Rewriting white

Vogel asks what it meant for nineteenth-century Americans of color to speak or write in a way that was marked as "white," and how many distinct meanings such writing could hold. He argues that American culture has tied language and artistic accomplishment to race, and he tests this claim by examining four writers of color from that period, one African American, one Native American and one Chinese American, and the polished English prose each one used for moral, political and social aims.

Vogel shows that these writers did more than imitate the models of their era. They used the styles of the educated mainstream and spoke in venues that their society regarded as beyond their status, and in doing so they built a subversive message into that very display of skill. Close reading and detailed archival research support his case that the relationship between these writers and the dominant culture was far more tangled than it first appears.

The book is aimed at scholars and readers of American literary and cultural history. Vogel positions it as part of a wider effort by recent researchers to break down the boundaries of racial segregation that have long shaped the study of American literature and culture.