Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance

Jeffrey B. Ferguson is remembered as an Amherst College professor of mythical charisma and for his long-standing engagement with George Schuyler, culminating in his paradigm-changing book The Sage of Sugar Hill. Continuing in the vein of his ever questioning the conventions of ‘race melodrama’ through the lens of which so much American cultural history and storytelling has been filtered, Ferguson’s final work is brought together here in Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance. Ferguson asks, what would thinking about ‘race relations’ be like if George Schuyler’s relentless questioning was heeded? How could the ‘bifurcating effects’ of racial melodrama, the common, popular, and well-intentioned forms of sentimental heroicization and victimization be avoided in literary and in scholarly narratives?

Ferguson goes deeper than any other literary and cultural critic in teasing out the ironies that have surrounded notions of race and racial cultural production in America. One further irony is that in order to highlight some of the current blind spots, he draws on classic American studies concepts and texts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson’s distinction between the party of memory and the party of hope, Alexis de Tocqueville’s notions of American democracy and the races of America, Lionel Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity, and Edmund Morgan’s demonstration of the interconnectedness of American slavery and freedom. Elegant, memorable, and aphoristically written, these essays convey to the reader Ferguson’s sense of humor, warmth, and grace, while they add up to a serious and principled critique of much common scholarly and pedagogic practice.