Description
Book Synopsis What did it mean for people of color in nineteenth-century America to speak or write "white"? More specifically, how many and what kinds of meaning could such "white" writing carry? In ReWriting White, Todd Vogel looks at how America has racialized language and aesthetic achievement.
Trade ReviewI came across
Rewriting White: Race, Class and Cultural Capital in 19th Century America by Todd Vogel, a cultural historian. There, I found Mr. Fowler’s beliefs about black people’s language skills and allegedly inborn talents for working as waiters and nurses. That wasn’t all — Mr. Fowler also correlated coarse hair with “coarseness in the fibers of the brain, together with coarse, harsh feelings” — but it was enough to disabuse me of any notion that phrenology was going to add some amusing historical tidbits to my review. -- Pete Wells * New York Times - Times Insider *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Recasting the Plot
Part I - Antebellum Revisions - Public Virtue
1. Speaking to the Whiteness of the Brain
2. William Apess's Theater and a "Native" American History
Part II - Postbellum Revisions - The Virtue Within
3. Sharpening the Pen: Racial and Aesthetic Transformation
4. Anna Julia Cooper and the Black Orator
5. Edith Eaton Plays the Chinese Water Lily
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
