To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature by Eric J. Sundquist


To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Title : To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 067489331X
ISBN-10 : 9780674893313
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 720
Publication : First published February 1, 1993
Awards : James Russell Lowell Prize (1993)

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.

To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature Reviews

  • Marissa Kessenich

    I expected this book to be a major drag, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

    Sundquist argues for a conception of American literature that is “biracial,” claiming that the national imagination has always been captivated with ideas of race, whether evidenced through fear of slave revolution, anxieties over the color line, or concerns over the very meaning of race. To demonstrate this, and to speak back to counter arguments, Sundquist argues for a deep revision of the literary canon that reconsiders the texts that are “foundational” to American life and American identity.

    This book is very of-its-time. I can definitely tell that he and Gilroy were writing in a similar intellectual atmosphere, because both are rethinking the idea of “tradition” as something the moves in multiple directions (rather than as something passed down from origin to recipient). Like Gilroy’s idea of the Black Atlantic as a metaphor to understand Black diasporic culture, Sundquist sees American literature as a product of a white/Black dialectic. It is unified under the umbrella of “American,” but also inherently pluralistic.

  • David Withun

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