Mixed Race Studies

Remarkable Particulars: David Gamut and the Alchemy of Race in The Last of the Mohicans

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 58, Number 1, 2012 (No. 226 O.S.)
pages 36-70
DOI: 10.1353/esq.2012.0010

Deidre Dallas Hall
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

David Gamut, the hapless psalmodist traveling with Major Heyward and his charges in The Last of the Mohicans, could not appear less suited to life in the wilderness of upstate New York, a war zone fiercely contested by the French, the English, and the Indians. With a temperament “given to mercy and love,” the pious and pacific Gamut brandishes a pitch pipe instead of a rifle or a sword; according to the wily Hawk-eye, in a frontier fight, “this singer is as good as nothing.” Hawk-eye’s dismissal of Gamut mirrors critical neglect: as David Seed notes, “to judge by Cooper criticism David Gamut seems to be the most forgettable character” in the 1826 novel. Within wider considerations of Cooper’s text, Gamut appears only fleetingly as a figure of fun, a stock character “representing the absurdity and pathos in the wilderness of men who will not touch a gun but take quite literally the Christian injunction to return good for evil.” Such assessments stem from the ostensible “incongruity of his presence in the wilderness,” for “as a psalmodist, he can scarcely have any conceivable connection with the novel’s central themes of nostalgia for the disappearing Indian and anxiety over the question of miscegenation.”

However, I find the psalmodist more than “conceivably connected” to these themes. Complicating traditional readings that focus exclusively on the novel’s rhetorical reinforcement of nineteenth-century race thinking, I argue that this quirky character enables The Last of the Mohicans to introduce important exceptions to the racial rules. I read the body of David Gamut as a hybridized construction around which signs not only of the Puritan but also of the Indian and the Jew gather. This body increasingly emerges as a site of racial ambiguity, a screen upon which a drama of cultural flux unfolds—a drama that points to the pull of the disappearing Indian and push of the arriving immigrant in Cooper’s own time. Such representation suggests an active engagement, substantiated by retrospective reflections in Cooper’s travel writing and late novels on the increasing prominence of Jews in the early republic, with the contemporary discourse of probationary whiteness. Described by Matthew Jacobson as a kind of “racial alchemy,” this discourse “whitened” suspect Europeans such as Jews and Catholics through imaginary contrast with the Indian in the West and the slave in the South, facilitating a national consolidation of whiteness essential to the rhetoric of nonwhite removal and containment. With the astonishing survival of the hybridized, pseudo-Jewish Gamut, Cooper’s text seems to anticipate the masses of immigrants that would flood ports in the North only a few years after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, but ultimately, this early work stands as uneasy witness to the discursive whitening of American Jews and questionable immigrants: when Cooper revisits the question of probationary whiteness in his last novel, The Oak Openings (1848), that narrative’s analogue to David Gamut quickly meets a violent end—a clear corrective to the racial redefinitions suggested by The Last of the Mohicans.
 
Jews in America: David Gamut and the Confluence of Race Thinking
 
The grotesquely attenuated figure of David Gamut appears in the opening moments of the narrative as a “marked exception” to the bystanders watching the departure of a British detachment from the frontier stronghold of Fort Edward. As this mysterious stranger falls in with the Duncan Heyward party, the narrator withholds the newcomer’s name and history, instead…

From Paranoid to Reparative: Narratives of Cultural Identification in the Social Sciences

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2012
pages 193-211
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2012.0007

Ashley Barnwell, Ashworth Lecturer in Sociology
School of Social and Political Sciences
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

This article tries to draw out the complexity with which people collate their cultural identities. It takes genealogy research as a case study. Looking specifically at an episode of the popular television program Who Do You Think You Are? starring John Hurt, the paper asks whether the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ can fully capture the fluid, social, and often unconscious means by which people attempt to verify and position their life stories. It also uses the theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to think about how we attribute an author’s motive.

“Maneuvers of Silence and the Task of ‘New Negro’ Womanhood”

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2012
pages 46-68
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2012.0006

Emily M. Hinnov, Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Lecturer of English
Granite State College, Concord, New Hampshire

Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic mechanism, wrought mainly by the World War and its aftermath. Along the entire gamut of social, economic and political attitudes, the New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted is resolutely marching toward the liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general.

— Editorial, The Messenger’s “New Negro Woman” issue (1923)
But I have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman; [it’s] so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game of TABOO.

— Anne Spencer, qtd. in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927)
Here is a woman who tried to be decisive in extremis. She “spoke,” but women did not, do not, “hear” her. Thus she can be defined as a “subaltern”—a person without lines of social mobility.

