This dissertation focuses on mixed-race writers and light-skinned African American fictional characters in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novels, examining the ways in which they engage with Black lives that are marginalized in the New Negro discourse. Analyzing the works that are commonly associated with multiraciality—Charles Chesnutt’s conjure stories, Pauline Hopkins’s romance novels, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Jean Toomer’s Cane—I argue that these works foster an imagination of Black freedom that does not fit with the narrative of racial progress and uplift. During the post-Reconstruction era, white supremacists circulated derogatory caricatures of Black people and committed racial terrorism in order to frustrate Black people’s efforts to achieve political and social rights. To combat anti-Black violence, African American leaders promoted the New Negro ideal which included heroic Black masculinity, respectable expressions of gender and sexuality, and middle-class public images. This study focuses on the texts that were written by mixed-race writers or considered centering on mixed-race characters and thus often criticized for not highlighting the positive capabilities of darker-skinned Black people. My contention is that just because they do not openly take on the New Negro identity it does not mean they do not reject their relation to Blackness. The literary texts I analyze instead imagine Black freedom with a careful focus on Black people’s erotic desires and quotidian acts of freedom that were dismissed in the New Negro discourse.My research aims to deepen the understanding of the complicated aspects of racial uplift rather than merely criticizing its conservative aspects. By analyzing the literary works of the writers whose social essays are often considered integral to the construction of the New Negro, I elaborate on how literature serves as a rich space that can question and disturb the limit of the New Negro ideal and those who are considered problematically promote middle-class values and colorism make subtle deviation from ideal in paying attention to Black freedom left at a liminal space of racial uplift narrative of advancement and newness. Chapter 1 discusses Chesnutt’s conjure stories that contribute to making African American fiction depart from racial uplift leaders’ emphasis on the respectable depiction of Black people. While the main character Julius is not a figure who heroically asserts Black people's social and cultural advancement, Chesnutt makes Julius’s storytelling harbor a rich space for Black freedom that questions white readers’ sentimental sympathy for Black people’s lives. Chapter 2 examines Hopkins’s featuring lighter-skinned Black women as protagonists of her romance novels and their close interaction with darker-skinned Black women who serve the role amount to the figure of a chivalric knight, arguing that her romantic novels interrupt the New Negro men’s suppression of women's heroic capacities. Chapter 3 discusses the significance that Johnson utilizes a light-skinned Black man's recollection of social and artistic accomplishments accompanied by his critique of the shame that upper-class Black people feel for other Black people who do not embody middle-class social standing. I argue that the unnamed narrator's account of the greatness of African American social and artistic accomplishments unsettles the racial uplift’s reliance on the opposition between elite leaders and the masses. Chapter 4 contends that Toomer’s refusal to be represented as a New Negro artist is to deviate from Alain Locke's New Negro aesthetics that tends to relegate the landscape of Black South as the aesthetic objects of the New Negro writers. By demonstrating the social and historical circumstances implied in images of nature and animals, I highlight Toomer’s attempts to delineate the resilience and strength of Black Southern women who transgress heteronormative and patriarchal control of their bodies.
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