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 atlarge: 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.
"Almost certainly the finest book yet written on race and
American literature," writes Arnold Rampersad of Princeton
University. "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."
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