Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This refrain from renowned nineteenth-century gospel song composer C. Herbert Woolston’s popular children’s hymn, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” reflects prevalent Western notions of the time regarding race. While the song is meant to be inclusive, the reductionist conception of races based on pigmentation betray a homogenizing and otherizing view of people originating from Africa, Asia, and pre-colonial America. This deference to simplified color is observable in the works of nineteenth-century popular author Emile Zola, where we see an interesting juxtaposition of highly diverse white races and a grouping of non-Europeans in amorphous color groups. For example, in Rome (1896), while many races are presented in Italy: Latin, Italian, French, royal, priestly, aristocratic, and familial (Boccanero), Zola refers to the Far East as “the other face of the earth, the immobile Extreme Orient, the mysterious China and Japan, all the threatening proliferation of the yellow race” (ch. XVI)—an entire continent reduced to a racialized color. Likewise, in the African pages of Fruitfulness, Zola portrays three discernable and distinct races: the fruitful, the (willfully) infertile, and the Africans. While the white Europeans may be divided into multiple races, in this case “types” of people, the Africans are homogenized all into one race, irrespective of the enormous diversity that exists on the continent. In this paper, I analyze the contradiction inherent in Zola’s retention of a Tainian definition of race when it comes to Europeans while simultaneously participating in more modern, biological notions of race when referring to Africans and Asians.