To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature / Edition 1

by Eric J. Sundquist

Overview

This powerful book argues that white culture in America does not exist apart from black culture. The revolution of the rights of man that established this country collided long ago with the system of slavery, and we have been trying to reestablish a steady course for ourselves ever since. To Wake the Nations is urgent and rousing: we have integrated our buses, schools, and factories, but not the canon of American literature. That is the task Eric Sundquist has assumed in a book that ranges from politics to literature, from Uncle Remus to African American spirituals. But the hallmark of this volume is a sweeping reevaluation of the glory years of American literature—from 1830 to 1930—that shows how white literature and black literature form a single interwoven tradition.

By examining African America’s contested relation to the intellectual and literary forms of white culture, Sundquist reconstructs the main lines of American literary tradition from the decades before the Civil War through the early twentieth century. An opening discussion of Nat Turner’s “Confessions,” recorded by a white man, Thomas Gray, establishes a paradigm for the complexity of meanings that Sundquist uncovers in American literary texts. Focusing on Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical books, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Charles Chesnutt’s fiction, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Sundquist considers each text against a rich background of history, law, literature, politics, religion, folklore, music, and dance. These readings lead to insights into components of the culture at large: slavery as it intersected with postcolonial revolutionary ideology; literary representations of the legal and political foundations of segregation; and the transformation of elements of African and antebellum folk consciousness into the public forms of American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674893313
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/15/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.72(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eric J. Sundquist is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I: SLAVERY, REVOLUTION, RENAISSANCE

1. Signs of Power: Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass

San Domingo and Its Patriots

Nat Turner, Thomas Gray, and the Phenomenology of Slavery

Ibo Warriors

Blackhead Signpost: Prophecy and Terror

Frederick Douglass's Revisions

Iron Sentences: Paternity, Literacy, Liberty

Broken Fetters: The Right of Revolution

2. Melville, Delany, and New World Slavery

Memory, Authority, and the Shadowy Tableau

The Play of the Barber

Ashantee Conjurors: Africanisms and Africanization

The Law of Nature or the Hive of Subtlety

Caribbean Empires

"It Is Wrote in Jeremiah": American Maroons

Sugar, Conspiracy, and the Ladder

El Dia de los Reyes

PART II: THE COLOR LINE

3. Mark Twain and Homer Plessy

The Second Slavery

The Badge of Servitude: Homer Plessy and the Rise of Segregation

Blaspheming Colors, Extraordinary Twins

A Whisper to the Reader

4. Charles Chesnutt's Cakewalk

The Origin of the Cakewalk

Word Shadows and Alternating Sounds: Folklore, Dialect, and Vernacular

Uncle Remus, Uncle Julius, and the New Negro

"De Ole Times," Slave Culture, and Africa

Talking Bones: Conjure and Narrative

White Weeds: The Pathology of the Color Line

Fusion: The Marrow of Tradition

A Great Black Figure and a Doll

PART III: W. E. B. DU BOIS: AFRICAN AMERICA AND THE KINGDOM OF CULTURE

5. Swing Low: The Souls of Black Folk

In the Kingdom of Culture

"This Wonderful Music of Bondage"

Bright Sparkles: Music and Text

Black and Unknown Bards: A Theory of the Sorrow Songs

6. The Spell of Africa

The Color Line Belts the World

"Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands": Toward Pan-Africanism

Africa: The Hidden Self and the Pageant of Nationalism

The Burden of Black Women

The Black Christ and Other Prophets

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

To Wake the Nations brilliantly weaves [Sundquist’s] analysis of African American ‘sorrow songs’ with textual material.

Bookforum - David Yaffe

Thus instead of literary history that invokes the same, shopworn links between old world and new, readers of To Wake the Nations will discover a not-so-subtle change in the frame of reference from Europe to Africa… This radical reconstruction of American literary history results in a dazzling if somewhat humbling experience for readers schooled in the European tradition. Sundquist’s conscientious scholarship and immense learning set a high standard for future scholars that will not soon be matched.

Clio - Jonathan Veitch

Almost certainly the finest book yet written on race and American literature… [To Wake the Nations] amounts to a startlingly penetrating commentary on American culture, a commentary that should have a powerful impact on areas far beyond the texts investigated here.

Arnold Rampersad

Nothing less than a full-scale revision of U.S. literary history… To Wake the Nations is an indispensable tool for broadening received conceptions of this nation’s literary history, making them both more comprehensive and, in the most profound sense, more true.

Newsday - Phillip Brian Harper

To Wake the Nations will stand as the most comprehensive and conscientious study of its subject that has yet appeared.

William L. Andrewsn Literature

A major contribution to [the] continuing reconfiguration of the body of American writing.

A. L. Nielsen

A major work of American literary criticism. Comparable in importance to Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden.

Choice

Sundquist’s book…helps reframe for a new time the questions, moral as well as aesthetic, we need to ask about what constitutes American literature and about what is to be valued in American culture.

Boston Globe - Paul Lauter

To Wake the Nations will stand as the most comprehensive and conscientious study of its subject that has yet appeared.

American Literature - William L. Andrews

To Wake the Nations brilliantly [weaves Sundquist's] analysis of African American 'sorrow songs' with textual material.
— David Yaffe

Bookforum

Thus instead of literary history that invokes the same, shopworn links between old world and new, readers of To Wake the Nations will discover a not-so-subtle change in the frame of reference from Europe to Africa…This radical reconstruction of American literary history results in a dazzling if somewhat humbling experience for readers schooled in the European tradition. Sundquist's conscientious scholarship and immense learning set a high standard for future scholars that will not soon be matched.
— Jonathan Veitch

CLIO

Multiculturalism is a burning issue in literary study nowadays, and Sundquist has written a substantial and provocative piece devoted to the influence of African Americans on the national literature. The works he uses to illuminate his thesis are unusual and apt. His thesis, that African American influence permeates the culture to such a great extent that it cannot and should not be separated out in any study of American literature, is both intriguing and convincing. Were it not for the dense writing style and exceedingly scholarly language used (making frequent recourse to a dictionary necessary for even the informed reader), this work would find a wide audience of interested readers. Recommended for academic libraries and public libraries collecting strongly in American literature.-- Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, Ill.

Library Journal

Sundquist (English, Vanderbilt U.) makes the compelling case, and exemplifies it in a number of intriguing ways, that white and black cultures in America cannot be properly understood (indeed, do not exist) independently of each other, and that rather than conceiving of American literature as solely Anglo-European in inspiration and authorship, "a redefinition of the premises and inherent significance of the central literary documents of American culture is in order." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews