| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michele Birnbaum. Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 138.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 195. $60.00.
Michele Birnbaum examines various texts written between emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance for the ways in which interracial working relationships shaped and were shaped by sexualized race discourses. Three of Birnbaum's four chapters juxtapose texts by whites and blacks in order to show the range of responses to desire in the workplace, from "traditional hegemonies" to "more complex and potentially progressive transformations" (p. 15).	1
The first chapter of the book focuses on seamstress Elizabeth Keckley's account of the work she did for Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckley makes clear, in Behind the Scenes (1868), that Mrs. Lincoln's yearning for and presumption of intimate friendship was based on her assumption of her seamstress's racial inferiority. For Keckley, the results, including unannounced visits to Keckley's home, were a burden, and she repeatedly resisted them. She would, for example, insist upon and receive additional payment whenever Mrs. Lincoln made demands in the name of friendship. In a coda to this chapter, Birnbaum considers a far more normative text: Grace King's Monsieur Motte (1888), in which a black domestic worker is wholly devoted to her white female charge. The juxtaposition helps to explain why Keckley was reviled by the white reading public for her exposure of the burden of white desire in the interracial workplace and her attempts to resist it.	. . .

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