Hemingway, Race, and Art

Bloodlines and the Color Line

Marc Kevin Dudley

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781612775401
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

A social historical reading of Hemingway through the lens of race

William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Hemingway, Race, and Art, author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner's racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway's fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too.

Twentieth-century white America was plagued by guilt in its dealings with Native Americans; simultaneously, it faced an increasingly dissatisfied African American populace. Marc Kevin Dudley demonstrates how Hemingway's interest in race was closely aligned to a national anxiety over a changing racial topography. Affected by his American pedigree, his masculinity, and his whiteness, Hemingway's treatment of race is characteristically complex, at once both a perpetuation of type and a questioning of white self-identity.

Hemingway, Race, and Art expands our understanding of Hemingway and his work and shows how race consciousness pervades the texts of one of America's most important and influential writers.

INDEX

Adams, Edward, 161, 168n22

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 118, 182n3

Africa: and adventure, 111, 112, 168n22, 181n1; as creative space, 2–3, 5–7, 24–26, 110, 113, 118, 125–26, 137, 141, 143–45, 157; escape to, 6, 20, 22, 23, 109; independence of, 147, 183n6; Theodore Roosevelt’s association with, 21; and white masculinity, 22, 113, 118, 128–34, 145

African Americans: and American race relations, 105–9, 174n9, 179n15; and dialect, 161; and the Gothic, 169n3; Hemingway’s engagement with, 9, 15, 71; and Jack Johnson, 69, 83, 91–92; migration of, 15, 71; Pullman Sleeping Car Company and its employment of, 95–97, 99, 176–77n6, 177–78n8; and stereotype, 14, 17, 74, 97, 163, 170n8

African Game Trails, 150, 168n21, 181n3, 184n15

The African Journals, 23, 138, 183n9

African safari: aesthetic function, 2–3, 5–6, 9, 21, 23–24, 109–10, 111, 114–15, 126–27, 129, 134, 144, 150; first safari (1933), 9, 18, 114–15, 126–27, 129–30, 134; politics of, 148, 183n5; Roosevelt as model, 21, 91, 111, 146, 150; second safari (1953), 2, 5, 22–24, 26, 113, 135, 138, 140, 154, 166n7, 183n8, 184n14

Algeria, 147

Analick, Ruth, 31

Anderson, Sherwood, 13, 97, 166n5

Atlanta, 17

Autobiography of an Ex-coloured Man, 29, 45

Babb, Valerie, 38, 39, 169n5

Baker, Carlos, 118, 145,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Specter of Race in Hemingway’s Grave New World
• One - “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”: Deconstructing the Great (White) Man
• Two - Beyond the Camp, Behind the Myth: Native American Dissolution and Reconstituted Whiteness in “Ten Indians,” “Fathers and Sons,” and “The Indians Went Away”
• Three - The Truth’s in the Shadows: Race in “The Light of the World” and “The Battler”
• Four - Killin’ ’Em with Kindness: Hemingway’s Racial Recognition in “The Porter”
• Five - “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and Green Hills of Africa: (Re)drawing the Color Line, or Reimagining the Continent in Shades of Black and White
• Six - The First Shall Be Last, the Last Shall Be First: Erasing and Retracing the Color Line in “The Good Lion,” True at First Light, and Under Kilimanjaro
• Epilogue: Contextualizing Hemingway’s Grand Complication
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index