Includes bibliographical references (pages 236-252) and index
Changing views of post-Civil War Black education in the fiction of Lydia Maria Child, Ellwood Griest, and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1867-1878) -- A fool's education : Albion Tourgée's A fool's errand, The invisible empire, and Bricks without straw (1879-1880) -- Of the people, by the people, and for the people : Frances E.W. Harper's cultural work in Iola Leroy (1892) -- Conflicted race nationalism : Sutton Griggs's Imperium in imperio (1899) -- Lynching and the liberal arts : rediscovering George Marion McClellan's Old Greenbottom Inn and other stories (1906) -- JIm Crow colonialism's dependancy model for "uplift": promotion and reaction -- Ghosts of Reconstruction : Samuel C. Armstrong, Booker T. Washington, and the disciplinary regimes of Jim Crow colonialism -- From planter paternalism to Uncle Sam's largesse abroad : Ellen M. Ingraham's Bond and free (1882) and Marietta Holley's Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition (1904) -- Counter-statements to Jim Crow colonialism : Mark Twain's "To the person sitting in darkness" (1901) and Aurelio Tolentino's Yesterday, today, and tomorrow (1905) -- Educating whites to be white on the global frontier : hypnotism and ambivalence in Thomas Dixon and Owen Wister (1900-1905) -- The dark archive: early twentieth-century critiques of Jim Crow colonialism by New South novelists -- The education of Walter Hines Page : a gentleman's disagreement with the New South in The Southerner, being the autobiography of "Nicholas Worth" (1909) -- Anti-colonial education? : W.E.B. Du Bois's Quest of the silver fleece (1911) and Darkwater (1920) -- Romancing multiracial democracy : George Washington Cable's Lovers of Louisiana (to-day) (1918)
Sitting in Darkness explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely studied fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourg--and--eacut
