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Article: Racial and textual miscegenation in Chesnutt's 'The House Behind the Cedars.' (Charles Chesnutt)
- Article from:
- The Mississippi Quarterly
- Article date:
- December 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Mississippi State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Current students of ethnic literature are revising the separatism that marked the pioneering efforts to expand the canon. For example, Barbara E. Johnson notes "the ineradicable trace of Western culture within Afro-American culture."(1) And Henry Louis Gates states that "black literature shares much with, far more than it differs from, the Western textual tradition."(2) In fact, Gates finds his immersion in black culture to be not only a help but also a hindrance in his effort to understand black literature: "I had to step outside my culture."(3) Deborah McDowell explains that separatists treated black and female as timeless, ahistorical, essential categories "yielding an ...