Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult

Susan Gillman. Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. xi + 245 pp.

Susan Gillman's Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult is a highly original study of race history and race consciousness in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. The book focuses on a wide range of texts published in the years after Reconstruction and before World War I, and discusses authors seldom grouped together, including Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Sutton Griggs, and Thomas Dixon. Gillman's discussion of the best known among these authors is also unusual, as she focuses on understudied works, such as Twain's dream tales and travel narratives and Du Bois's pageants. While many of the texts she examines have remained largely understudied by literary scholars due, in part, to what have been deemed their formal failings, Gillman argues that the theatrical, repetitive, often overwrought and simply messy formal qualities of these texts can be attributed to their adherence to the narrative structures of the race melodrama.

In its focus on the race melodrama, Gillman's book accords with other recent studies of literature and film that have sought to articulate the racial outlines of the melodrama, a narrative genre previous scholars have understood mostly in terms of gender. Gillman contributes a number of unique insights to this conversation: First, she argues that the race melodrama provides a way of telling a race history that is itself fragmented, repressed, repetitive, overwrought, and without clear narrative direction for the future. second, she argues that understandings of race history and race consciousness at the turn of the century are powerfully informed by a culture of the occult. In short, Gillman argues that the race melodrama enables an articulation...