During the Harlem Renaissance competing rhetorics of racial uplift centered upon concerns
regarding class identification and the process of acculturation into American society. This
book demonstrates how the practice of motherhood and the organization of household relations
operated to address the pressing issues facing the black community of the early twentieth
century. An exploration of such literary constructs as the tragic mulatto the passing
phenomenon and the mammy result in a revitalized understanding of how the influences of racial
intolerance sexual oppression and class ideology combined to provoke a model of resistant
black maternity in the early modern era.
