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Stephen Cushman extends Levin’s coverage with an examination of the Crater in recent fiction and film. Using Charles Frazier’s best-selling Cold Mountain (1997), Anthony Minghella’s cinematic version of the novel (2003), Duane Schultz’s Glory Enough for All (1993), and Richard Slotkin’s The Crater (1980), Cushman, who is a poet and a historian, explores stylistic choices, differences between written and spoken language in the 19th century, the challenge and potential reward of mining historical sources to create fictional treatments, and the importance of audience. Cushman’s discussion of Slotkin’s handling of black characters and interweaving of historical, literary, and political sensibilities has implications far beyond the topic and texts of the essay.

This book concludes with Suzan-Lori Parks's playful appropriations of historical whiteness, which place her dramaturgy in the tradition of whiting up and provide more avenues for black bodies to complicate race onstage. In an explanatory and exploratory essay titled “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” Parks articulates a unique predicament for black characters and actors: “As African-Americans we have a history, a future, and a daily reality in which a confrontation with a White ruling class is a central feature. This reality makes life difficult.” In this brief assessment, the basic tension between America's racial hierarchies, African American performance, and stage Europeans is captured. Parks warns that insisting “Whitey' has to be present in Black drama because Whitey is an inextricable aspect of Black reality is like saying that every play has to have a murder in it.”

This chapter analyzes the “new buddy movement” that pairs black female characters in supporting roles with white female leads in two Disney Channel shows, Shake It Up (2010–) and Good Luck Charlie (2010–). It suggests that Disney presents diversity in such a way that reifies the position and privilege of white culture and white cast members. Drawing on recent Pew Research Center reports that document income inequities along lines of race, the chapter suggests that viewers read these shows through a colorblind lens and see diversity without seeing (or understanding) difference. Keeping in mind the fact that television plays a central role in the articulation and construction of racialized identities in the United States, the chapter explores the impact of Disney's representational strategy on its children and tween viewing audience through Stuart Hall's theories of encoding and decoding.

This chapter puts forward the hypothesis that Charles Chesnutt attempted to publish his novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. in 1921, with the goal of countering D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Substantiating this hypothesis not only helps to answer questions about Chesnutt’s decision to submit a novel for publication so long after the publication of his final ill-fated novel, The Colonel’s Dream but also reveals the novel’s potential as a feasible challenge to Birth’s depictions of both white and black characters. In relation to this, it is important to note that Chesnutt’s political and literary activities parallel African-American activism during the racially turbulent political climate from 1906 until 1921, the year Chesnutt submitted Paul Marchand for publication.

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.

Chapter 4 challenges the recent critical consensus that has emerged around Baldwin’s second novel. While many scholars identify David, the text’s narrator, as a black character in whiteface, I analyze Giovanni’s Room as a sophisticated study of whiteness. David invents blackness in a world notably devoid of black characters in order to reject his homosexual desires. I argue that Giovanni and Joey, David’s two male sexual partners, are not black but are made figuratively black by David to secure his fragile relationship to whiteness. Baldwin does not tease readers with a racial masquerade. Rather it is David who plays this game of identity construction, for reasons that reveal his racial and sexual insecurities, not those of his creator. Conflicted between opposing desires for home and sexual pleasure, David manufactures an Africanist presence that comes to define all that he most fears and rejects in himself.

This introductory chapter states that the book depicts black playwrights actively grappling with the role of religion in forming black identity before World War II. Early twentieth-century black playwrights constituted a highly educated and activist class of individuals more likely to be touched by the hand of modern humanism than by baptism of the Holy Spirit. Though most viewed theater as a tool for challenging African American stereotypes, the book argues that a majority of these playwrights also saw the stage as a place from which to combat the idea that an emotional, superstitious, irrational, and blindly faithful form of religious life was endemic to black character. In a Christian social order where the concept of soul is perceived as differentiating human beings from all other living things, chattel slavery brought with it the claim that Africans lacked this essential element of personhood.

This chapter examines how race intersects with questions of “realism” and fate in Frederick Delius's Koanga, which features black characters as its protagonists as well as examples of African American folk music. Based on an episode from George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes, Koanga is a nineteenth-century story of love, jealousy, and betrayal centered on Koanga, an enslaved West African prince and voudon priest, and Palmyra, a quadroon maidservant. This chapter first provides a background on Koanga's genesis and textual variations before discussing its seeming contradiction: the dramatic portrayal of Koanga and Palmyra as a reflection of period beliefs about the Otherness of blacks; and its treatment of the exoticism of “blackness,” both physical and musical, as an attractive quality integral to achieving its dramatic and musical aims. It argues that Koanga revives many familiar tropes of racial exoticism and manifests troubling new resonances concerning questions of destiny and free will.