discussion as I trace common racial themes, such as racial violence, cross-racial couples, and the denial or erasure of race. In an examination of other critics who have employed personal narrative as a form of literary analysis, I affirm the value of teaching and reading literary texts as a mode of activism. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists, exploring the ways in which such depictions require a transracial, cross-gender performance on the part of the woman writer. Recurring patterns of racial dynamics emerge in the larger body of each author's work. A West Indian female racial identity emerges in Rhys' work as, consciously and unconsciously, her white heroines identify with black slave women, and seek another form of "blackness" through alcoholic oblivion. Gordimer's white women seek to slough off the racial privilege they are only too aware of, but Gordimer creates narratives in which white female identity merges textually with black male identity and black female identity, linguistically and through shared political action. Morrison's black women, doubly othered by race and by gender, seek to transcend all boundaries through wildly transgressive behavior, enacted boldly or imagined through language. In my final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of female racial identity in American, South African and Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture which signal the possibility of fluid identity. I demonstrate how Morrison, Gordimer, and Rhys employ a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of consciousness and of society. Literature is an ideal vehicle for entering the in-between space imaginatively, and dwelling there longer and longer as we rid ourselves of preconceived notions of race and gender.

This dissertation examines the process of miscegenation in the work of four authors who occupy pivotal positions in American writing about race. It is concerned with a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts produced by William Wells Brown, George Washington Cable, Pauline Hopkins, and Thomas Dixon between the years 1846 and 1915. This study will examine how miscegenation provided these authors with a way of narrativizing American race relations in a period which encompasses slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction and Redemption, as well as the creation of a segregated South and an imperial America. Individual chapters engage in cultural as well as literary analyses by reading mixed-race characters as literary signs which gave rise to a wide range of narrative possibilities, as political instruments which allowed each author to intervene in contemporary debates about the construction of American history, the nature of race, and laws designed to regulate interracial contact. While remaining aware of the personal and political differences which separate the writers under consideration, this study notes similarities in the ways in which each makes use of mixed-race characters and miscegenation plots. Attention to gender likewise unites the individual chapters. The fact of mixed parentage signifies differently for male and female characters, no matter what plot these authors chose. For each, the figure of the quadroon woman presented special problems, as indicated by the sheer number of pages each devoted to telling child re-telling her story. This study traces the permutations of plots centered around quadroon women by reading a number of fictional works by each of the primary authors. It also examines the ways in which constructions of gender are overdetermined by methods of race representation which appear in the works of African-American writers, as well as in that of their white counterparts. By focusing on a works which illustrate the interconnectedness between black and white Americans from slavery through segregation--works created by authors who themselves represent, in their persons as well as their politics, a variety of subject positions--this dissertation seeks to locate itself in the context of current efforts to produce a new canon of American literature, one more truly reflective of the varied nature of American life. It examines a literature not of race, but of race relations; one which repeatedly describes positions on a racial continuum too complicated to be characterized in terms of black and white.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-189).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 11, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald L. Strickland (chair), Jonathan M. Rosenthal, Cecil Giscombe. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-208) and abstract. Also available in print.

This dissertation is a two-fold project. The first half is a methodological examination of how memoirs can be used as instruments of historical understanding. The second half applies this methodology to the study of several memoirs written about life in the American south in the first half of the twentieth century. Memoir is a peculiar genre which straddles the disciplines of literature and history. Currently the field of autobiography studies is dominated by literary critics. However, there is nothing inherent about the genre dictating that this should be the case. This dissertation analyzes memoirs from a historical perspective. I argue that insights drawn from life writing have the potential to greatly enhance our historical understanding. I broach several topics including the problem of defining autobiography, the disciplinary proprietorship of the memoir, the relationship between history and theory, and the linkages between the historical study of memoirs and interdisciplinary conversations about historical memory. I describe the nature of historical reality, arguing that the individual thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and misperceptions of each historical agent are constitutive of the historical reality of a particular moment. Memoirs capture the entire universe as it appeared from one acknowledged perspective. Furthermore, skilled, creative writers are especially adept at capturing the complexity of a past moment. Authors of literary memoirs draw on the aesthetic power of literary language and on literary devices such as metaphor and irony to powerfully portray particular historical moments. I apply these ideas to an examination of memoirs about life in the segregated American south. I analyze memoirs written by African Americans, by whites, by men, by women, and by individuals with various political points of views. I find these accounts bear certain similarities to one another but are often strikingly at odds. Different ideas about the psychological impact of segregation, dissimilar characterizations of the black community, and contrary descriptions of the same moment and the same geographical space reveal that there is no singular Jim Crow experience. Historical reality is multifaceted, and the complexities of individual experiences are best captured in artfully constructed literary memoirs.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-207).