Recently, I just finished reading Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Future American” (1900) and The Quarry (1928) for a paper I am writing. As I read Chesnutt’s last novel, I started to think about a possible syllabus that would use Chesnutt as a focal point to explore “the race question” at the turn of the twentieth century. I have posted syllabi such as “African American Crime and Detective Fiction” and “The ‘Vanishing American’ in American Literature” on my blogs before. Feel free to take these syllabi and incorporate them into your own classroom, tweaking them as you see fit. If you do use these syllabi, please let me know how the class goes. I would like to hear from you in regards to what students thought and what types of discussions ensued.  

Charles W. Chesnutt’s lengthy career spanned the local color and regionalist movements of the late nineteenth century all the way to the close of the Harlem Renaissance at the end of the 1920s. As a result, his writings explored the “race question” at a time when activists such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were arguing for their respective views regarding African American advancement, when white authors such as George Washington Cable and Mark Twain were exploring the role of African Americans in the body politic at the turn of the century, and when the ascendance of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Harlem Renaissance authors such as Nella Larsen began to gain attention from a wider audience. With all of these aspects, and more, Chesnutt serves for us as a locus to explore late nineteenth century and early twentieth century debates on racial uplift, race science, modernism, and regionalism amongst other items. As such, this class will explore a selection of Chesnutt’s works in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries to help us delve further into the issues surrounding the “color line” at the turn of the twentieth century.