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Given the primitivist stereotypes projected upon African American women as oversexed, exotic creatures during the Harlem Renaissance era, contemporaneous poet Anne Spencer’s statement suggests that women writers’ doubly conscious performance of self must have been challenging (to say the least). With her comment about the state of “New Negro Womanhood” in mind, we might ask: to what extent were women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance successful in critiquing representations of race or gender within the context of that male-dominated literary and cultural movement? Forthright literary depictions of race, gender, and mobility in now canonical Harlem Renaissance works by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston allow expression of varied facets of the African American woman’s experience during the early part of the twentieth century. Hurston’s women (and Hurston herself) refuse to be “tragically colored” and instead embrace the power inherent in their female sexuality—even using it, in part, remain perpetually mobile. For Larsen, however, the triple bind of double-consciousness, female sexuality, and white supremacy eventually disallows any true mobility for her fictional characters. When Larsen was accused of plagiarism in 1930, there were no legal charges, but her career never recovered from this blow. It seemed that “in America, whites might borrow from blacks with impunity, but Negro use of white materials is always suspect” (Douglas 105). As Ann Douglas writes, “The New Negro was a figure with few claims on mainline America’s attention, interest, or sympathy. If he insulted or displeased, he could be cut off, erased, without thought or regret” (106). It is difficult to determine how much mutuality between black and white artists and audiences could have existed in light of Larsen’s fate. She was “cut off” from what has developed into the African American literary canon essentially because she was a black female artist working within the confines of a racist and sexist culture. Thankfully, Larsen’s rediscovery in the 1980s, and the subsequent inclusion of her work in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms, enabled Larsen’s legacy to resist such erasure. Larsen and Hurston’s work has triumphantly evaded the threat of removal from the literary canon thanks to the gynocritical efforts of many feminist scholars, while other writers of the era still languish on the critical precipice of silence.

In this essay, I am especially interested in the ways in which two still largely ignored Harlem Renaissance women writers, Elise Johnson McDougald, in her more straightforward essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” and Marita O. Bonner, in her multigenred, haltingly-titled “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” use silence as a means to maneuver among the various identity positions that comprise the interstices of “New Negro Womanhood.” Placing them within the context of more widely known writers of their era such as Hurston and Larsen is edifying,…

The Crime of Being Married

Life Magazine
1966-03-18
pages 85-
Source: Library of Virginia

Photographs by Grey Villet

A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation

She is Negro, he is white, and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.

Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and livelihood…

Read the article here.

Drawn in Bloodlines: Blood, Pollution, Identity, and Vampires in Japanese Society

University of Texas, Austin
May 2012
117 pages

Benjamin Paul Miller

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

This thesis is an examination of the evolution of blood ideology, which is to say the use of blood as an organizing metaphor, in Japanese society. I begin with the development of blood as a substance of significant in the eighth century and trace its development into a metaphor for lineage in the Tokugawa period. I discuss in detail blood’s conceptual and rhetorical utility throughout the post-Restoration period, first examining its role in establishing a national subjectivity in reference to both the native intellectual tradition of the National Learning and the foreign hegemony of race. I then discuss the rationalization of popular and national bloodlines under the auspices of the popular eugenics movement, and the National Eugenics Bill. Then, I discuss the racialization this conception of blood inflicted on the Tokugawa era Outcastes, and its persistent consequences. Through the incongruity of the Outcastes ability to “pass” despite popular expectations that their blood pollution was visibly demonstrative, I introduce the notion of blood anxiety. Next, I address the conceptual and rhetorical role blood played in articulating Japan’s empire and imperial ambitions, focusing on the Theory of Common Descent and the Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus report. I follow this discussion with a detailed examination of the postwar reconceptualization of national subjectivity, which demands native bloodlines and orthodox cultural expressions, and which effectively de-legitimized minority populations. As illustration of this point, I describe the impact of this new subjectivity on both the Zainichi and the Nikkeijin in lengthy case studies. Finally, I conclude this examination with a consideration of blood ideology’s representation in popular culture. I argue that the subgenre of vampire media allegorizes many of the assumptions and anxieties surrounding blood that have developed since the Restoration, and demonstrates the imprint of blood ideology on contemporary society.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • Blood Matters
  • Thesis Organization
• Chapter One: The Development of Blood as an Organizing Metaphor
  • The Blood Bowl Sutra and the Feminization of Blood Pollution
  • Sōtō Zen and the Dissemination of Blood Determinism
  • Lineage and a New Vocabulary
• Chapter Two: Bloodlines in Modern Japanese Society
  • A State Without a Nation
  • The Formulation of the Family-State
  • Civil Code and Constitution
  • Eugenics and the Rationalization of Bloodlines
    • Race, Science, and the Introduction of Eugenic Thought
    • Popular Eugenics
    • State Eugenics
  • From Outcastes to Burakumin
    • Outcastness as Pollution
    • The Racialization of the Outcastes
    • Infiltration and Blood Anxiety
• Chapter Three: The Empire
  • Blood-Kinship and Overseas Expansion
  • Imperial Manifesto
• Chapter Four – Postwar Reconceptualization and the De-legitimization of Minority Populations
  • The Aesthetics of Ethnic Homogeneity
  • Blood and Culture
  • Zainichi
    • Colonial Koreans and Their Subjective Shift
    • Hereditary Foreigners
  • The Nikkeijin
    • Immigration and the Racially Homogenous State
    • The Sakoku-Kaikoku Debate
    • 1990 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act
    • Culture Clash
• Chapter Five – Blood Ideology in the Popular Media
  • The Vampire Boom
  • The Vampire as Blood Allegory
• Bibliography
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.