This is freakin hilarious. An obscure 19th century female novelist is discoverd to be 'black' and her writings lauded. Then "Whoops" it turns out she wasn't black. So much for the rigor of 'ethnic studies'.

It took a few days to percolate, but Holly Jackson's "Mistaken Identity" in the Boston Globe has set off a fascinating discussion on the net about literary historicism.

The facts seem simple enough. A rather hum-drum late nineteenth century novelist, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (1863-1938), finds late twentieth century cachet when she is identified as an African American author. Identified as such as early as 1955, she was known only for Megda (1891). Early in the 1980s, when Henry Louis Gates, the African American literary scholar, found a second novel, Four Girls at Cottage City (1895), it inspired him "to edit a collection of reprints of these works and to publish them as a 'library' of black women's writings, in part so that I could read them myself." It became Oxford University Press's 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988.

Holly Jackson's discovery shows that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was white. Her family knew that all along. Her novels included no people of color. Only the scholars believed Kelley-Hawkins was an African American writer and that her novels betrayed no race consciousness became a matter for interpretation. But why would scholars not have taken the relentlessly white novels of Kelley-Hawkins as a signal that she was white? Did we read them and do the archival research about her or did we simply rely on an earlier authority's word for their author's ethnicity?

-p (BTW, I'm black)