United States Realism and the (Conceptual) Problem of Race: Realists and Race Science from 1877 to 1905 (2006)
Daigle, Jonathan R. (Author)
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Schaub, Thomas
Edition Details: Advisor: Schaub, Thomas
Physical Details: 370 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation examines how American novelists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century created new forms of realism to address a set of scientific questions concerning race, progress, and the definition of culture. The writers I study---Sarah Orne Jewett, a supremacist; William Dean Howells, a race liberal; George Washington Cable, a bold anti-segregationist; and Paul Laurence Dunbar, "the black poet laureate"---were not only conversant with new scientific developments, they themselves were social scientists. Examining realists' fiction alongside their sociological papers, ethnological histories, and evolutionary accounts of cultural progress, I trace important literary innovations to a major contradiction in the way realists conceptualize race. In their scientific and literary work, realists value America's races as discrete, unequal evolutionary units but they also develop incipient critiques of race essentialist theories and policies. That is, they simultaneously expose certain racist theories as bad science and conceive of history as a teleological process driven by what Jewett calls "the great war of the races." While it is typical to trace realists' ambivalence over racial issues to their investment in the social order, I begin with the claim that realists did not simply want social order; they wanted social progress. When realists define progress in terms of natural laws, they enter a fraught relationship with Herbert Spencer's social Darwinian model of evolution. Their debt to Spencer manifests itself in a tendency to naturalize social differences, on the one hand, and to correlate race with the capacity for civilization, on the other. Like their colleagues in the social sciences, literary realists mobilize race as an epistemological tool that could help make sense of history. By re-thinking the relationship between emergent social sciences and literary genres, my project articulates how ideas about race structured the possibilities for social analysis across late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century disciplines. To the degree that realists use race as an epistemological tool, they forfeit realism's unique potential to study the environmental sources of social inequality. The arc from Howellsian realism to Dunbar's black naturalism describes sociology's shift from race to place and marks realists' late emergence from under the shadow of Spencer.
...MoreDescription “The writers I study---Sarah Orne Jewett, a supremacist; William Dean Howells, a race liberal; George Washington Cable, a bold anti-segregationist; and Paul Laurence Dunbar, `the black poet laureate'---were not only conversant with new scientific developments, they themselves were social scientists.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/09 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3234706.
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