Even at their most expansive, our canons, histories, and syllabi often reduce complex identities and experiences to simpler stories and rigid categories. Multiracial authors are reduced—or erased. Movements on the edge of society become mainstream only once they do the work of dominant cultures. In order to challenge our critical tendencies to reduce, scholars are continually called to unearth our complex pasts again and again.

This panel heeds that critical imperative by recovering forgotten US authors and movements that complicate a simplistic black/white binary. By taking comparative approaches to race, DeLisa D. Hawkes, Tim Bruno, and Brandon Miller reveal the lived challenges to white supremacy even in the midst of settler expansion and the reinstitution of racial caste after Emancipation. However much white supremacy worked to structure the world in terms of vicious categories, peoples' bodies and cultural practices protested containment. Unearthing these pasts serves to unsettle contemporary scholars' tendencies toward reduction and categorization.

In "When Afro-Indigeneity Was Within the Harlem Circle," DeLisa D. Hawkes recovers Olivia Ward Bush-Banks’s life and works as critical lenses to further understand the complexities of racial identification and to acknowledge the separate yet intertwined histories of Native Americans and African Americans. Early-twentieth century newspapers referred to the self-identified Afro-Montauk writer, activist, and educator as “the grand dame of the literati.” Yet contemporary scholars of Harlem Renaissance literature have relegated her life and works to the shadows. Hawkes argues that Bush-Banks’s works put forward an understanding of New Negro-Indigeneity that welcomes cross-cultural understanding and multiracial self-identification that is not limited solely to African and European mixed-race ancestry. Writing on Afro-Indigeneity during the Harlem Renaissance allows Bush-Banks to take part in revising a United States cultural history that insists on racial purity and racial stratification according to a black/white binary. In doing so, Bush-Banks follows up on Carter G. Woodson’s 1920 claim that “one of the longest unwritten chapters of the history of the United States is […] the relations of the Negroes and Indians.” Ultimately, Hawkes argues that Bush-Banks deconstructs the ideology of black separatism and offers an understudied perspective on the emergent internationalism and pan-Africanism within New Negro philosophy and the Harlem Renaissance’s literary culture.

Tim Bruno continues to explore the relationship between identity and ideology in his paper, "Lucy Parsons's Anarchic Identity." Bruno takes the vexed biography of Chicago's infamous labor agitator and anarchist as a critical provocation. Variously dubbed “la mestiza,” “mulatto,” and “Negro,” Parsons self-described as Mexican and Indian. Yet in a recent critical biography, Jacqueline Jones firmly asserts that Parsons denied her “true” black identity. Eschewing such definitive readings, Bruno instead recovers Parsons as a complicating example of Afro-Latina indigeneity. This identity, in tandem with the archival gaps in her life, offers a way to figure Parsons's disruptive political-aesthetic practice, according to Bruno. She actually becomes a representative of the racial conflict in the period: in the face of state repression following the Haymarket Affair, and as the Plessy era harshened the color line, Parsons worked and wrote to frustrate oppressive classifications. Recovering Parsons's life and writings ultimately will extend this anarchy into the archives and canons of the present. Held in the nineteenth century to be “more dangerous than a thousand rioters,” she still challenges our own archival logics, racial categorization, and literary canonicity.

Brandon Miller extends these comparative and recovery efforts from authors to religious movements. In “Indigeneity and the Utopian Imagination: Mormons in the South Pacific, 1844-1890,” Miller parses the threads of race, indigeneity, and utopianism that wove together to form early Mormon missionary projects. Following Paul Reeve and Mark Rifkin, Miller argues that early Mormons were also cast as racial Others, in part because of their cosmology and their “primitive” practice of polygamy that located them in imagined proximity to Native Americans. Yet even as early Mormons were themselves being racialized as non-white, their missionaries began conducting campaigns to the South Pacific that drew on literary languages of indigeneity. Their work coincided with an era of utopian fiction and South Pacific adventure stories—notably including Melville’s 1846 Typee--in which native peoples were cast as “noble savages.” According to Miller, if these competing images of what it means to be native came together in a missionary project that displaced actual indigenous traditions, those traditions have also since reemerged as anti-colonial projects, such as the work of Samoan poet Albert Wendt. Miller's paper thus turns to these Mormon missionary projects as a way to witness processes of racialization and utopianism unfold over time.

By approaching their subjects through comparative racialization frameworks, Hawkes, Bruno, and Miller ask, what have our critical histories and practices lost or obscured? What, in turn, can scholars unearth again by thinking outside of a black/white binary?