Content area
Full Text
Color Me White: Naturalism!Naturalization in American Literature, by Mita Banerjee. American Smdies: A Monograph Series, Vol. 237. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2013. 484 pp. Cloth, $87.00.
In this wide-ranging and richly textured smdy, Mita Banerjee explores the intersection of American legal and literary discourses on the subject of whiteness at the turn of the century (roughly the period of the 1880s to the 1920s). Prior to this time, whiteness was a self-evident fact; however, at the end of the nineteenth century, the courts were faced with a massive influx of all ranges and shades of white and non-white immigrants and had to determine who among them was white and, by default, who was not. In case after "racial prerequisite" case, as these cases came to be called, immigrant groups came before judges to establish their whiteness, and judges, in mrn, were confounded by the dearth of evidence to rule decisively on the matter, turning often to the cultural logic of "common sense" as reflected in the popular culture and literature of the time. At this time, then, race was an unstable, pseudo-scientific category that was wide open to interpretation by both the law and the literature. Banerjee examines the collusion of these two-in particular, the texts of naturalization and naturalism-to show that, for both, whiteness came to be defined in terms of its culmral performance, in spite of its indeterminacy and at the expense of those deemed to be "off-white," non-white, and (often) female. This nexus of legal and literary texts also enables Banerjee to expose the status of the law not as authority but as narrative, since the law relies on uncertain, impressionistic, and visual information to adjudicate whiteness; in a parallel manner, the literature of naturalism operates like the law, extending beyond the literary realm to bestow or withhold whiteness based on hierarchical differentiation between various racial groups. In the chapters of this book, Banerjee draws upon scholarship in the areas of ethnic studies, whiteness...