Mixed Race Studies

‘Brother Mine’ highlights unique relationships

The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper
Rochester, Michigan
2011-02-08

Ryan Hegedus

Reading other peoples’ mail can land you in serious trouble with the government.
 
Or, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer, it can land you a book deal.
 
Pfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland University, is the author of “Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, a back-and-forth account of over 120 letters between the two in the 1920s.”
 
Toomer, a young black author, began writing to Frank, an established white writer in New York, and the book details the unique friendship between the two.
 
“Dr. Pfeiffer’s work provides an important tool for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank,” said associate history professor and chair of the history department, Karen Miller. “Both Toomer and Frank were participants in the conflict over the construction of racial identity. Their correspondence helps us to understand how the debates over race worked themselves into friendships.”
 
In the summer of 1993, Pfeiffer was deciding on the topic of her dissertation at Yale University, and ended up at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the country’s best resources for African-American literature. The opportunity gave her the chance to do research in the primary archives.
 
It was at Beinecke that she decided on the topic of race passing.
 
Race passing was a “hot topic” in American literature at the turn of the century, Pfeiffer explained, where people who were legally defined as black because of previous generations, were actually light enough to pass for a white person.
 
“These people would take on a new identity and pass for white,” Pfeiffer said. “They would have this better opportunity as a white person than they would have as a black person, but then there would be all of this guilt and sense of loss because they’d have to leave their families. That’s really what my dissertation was about — about stories of characters who ‘pass.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Brother Mine:  The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank

University of Illinois Press
2010
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
14 black & white photographs

Edited by:

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Associate Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

An extraordinary literary friendship, preserved in letters

The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane.

While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves.

Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature

University of Illinois Press
2003
328 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02819-9

Edited by:

Jonathan Brennan, Professor of English
Mission College, Santa Clara, California

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African-Native American descent

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature.

Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the roles subjectivity, situational identities, and strategic discourse play in defining African-Native American literatures.

Brennan provides a thorough background to the literary tradition and a valuable overview to topics discussed in the essays. He examines African-Native American political and historical texts, travel narratives, and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, suggesting that this evolving oral tradition parallels the development of numerous Black Indian literary traditions in the United States and Latin America.

The diverse essays cover a range of literatures from African-Native American mythology among the Seminoles and mixed folktales among the Cherokee to autobiography, fiction, poetry, and captivity narratives. Contributors discuss, among other topics, the Brer Rabbit tales, shifting identities in African-Native American communities, the “creolization” of African American and Native American mythologies and religions, and Mardi Gras Indian performance. Also considered are Alice Walker’s development of an African-Native American identity in her fiction and essays and African-Native American subjectivity in the works of Toni Morrison and Sherman Alexie.