Mixed Race Studies

Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted

Broadview Press
2018-02-28
352 pages
5½” x 8½”
Hardcover ISBN: 9781554813858 / 1554813859
(Originally published in 1892)

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911)

Edited by:

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.

This edition engages the latest research on Harper’s life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper’s biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted
• Appendix A: Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation, Reconstruction and Its Demise
  1. From the Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
  2. United States Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott Decision (1857)
  3. From the First Confiscation Act (1861)
  4. From the Second Confiscation Act (1862)
  5. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
  6. From the Freedmen’s Bureau Act (1865)
  7. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
  8. From the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
  9. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
  10. The Compromise of 1877
  11. From United States Supreme Court Justice Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Appendix B: Not White? Then You Can’t Be Equal
  1. From Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes (1862)
  2. From Frances Harper, “Mrs. Frances E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme,” Christian Recorder (27 September 1862)
  3. From Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Campbell, The People v. Dean (1866)
• Appendix C: Black Families in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  2. Dictated letters between enslaved husbands and wives while separated by their owners
  3. From “Arrest of Fugitive Slaves,” Cincinnati Gazette (29 January 1856)
  4. Frances Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” 1857)
  5. Testimony about enslaved men and women who fled slavery to join the Union effort and often planned to return to help family members escape (1863)
  6. Letter from a black soldier to his children (1864)
  7. Letter from a black soldier to the owner of one of his daughters (1864)
  8. Newspaper Notices in Hopes of Finding Lost Loved Ones after Emancipation (1866–93)
• Appendix D: Education in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From the South Carolina Negro Act (1740)
  2. Account about an enslaved woman who ran a midnight school (1881)
  3. Account of teaching/learning in secret during slavery (1902)
  4. An account of finding the spark for learning while enslaved (1885)
  5. Accounts of the consequences of learning to read and write
  6. Account of black soldiers wanting education
  7. Account of recently emancipated people’s eagerness to learn
  8. Testimony on Ku Klux Klan preventing school attendance after Emancipation (1872)
• Appendix E: Preventing Freedom Even after Emancipation
  1. Laws constraining black girls and boys via apprenticeship and African Americans of every age via vagrancy statutes (1865)
  2. Testimony about Ku Klux Klan raping black women whose husbands/fathers voted (1871)
  3. From Henry W. Grady, “The Race Problem in the South” (1889)
  4. From Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)
• Appendix F: Black Women’s Activism
  1. From Frances Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866)
  2. Frances Harper, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” (1872)
  3. From Frances Harper, “Colored Women of America,” Englishwoman’s Review (15 January 1878)
  4. From Frances Harper, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the ColoredWoman,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (1888)
  5. From Frances Harper, “Enlightened Motherhood: An Address … Before the Brooklyn Literary Society” (15 November 1892)
  6. From Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of The Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation” (1893)
• Appendix G: Being Black and a Woman: Aesthetics and Reception
  1. William J. Watkins, “The Reformer,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (7 April 1854)
  2. Grace Greenwood, Impressions of Harper as a Speaker (1866)
  3. From Anna Julia Cooper, “The Status of Woman in America” (1892)
  4. Reviews of Iola Leroy
     1. “Publications Reviewed,” Christian Recorder (12 January 1893)
     2. From “Review 1,” Independent (5 January 1893)
     3. Richmond Planet (21 January 1893)
     4. From “Recent Fiction,” The Nation (23 February 1893)
     5. From “Our Book List,” A.M.E. Church Review (April 1893)
     6. “Book Review,” Friends’ Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (22 June 1893)
     7. Review of Reviews (January 1895)
     8. From “Recent Fiction,” Independent (29 October 1896)
     9. From Edward Elmore Brock, “Brock’s Literary Leaves,” Freeman (Indianapolis) (14 August 1897)
     10. [W.E.B. Du Bois,] “Writers,” Crisis (April 1911)
• Works Cited and Select Bibliography

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

Broadview Press
2016-05-04 (Originally Published in 1894)
304 pages
5½” x 8½”
Paperback ISBN: 9781554812660

Mark Twain

Edited by:

Hsuan L. Hsu, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Davis

The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd’head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins is a farcical tale of conjoined twins. Although the stories were long viewed as flawed narratives, their very incongruities offer a fascinating portrait of key issues—race, disability, and immigration—facing the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Hsuan Hsu’s introduction traces the history of literary critics’ response to these works, from the confusion of Twain’s contemporaries to the keen interest of current scholars. Extensive historical appendices provide contemporary materials on race discourse, legal contexts, and the composition and initial reception of the texts.

Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams: The Age of Obama and Beyond

Broadview Press
2016-01-05
190 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781554813162

Julius Bailey, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio

Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams is a moral call, a harkening and quickening of the spirit, a demand for recognition for those whose voices are whispered. Julius Bailey straddles the fence of social-science research and philosophy, using empirical data and current affairs to direct his empathy-laced discourse. He turns his eye to President Obama and his critics, racism, income inequality, poverty, and xenophobia, guided by a prophetic thread that calls like-minded visionaries and progressives to action. The book is an honest look at the current state of our professed city on a hill and the destruction left on the darker sides of town.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Rev. Dr. Michael L. Pfleger
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “I, Too, Sing America”
• Chapter 1: “I Can’t Breathe!” “So What! F??? Your Breath”
• Chapter 2: Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America
• Chapter 3: Racism: The Long March to Freedom and the New Jim Crow
• Chapter 4: Xenophobia: America Inside Out
• Chapter 5: Poverty: A Load Too Heavy to Bear
• Chapter 6: Income Inequality: The Unbridgeable Gap
• Chapter 7: Repositioning the Moral Arc
• Works Cited

The Octoroon

Broadview Press
2014-05-16 (orignially published in 1859)
136 pages
Paperback / PDF / ePub
ISBN: 9781554812110 / 1554812119

Dion Boucicault

Edited by:

Sarika Bose, Lecturer of English
University of British Columbia

Joseph Black, Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

et al.

Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroon was produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault’s dramas as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”

In The Octoroon—the most controversial play of his career—Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon—a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroon opened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation—as it did in its subsequent British production.

This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
• Appendix A: American Reviews
  • 1. “‘The Octoroon.’ A Disgrace to the North, a Libel on the South,” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (17 December 1859)
  • 2. From “The Octoroon,” The Charleston Courier, Tri-Weekly (22 December 1859)
  • 3. From “Winter Garden–First Night of ‘The Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
• Appendix B: English Reviews
  • 1. “Saving the Octoroon,” Punch (21 December 1861)
  • 2. From “Theatres and Music,” John Bull (Saturday, 23 November 1861)
  • 3. From “Adelphi” (Review of The Octoroon), The Athenaeum (23 November 1861)
  • 4. “Pan at the Play,” Fun (Saturday, 30 November 1861)
  • 5. “Adelphi Theatre” (Review of Revised Play), The Times [London] (12 December 1861)
• Appendix C: Letters to Editors Concerning the Lawsuit
  • 1. “The Octoroon Conflict: Financial and Political View of the Case–Letter from Mrs. Agnes Robertson Boucicault,” The New York Herald (Friday, 16 December 1859)
• Appendix D: A Selection of Letters from Boucicault Defending the Content of The Octoroon
  • 1. “Letter from the Author of the ‘Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
  • 2. “The Octoroon Gone Home,” New York Times (9 February 1860)
  • 3. “‘The Octoroon’: To the Editor of the Times,” The Times [London] (Wednesday, 20 November 1861)
• Appendix E: Boucicault on Acting
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, “The Art of Acting” (1882)
• Appendix F: Alternative Endings
  • 1. The Illustrated London News (14 December 1882)
  • 2. “Music and the Drama,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (Sunday, 15 December 1861)
  • 3. From The Octoroon: Founded on Dion Boucicault’s Celebrated and Original Melodrama (1897)
  • 4. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, Lacy’s Acting Edition, No. 963 (c. 1861)
  • 5. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Drama in Three Acts (26 October 1861)
• Appendix G: On Slavery
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, unpublished note, Theatre Museum, London (1861)
  • 2. From Fredrika Bremer, “Fredrika Bremer Sees the New Orleans Slave Market” (1853)
  • 3. From Civil Code of the State of Louisiana
• Appendix H: Illustrations
  • 1. From The Illustrated London News (30 November 1861)
  • 2. Cover, Reynolds Miscellany (4 January 1862)
  • 3. Cover, The Octoroon (Dick’s Standard Plays)
• Permissions Acknowledgments

An Imperative Duty

Broadview Press
March 2010 (Originally Published in 1891)
200 pages
ISBN: 9781551119144 / 1551119145

W. D. Howells (William Dean Howells) (1837-1920)

Edited by:

Paul R. Petrie, Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• W.D. Howells: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• An Imperative Duty
• Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews and Responses
• Appendix B: The “Tragic Mulatta” in Literature
  1. From Grace King, “The Little Convent Girl” (1893)
  2. From Matt Crim, “Was It An Exceptional Case?” (1891)
  3. W.D. Howells, “The Pilot’s Story” (1860)
• Appendix C: Interracial Marriage & the “Science” of Race
  1. From Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853)
  2. From J.C. Nott, Types of Mankind (1854)
  3. From Frederick L. Hoffman, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)
  4. Pace v. State of Alabama, 1883
  5. From Henry W. Grady, “In Plain Black and White” (1885)
  6. From Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American” (1900)
  7. From W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)
• Appendix D: W.D. Howells’s Theory of Realism—The “Editor’s Study” Columns
  1. May 1886 [Realism and Romance]
  2. November 1886 [Aesthetics and Ethics]
  3. April 1887 [Art, Truth, and Morality]
  4. September 1887 [Realism and Democracy]
  5. Dec 1887 [The Real and the Ideal Grasshopper]
  6. March 1888 [Can Fiction Help the People It Depicts?]
  7. December 1888 [Christmas Literature]
• Select Bibliography

Read the entire novel here.

The Woman of Colour

Broadview Press
2007-01-01
268 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781551111766 / 1551111764

Written by: Anonymous

Edited by:

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father’s will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed “widow” who flouts the conventional marriage plot.

The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman’s perspective.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose Fiction

A Note on the Text

The Woman of Colour, A Tale

Appendix A: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786)

Appendix B: Anonymous Poem “written by a Mulatto Woman” (1794)

Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction

1. From Agnes Musgrave, Solemn Injunction (1798)
2. From Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (1817)
3. From Edmund Marshall, Edmund and Eleonora: or Memoirs of the Houses of Summerfield and Gretton (1797)
4. From Robert Bissett, Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800)
5. From Mrs. Charles Mathews, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress (1791)

Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica

1. From Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1799)
2. From Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
3. From J.B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (1793)

Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives

1. From Richard Griffith, The Gordian Knot (1769)
2. From Hester Thrale, “Letter to Mrs. Pennington” (1802)
3. From Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792)
4. John Wesley, “Letter to William Wilberforce” (1791)

Appendix F: The Woman of Colour: Contemporary Reviews

1. The British Critic (March 1810)
2. The Critical Review (May 1810)
3. The Monthly Review (June 1810)

Appendix G: Jamaican Petitions, Votes of the Assembly, and an Englishman’s Will

1. From Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica (1792)
2. From Andrew Wright’s “Last Will and Testament” (1806)