Race, Work and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930

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by Michele Birnbaum

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published November 2003, 218 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521824257

Race, Work and Desire analyzes literary representations of work relationships across the color-line from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Michele Birnbaum examines inter-racial bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten - exploring the way servants and employers, doctors and patients, and patrons and artists negotiate their racial differences for artistic and political ends. Situating these relationships in literary and cultural context, Birnbaum argues that the literature reveals the complexity of cross-racial relations in the workplace, which, although often represented as an oasis of racial harmony, is in fact the very site where race politics are most fiercely engaged. This study productively complicates current debates about cross-racial collaboration in American literary and race studies. 3 half-tones

 Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Working relations and racial desire
1. Dressing down the first lady: Elizabeth Keckley's Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House
2. Off-color patients in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells' An Imperative Duty
3. 'Alien hands' in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
4. 'For blood that is not yours': Langston Hughes and the art of patronage
Epilogue: 'Co-workers in the kingdom of culture'