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The chapter discusses responses of African Americans and American whites to the racialized and gendered discursive patterns of nineteenth-century white supremacist fiction. The author focuses on how two novels can easily be read in opposition to white supremacist fiction—namely, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Both argue in their respective novels that black/white sexual contact was a custom long upheld by whites themselves and that the real cause of violence along the color line was the white struggle to determine the rights of citizens according to race. Twain's novel embodies a struggle between black and white families and it is on the terrain of race and family that Pudd'nhead Wilson loses its battle with white supremacy over the structuring of American racial identity, property ownership, and civil rights. In the process, Twain reaches for metaphors of malignant blackness similar to those subsequently developed and exploited by Thomas Dixon. Chesnutt's novel articulates a plot that depends on the metaphor of twinning as a means of exploring regional and racial discrimination. It was written with a view to reforming black social conditions by addressing white racial attitudes. Both Pudd'nhead Wilson and The Marrow of Tradition offer radical and complex indictments of post-Reconstruction white supremacy, using the very terms that radical racists erected for their arguments. As members of a politically and racially diverse triptuch, Dixon, Twain, and Chesnutt are engaged in a fierce struggle to define black/white male heroism, and thus exemplify a traditional disclosure on lynching centered around figurations of black or white male criminality.

This chapter discusses the exhibition of the conjoined twins Giacomo and Giovani Battista Tocci, who became the basis for Mark Twain’s two novels, Those Extraordinary Twins and Pudd’nhead Wilson. It argues that the freak-garde that emerged in these novels served as a response to the simultaneous rise of corporate capitalism and disenfranchisement of African Americans, both of which were enabled by the Supreme Court’s radical interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. It examines the notion of the two novels conveying the powerful ties that bind the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that essentially robbed African Americans of their Fourteenth Amendment protections concerning equality. It addresses how the novels confirmed that the only way to enjoy legal protections is to disown the autonomy and integration of liberal subjectivity and to become a “corporate person”, and appropriating freak show aesthetics as a means of experimenting with this subject of incorporation.

This chapter focuses on confidence games played in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). These con games expose the weakness in the legal construction of people as property. In each novel, white characters conflate enslaved people with animals, but this conflation allows black characters to hide their agency. Blinded by racism, white characters become the dupes of con games in which black characters outwardly perform the identity of property while covertly taking on the agency of people. Despite legal resolutions that seem to restore order in Melville’s and Twain’s texts, lingering haunting reveals that the racial categories destroy everyone. Williams offers a twentieth-century answer to this destruction by imagining people formerly enslaved escaping to the West, thereby crafting the only con game that works.

This chapter focuses on the American dilemma of race, exploring the rise of a literary countertradition that privileges silence and dissimulation over candor and accessibility. Examples are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. It is shown how racial others become associated with illegibility in these texts, the corollary to a culture that relegates Black people to the margins.

This chapter places Mark Twain's Those Extraordinary Twins in two related contexts: the establishment of corporate personhood (along with Fourteenth Amendment protections for corporations) in the U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) and popular representations of Chinese railroad workers as swarming, monstrous “coolies” functioning as collective—rather than individuated—agents. The chapter shows how Those Extraordinary Twins connects Pudd'nhead Wilson's interest in the legal fiction of race with other legal fictions central to the broader economic transformations of the Gilded Age. Unsuccessfully prosecuted “as a corporation,” the conjoined twins embody postwar disruptions precipitated by industrialization, monopoly capitalism, and the increasing prominence of immigrants as both a labor source and a means of dividing and controlling the U.S. working class.

This chapter reviews the literary works of Mark Twain, another refugee from the former Confederacy who settled for a time in Hartford, Connecticut. Twain both accepted and loathed this state of affairs as a condition of his renown, and he turned it into a central theme of his fictions. The best of them—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)—dwell obsessively on the risk of verbal indiscretion and the fear of being found out. These novels contain some of the most famous black characters in American literature—Jim, Roxy, and Tom Driscoll—and the two books are widely studied for their insight into the problem of race after Reconstruction.

This chapter examines the aesthetics and politics that inform modes of realism increasingly used to represent Black Americans in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with a trompe l’oeil painting that depicts a Black boy playing soldier (Attention, Company! by artist William Harnett), read alongside sections of Frederick Douglass’ narratives and the mass-reproduced image of Gordon the slave, this chapter also surveys a Brooklyn park that was remade into a cotton plantation as part of the immersive performance called Black America. Each of these texts conjures the “free” Black body as a sensuous object for white consumption. This racialized dynamic is linked to segregation through an analysis of the eponymous protagonist of Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson and a history of the anonymous subject of Harnett’s painting. Focusing on the logic of realism as it intersects with the ideologies of liberalism and of Jim Crow segregation, this chapter exposes how free black personhood was turned into a form of commodity spectacle.