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

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, and will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies.

• Important new work which will be of interest to literary and race studies scholars • Examines representations of labour relations across the color-line - work that has not been done before • Offers radical revisions of interracial relations as represented in fiction and letters

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’.

\'… a wide-ranging but meticulously argued series of essays that offer highly original and rewarding readings of canonical and less well-known works.\' Modernism/Modernity