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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, editors. Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest. Foreword by Nancy A. Hewitt. (Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, number 35.) College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 2004. Pp. xxx, 144. Cloth $32.95, paper $16.95.
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| The contextual introduction and five provocative essays contained in this book represent the culmination of the revised conference papers delivered at the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington in March 2000. Each contribution probes the boundaries and contradictions of the traditional understanding of race in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America as a bifurcation of "black" and "white." By exploring the multiracial environment of the Southwest, a region with strong southern connections yet distinct in its historical development, the authors raise questions about the rigidity and appropriateness of this interpretation. Together, they reveal the social interactions of men and women, immigrants and citizens, the arbiters of justice and the vigilantes, competitive groups, and the privileged and the dispossessed. While the essays challenge the racial binary, they also expose the power and seductiveness of this understanding. |
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Nancy A. Hewitt marks the terrain of the subsequent essays in her introduction through a discussion of her own research on nineteenth-century Tampa, Florida. She traces the complexity of racial groups and their relations with a white American government through issues regarding mixed-blood Seminoles, protection of property rights for free women of color against ousted Spanish colonial officials, the negotiation of immigrant Cuban workers and African Americans over Jim Crow transportation, and the violence between African-American and white soldiers awaiting embarkation for Cuba during the Spanish American War. The absorption with the social determination of who was "white" and who was "black," regardless of race or ethnic origin, and the identification of rights and privileges with the former and powerlessness with the latter would be a theme replicated in other places and at other times. At each juncture, meaningful alliances among the non-elite were truncated over this obsession. |
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In "The People's Sovereignty and the Law," Laura F. Edwards argues that white patriarchal authority in the Old South was far less stable than has been previously assumed, and that scholars have placed too much emphasis on the polarities of free and slave, independent and dependent, and male and female. Postrevolutionary American law transferred power from the monarch to "the people" leaving room for misunderstandings about the precise definition of the term and appropriate relations tied to race, gender, and class. Edwards provides examples of court complaints such as that of an abused wife, who won a divorce and saw her husband jailed for beatings that outraged "the people," and the case of a slaveholder who asked the court for redress against his female slave, who could not be disciplined and behaved as if she were the equal of the family. Such legal documentation from North and South Carolina illustrates how reputation, local interests, class status, and kinship might place constraints on the exercise of patriarchal power. |
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