Elements in Race in American Literature and Culture aims to extend our understanding of the critical role race has played in shaping US literary history. All of the projects in this series grapple with the simple if ever vexing question: what is race?

In thinking through this knotty notion, I might return to the theorists of my graduate seminars and catalog the ways in which race exists in American life as an ideology, a structure, a history, a community, an identity. It is all of these things and something more. Any theory seems to leave something out—some nuance of class or gender or sexuality or nationality that colludes with race to make this indelible mark of social difference just out of reach. Race spills over with its excesses or dodges with its exceptions, too quickly becoming a way to understand all of American life or maybe nothing at all. Because isn’t racial difference just a delusion? Aren’t we always going to be more alike than we are different? And yet race persists as perhaps the most significant indicator of various life outcomes—from where you live, how much money you make and how long you will live.

James Baldwin likened whiteness to a kind of dream, a refusal to reckon with the crimes of history, and if we can just wake up our nation, this fevered fantasy might at last end. But, of course, the dream has branded its inequalities into the very landscape of our country. Even if we are alive to the plunder and genocide that fuels the engine of this nation, race remains the malleable shape of such inequality.

This series does not aim to provide an easy, pithy definition of race. There are so many contending conceptions of race and its impact because it exceeds capture. Race fascinates and frustrates in equal measure because it so readily invites the play of metaphor. For Baldwin, whiteness is a form of blindness, a willed ignorance to the violent truths of history. Ralph Ellison also conceived of race as a function of the visual, characterizing Black subjectivity as a condition of invisibility. The Invisible Man’s black skin prevents others from seeing his full humanity even as he withholds parts of himself, afraid perhaps of the vulnerability of visibility.

More recently, Claudia Rankine has called Black life a condition of mourning.  She explains that to live with the “daily strain of knowing that as a Black person you can be killed for simply being Black” is to exist in a continual state of precarity and loss. For Rankine, Blackness is inextricable from the imminent possibility of death—of oneself, of one’s child, of one’s beloved. It is to live without shelter. Similarly, Edwidge Danticat in “Message to my Daughters” likens the experience of Black people in the US to that of refugees, noting how they are treated without the rights of full citizens and operate as a targeted ethnic community.

I find all of these metaphors insightful and evocative. None of them capture all the intricacies of race but these are not theories, they are modes of understanding that inch us closer to describing how we have arrived at the profoundly unjust world we inhabit. The Cambridge Elements series in Race in American Literature and Culture aims to provide fresh perspectives on the impact of race on American letters in order to offer a better understanding of how race continues to signify and evolve across history and into the present moment.

Click here to discover more about the series.