In this collection and elsewhere, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket has been the focus of considerations of race and racism in Poe’s work, given its appalling depictions of Black people and its fetishistic, oneiric treatment of whiteness.įor all their differences, these studies agree on one point: Poe’s work evidences a racial anxiety, and voices an unsettled and unsettling view of race as itself unsettled. 2 The essay collection Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001) offers a number of important interventions on the subject. While a few have sought to either demonstrate that Poe was a racist or defend him from charges of racism, most take a more nuanced approach. In a much-quoted 1827 letter to foster father John Allan, Edgar Allan Poe angrily lashed out at the perceived injustices he suffered at Allan’s hands: Edgar was “to be subjected to the whims and caprice, not only of your white family, but the complete authority of the blacks-these grievances I could not submit to and I am gone.” 1 Over the last half century and particularly since 1992, when Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination instigated an explosion of studies, critics have examined this and the few other appearances of Black people in Poe’s fiction, letters, and journalism, variously weighing in on the function and meaning of race in Poe’s life and writing.
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