The Sport of the Gods: and Other Essential Writings (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Dunbar, Paul Laurence Laurence

 
9780812972795: The Sport of the Gods: and Other Essential Writings (Modern Library Classics)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812972791 ISBN 13: 9780812972795
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872—1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures. This original collection includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar’s essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as “Sympathy,” all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872—1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures. This original collection includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar’s essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as “Sympathy,” all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century.


Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a professor of English and the director of American studies at Stanford University. An award-winning author, she is past president of the American Studies Association.


David Bradley is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon, and the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, for which he received the 1982 PEN/ Faulkner Award.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872--1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures. This original collection includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar's essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as "Sympathy," all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century.

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PART ONE

Poetry





Introduction

In 1781 Thomas Jefferson completed the first draft of what would come to be known as Notes on the State of Virginia. At inception, however, it was a collection of responses to a number of queries from a French aristocrat, Francois, Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, who served as secretary of the French legation to the United States between 1779 and 1785. Marbois' queries were wide-ranging, arising out of the science of the time, which had not yet coalesced into discrete disciplines, but instead mingled geology, geography, zoology, physiology, psychology, philosophy, biology, and botany under the rubric of "natural history," a proto-discipline that depended less on systematic investigation, and much less on experimentation, than on personal observation. Jefferson's responses, therefore, though wide-ranging and thorough, were essentially opinions allegedly supported by reason.

Jefferson gave a fairly complete and accurate description of the geography, geology, flora, fauna, population, and social organization of Virginia a dispassionate, academic expression by a well-versed Man of Reason, which Jefferson purportedly was. But in the midst of his response to one query, Jefferson seemed to forget he was a member of the American Philosophical Society and became something altogether more agendaed.

The query read simply: "The administration of justice and description of the laws?"

Jefferson's response began, "The state is divided into counties. In every county are appointed magistrates, called justices of the peace . . ." and continued with a long and tedious summary of Virginia's statutes governing everything from landholding to marriage and naturalization. The discussion became more interesting when Jefferson explained an ongoing revision of the codes intended to remove colonial vestiges, mentioning his own proffered amendment to the revision plan itself: a proposal to emancipate Negro slaves born in Virginia once they had reached majority, at which time, "they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper."

Although this would not have affected the legal status of slavery itself, applied only to blacks born in the future and would have given slave owners the right to work even those blacks for at least ten years, it was clear that this plan would eventually cause a labor shortage. This Jefferson proposed to remedy by sending "vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither."

That all this seemed somewhat byzantine, Jefferson acknowledged in a rhetorical question:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?

which he answered with a mordant prediction:

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

Jefferson then proceeded to enumerate the "real distinctions" of nature, laying out a series of canards that constitute a systematic codification, not of the laws of Virginia, but of the tropes of American racism. These included:

They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. . . .

They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. . . .

They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. . . .

In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep, of course.

In imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.

However, the first trope Jefferson articulated was of particular interest:

The first difference that strikes us is that of colour. . . . And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgement in favor of the whites, declared by their preference for them, as uniformly is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over those of his own species.

This was not merely an expression of personal aesthetics an assertion that black is not, in fact, beautiful. The last part of the passage referred to a belief, seriously held by many educated Europeans, that given opportunity, African apes would come down out of the trees and force themselves on African females. Winthrop Jordan, in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, explains this belief in psychological terms: "By forging a sexual link between Negroes and apes . . . Englishmen were able to give vent to their feelings that Negroes were a lewd, lascivious, and wanton people." Jefferson altered and extended the belief about the behavior of non-human animals to the behavior of human animals. What makes this curious especially in the context of a discussion of the laws of Virginia is that in discussing marriage elsewhere in his reply, Jefferson makes no mention of the anti-miscegenation laws, although such laws had been part of the Southern criminal codes, including Virginia's, for a hundred years. The existence and form of those laws made it quite clear that fully consensual sexual relationships between blacks of both genders and whites of both genders were so common that they had to be legally discouraged. But Jefferson turned that which was often a mutually consensual, albeit illegal, conjoining of black male and white female into something that was inevitably bestial rape, while making no mention of that other business, of white male masters coupling with black female slaves. It is not clear whether, at the time of this writing, Jefferson himself had engaged in such behavior, but he knew it existed. Yet rather than acknowledge the fact, or even the obvious implication, of the long-standing miscegenation laws, Jefferson chose to extend the European belief and suggest that the Negro male was as rapacious with respect to white females as was the "Oranootan" toward black females.

After listing these and other disparagements, Jefferson modestly summarized:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812972791
ISBN 13 
9780812972795
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Herausgeber
Fishkin Shelley Fisher, Bradley David
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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