Dividing Lines

Series

• Class : Culture

Dividing Lines is one of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature. Clear and engaging, this book unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities.

By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled popular notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. But even as the writers highlighted middle-class achievement, they worried over whether class distinctions would help or sabotage collective black protest against racial prejudice. Andreá N. Williams argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. In these telling moments, authors innovatively dared to address the sensitive topic of class differences—a topic inextricably related to American civil rights and social opportunity.

Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

"Rarely are readers offered such an ample and expansive examination of the various ways in which class manifests within and between African American and non-African American communities. By emphasizing class, which too often is obscured or absorbed by other important categories, Andreá N. Williams makes a significant contribution to African American and American literary and cultural studies. Williams moves readers well beyond the conventional prisms of labor and work, and respectability, 'manners and morals.'"
—P. Gabrielle Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

"Dividing Lines fills a significant gap in literary criticism on postbellum African American fiction. While there are studies that touch on these issues, Williams compels readers to think about how an issue so prominent could have escaped thorough sustained analysis for so long."
—Cassandra Jackson, The College of New Jersey

Illustration: Photograph of John and Lugenia Burns Hope and family, undated, Atlanta University Photographs—Individuals, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library
(Pictured from left to right: Dr. John Hope, Edward Hope, John Hope, II, and and Lugenia Burns Hope)

Praise / Awards

• "Dividing Lines fills a significant gap in literary criticism on postbellum African American fiction. While there are studies that touch on these issues, Williams compels readers to think about how an issue so prominent could have escaped thorough sustained analysis for so long."
  —Cassandra Jackson, The College of New Jersey