"Generic" Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts

Laura L. Behling

doi:10.2307/3594242

College English Mar 2003

"Generic" Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts

Laura L. Behling

Abstract

onsider Pauline Hopkins's short story Talma Gordon (1900), first published in the Colored American Magazine. Like many Hopkins's writings, Talma Gordon takes up the issue the tragic mulatto and the larger theme miscegenation. In this text, however, she frames these social issues in the form detective fiction, the locked-room mystery structure that Edgar Allan Poe inaugurated with Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story opens at the Canterbury Club Boston, a private club composed wealthy, well-connected white men who gather monthly to discuss questions of vital importance to the life the Republic, such as that evening's topic, Expansion: Its Effect upon the Future Development the Anglo-Saxon throughout the World (4). The speaker, Dr. William Thornton, argues that despite the efforts to thwart intermarriage among races, it is inevitable, even between the white Boston Brahmins and the far-off tribes dark-skinned peoples (5). If are not ready to receive and assimilate the new material which will be brought to mingle with our pure Anglo-Saxon stream, Thornton warns, we should call a halt in our expansion policy (5). Arguing that man is powerless to combat both fate and the laws the Omnipotent, Thornton avers that

Journal: College English
Published: 2003-03-01
DOI: 10.2307/3594242
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: literary studies
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"Generic" Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts

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