Abstract
Despite recent critical re-evaluations of American literary realism placing ‘race’ at the center of realist projects at the turn of the century, current institutional guides to teaching this field tend to reproduce the historical segregation of genre by race. The provocative notion that race in addition to - and, at times, in lieu of - literary form constitutes a generic feature is first and most forcefully advanced during the era of Jim Crow in the US; analyzing the critical legacy of this incorporation of ‘race’ (understood variably at the time as essentialist and/ or experiential) as an aesthetic component carries wide political implications for the teaching not only of American and African-American Studies, but also postcolonial, diasporic and circum-Atlantic literatures.
‘We must write these realities.’
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record (1895)
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Birnbaum, M. (2003). Towards Desegregating Syllabuses: Teaching American Literary Realism and Racial Uplift Fiction. In: Agathocleous, T., Dean, A.C. (eds) Teaching Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507906_6
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