ReWriting White: Race, Class, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Todd Vogel. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 194 pages. $60.00 cloth; $22.95 paper.

In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a 1926 essay that has gained increasing recognition as a forerunner of recent work in critical whiteness studies, Langston Hughes denaturalized what had come to be accepted in America as “poetry” by labeling it a distinctly “white” version of poetry. In the course of pegging black adherents to mainstreamed literary aesthetics as white-wannabes, Hughes managed to clarify a difficulty with unmarkedly Eurocentric standards that minority writers of today continue to face. However, he overlooked the many minority writers who had already adopted white rhetorical styles and standards more slyly—in order, that is, to subvert and challenge their buttressing ideologies. In ReWriting White: Race, Class, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Todd Vogel continues recent critical recognition of such tactics with an engaging, carefully researched study of racially cognizant whiteface performances, as delivered by key nineteenth-century writers of African American, Native American, and Chinese American descent.

Vogel draws adroitly on archival research to situate these writers amidst relevant social and intellectual currents. Chief among these are shifting notions of credible public discourse styles. Vogel begins his analysis of the hopes of antebellum black journalists, who encouraged other black writers and orators to “rewrite white,” with an extensive overview of the rise of a “middling” rhetoric adopted by most public commentators. This writing and speaking style hovered between the elevated, neoclassical propriety still touted by some elites and a newly popular lower style, which was exemplified perhaps most vividly by the unrestrained slang and hyperbole of Davy Crockett’s speechifying before Congress. In a bid for acceptance as viable social commentators, many African American writers and orators of the time adopted this middling style. Vogel demonstrates that something close to Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic capital had initially become an overt and exciting concern for black journalists: “If one’s manner of speaking illustrated the inner person, then perhaps it could get white society to look beyond skin color to examine the genuine attributes of blacks. Linguistic capital potentially offered the free black a path to expanded freedoms."

However, free black antebellum writers and orators failed to gain a respectful wide audience because a public discourse style that seemed at first an attainable tool for all became instead an explicit, exclusionary mark of white superiority. As Vogel goes on to illustrate, the growing democratization of public discourse was soon influenced by two other social currents: the phrenology craze (whereby such outward physical characteristics as the topography of one’s scalp were read as indicators of inner characteristics) and an increasingly pervasive belief in “Anglo-Saxon” superiority. Phrenological claims joined other emerging scientific efforts to discern inherent racial difference to further bolster a widespread belief that African Americans lacked the mental faculties required to say anything insightful or convincing about the day’s affairs. Meanwhile, Anglo-Saxonism’s spread found its way to the new style of public discourse, to the point where “Anglo-Saxon” supplanted “middling” as a label for the preferred public style, further shutting out the possibility in the minds of a white audience that a non-white writer or speaker had any claim to respectful attention.

Having established the enormous obstacles presented to African American writers by thoroughly whitened aesthetic standards, Vogel goes on to demonstrate the differing strictures that other writers of color grappled with. Vogel’s own writing is especially accessible, and peppered here and there with succinct, vivid anecdotes, such as his description, in the next chapter, of the young Cotton Mather’s journey to see the decaying skull of Metacomet, who was known by whites as the “Philip” of the King Philip’s War. These anecdotes function well as lead-ins to extensive scene-setting for Vogel’s readings of non-white efforts to “rewrite white,” in this case, a lecture delivered in Boston by Pequot essayist and Indian rebellion leader William Apess:

The English ambushed [Philip] and shot him. They dragged his body through the muck, quartered him, and then displayed his head on a pole in Plymouth. A young Cotton Mather made a pilgrimage to Plymouth . . . . Mather reached up to Philip’s dessicated skull and, as if he were peeling a drumstick from a roasted chicken, tore away his jaw. Mather . . . metaphorically silenced Philip. Few, if any, tellings of the war that differed from the Puritans’ version survived.

One site where this fantasy took form was the dramatic stage, with enactments of noble savagery comprising the era’s most popular theatrical fodder. The day’s “supreme contemporary actor,” Edwin Forrest, spent much of his career in redface, performing thousands of times as the central character in a lachrymose melodrama based on the life of Metacomet, who, Vogel writes, was portrayed as “simple, brave, noble, and not of this world.” Demonstrating little interest in the actual Native Americans of his time, Forrest embodied and played out for a white American audience what amounted to its own dependence on convenient elements of a romanticized Indian-ness to define itself and assuage its misgivings about the costs of American progress.

Prior to explaining how Apess sought to rewrite the white discourse typified by such melodrama in his own performance as a public lecturer, Vogel describes the era’s idolatry of George Washington, whom Apess made the bold move of comparing to Metacomet. Many speakers, writers, playwrights, parade organizers and others bent Washington’s legend to their own purposes, but Vogel sees the time’s most consistent figuration typified in paintings and statues that depict Washington in heroic relation to Indians, as the noble holder of a symbolic sword that cleared the land of them. In his Boston lecture, Apess (a Pequot whose own tribe had actually sided with the Puritans rather than with Metacomet’s united tribes) countered condescending white notions of Indian obsequiousness by telling of early Puritan dependence on Indians, and of whites who hired themselves out as servants to Indians. For Vogel, Apess’s most stunning revision was to review the commonly rehearsed qualities of Washington, attribute those as well to Metacomet, and then declare the latter a precursor to the former, and thus “‘the greatest man that ever was in America.’” Hence, in addition to offering a corrective Indian version of history by declaring an Indian leader greater than a white one, Apess’ performance itself countered white notions of Indians as both simple-minded and as plain-and-simple rhetoricians.

Again, Vogel fleshes out very well that which non-white writers of the nineteenth century faced and wrote against, and he is certainly right to conclude that “When we understand that a writer’s hardest battle is how to make the natural, a ‘perfectly normal’ construct like whiteness appear to be a prefabrication, then we better understand the construction writers of color have undertaken.” However, at times this study of writers who sought to “rewrite white” struck me as unbalanced. Although Vogel’s scene-setting of Apess’ lecture, for instance, is insightful and absorbing in its own right, there’s so much of it relative to a few paragraphs on Apess’ performance that the latter analysis seems anticlimactic.

Similarly, I found his work on the resistant writings of Julia Ann Cooper and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maud Eaton less compelling than his explication of the rhetorical standards and gendered mores that Cooper adopted and craftily wrote against, and his analysis of the staged and doctored Chinatown photographs of Arnold Genthe, which helped to codify the Orientalist mindset that Far/Eaton wrote against. In the latter case especially, the conclusions that Vogel draws about Far/Eaton—that she strategically effected a “reverse passing” by adopting her pen name and identifying with her Chinese ancestry, and that she strove in her writings to depict the Chinese as people with a broader inner life than Americans thought they had—will surprise few who are familiar with the great deal of scholarship on this author. Again though, the work on Genthe’s photography (much of which is reproduced here, along with that of more sympathetic photographers) should prove valuable for further situating Far/Eaton’s work. Indeed, Vogel’s greatest service is the illuminating contextual detail he provides for discussion of each of these writers who rewrote white.

Tim Engles
Eastern Illinois University

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