The blue stain : a novel of a racial outcast
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The blue stain : a novel of a racial outcast
（Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture / edited by James Hardin）
Camden House, 2018
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Das blaue Mal : Der Roman eines Ausgestoßenen
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Translated from the German
"First published 2017 by Gamden House. Reprinted in paperback 2018" -- T.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A European novel of racial mixing and "passing" in early twentieth-century America that serves as a unique account of transnational and transcultural racial attitudes that continue to reverberate today.
Hugo Bettauer's The Blue Stain, a novel of racial mixing and "passing," starts and ends in Georgia but also takes the reader to Vienna and New York. First published in 1922, the novel tells the story of Carletto, son of a white European academic and an African-American daughter of former slaves, who, having passed as white in Europe and fled to America after losing his fortune, resists being seen as "black" before ultimately accepting that identityand joining the early movement for civil rights. Never before translated into English, this is the first novel in which a German-speaking European author addresses early twentieth-century racial politics in the United States - notonly in the South but also in the North. There is an irony, however: while Bettauer's narrative aims to sanction a white/European egalitarianism with respect to race, it nevertheless exhibits its own brand of racism by assertingthat African Americans need extensive enculturation before they are to be valued as human beings. The novel therefore serves as a unique historical account of transnational and transcultural racial attitudes of the period that continue to reverberate in our present globalized world.
Hugo Bettauer (1872-1925) was a prolific Austrian writer and journalist, a very early victim of the Nazis. Peter Hoeyng is Associate Professor of German at Emory University. Chauncey J. Mellor is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Tennessee. Kenneth R. Janken is Professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Peter Hoeyng
Part One: Georgia
Part Two: Carletto
Part Three: The Colored Gentleman
Afterword by Kenneth R. Janken
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