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Professor redefines traditional readings

Sundquist says American literature is not black or white

By Jennifer K. Morita

Daily Bruin Staff

Redefining American literature has been Professor Eric Sundquist's project for the past 10 years, culminating in his book, "To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature."

The UCLA English department chair's efforts won him the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded each year to an author of an outstanding book.

"It was very pleasing to receive this award," Sundquist said. "There are many deserving books and one of the peculiarities of winning the award is knowing that there are so many other important books that could just as well have received the award."

"I feel fortunate," Sundquist said.

His book describes American literature from the time before the Civil War through the early 20th century, looking at how both white and African-American writers examine the problem of race.

The award committee's citations described the "richly contextualized" book as a compelling new approach to American literary history that "effectively reshapes the landscape of our literature."

"I was particularly interested in the way black and white writers seemed to speak to one another or enter into a kind of dialogue," Sundquist said.

The teaching and criticism of American literature has tended to examine African-American works separately into a tradition of its own.

"The definition of American literature has usually meant white American literature. This seemed an inadequate way to think about American literature," he said. "What counts as the tradition of American literature is always changing. It's always been changing, it's always in flux."

Sundquist is at the forefront of literary scholars, said his colleague Blake Allmendinger.

"He is not only working on literature written by people of color, he is also trying to figure out how we teach and read and think about those other kinds of literature in relationship to mainstream literature, which is typically white literature," Allmendinger said.

Unlike many other literary critics, Sundquist says literature not only shows that white and African-American writers were aware of each other, but that they were conscious of responding to one another in various ways.

Frederick Douglass is just one of the examples Sundquist cited.

When Douglass wrote his auto-biography in 1845, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had yet to be published. Ten years after his first autobiography, Douglass published an expanded version.

"Douglass was inevitably writing to some degree in response to 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'" Sundquist said. "It's just been the case until about the last five or six years that typically these traditions have been seen as separate.

"Instead, they're forming a dialogue if not an actual conversation," he added.

Sundquist also believes in studying a variety of writers. W.E.B. DuBois and Charles Chesnutt, both prominent writers whose works are taught mainly in African-American studies courses, are two authors Sundquist believes need to be given more attention.

"In the case of DuBois, his most famous book 'The Souls of Blackfolk' is very well known," he said. "But because it's not a novel nor a biography, but a kind of hybrid work that combines autobiography, essay, history, music ... it doesn't seem to fit any of the recognizable, generic categories."

Chesnutt's work ­ written primarily in dialect ­ was a response to one of the most popular writers of the late 19th century, the creator of the Uncle Remus tales ­ Joel Chandler Harris.

"The Uncle Remus tales recorded African-American folkculture but did so from a white point of view, with the character Uncle Remus, which some readers take to be a racist caricature," Sundquist said.

Because Chesnutt writes his most important works in dialect, they are difficult for modern readers, Sundquist said.

"The popularity of Uncle Remus tales served to create a kind of predisposition that assumed that dialect stories, or stories derived from African-American folkculture, were not serious literature," he said.

"Chesnutt wanted to take African-American folkculture and give it a more serious voice and undermine the stereotypes and caricatures that had been created by Joel Chandler Harris," he added.

By further examining the works of DuBois and Chesnutt, Sundquist is bringing their work into the mainstream.

"He's really trying to integrate the cultural strands you get in American literature so we can think of them in ways that are meaningful," Allmendinger said.

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