97 Bill Hardwig SEARCHING FOR TODAY IN THE PAST: TEACHING CHESNUTT TO MULTIPLE STUDENT AUDIENCES I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, can- nibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” —Frantz Fanon 112 From one angle, beginning an article about Charles Chesnutt with an epigraph from a philosopher and psychiatrist from Martinique might appear odd. After all, Fanon is known principally for his anti- and post- colonial writing, for his revolutionary critique of political and racial power structures. Chesnutt, on the other hand, is often depicted (wrongly I believe) as an apologist to the white power structure, as an accommoda- tionist, not unlike Booker T. Washington. However, from another perspec- tive, Fanon’s quotation above echoes the concerns of Chesnutt’s career, as well as the unique demands placed on instructors teaching Chesnutt to today’s students. One way to understand both Chesnutt’s place in his contemporary literary and political spheres and his reception today is to examine how carefully he deals with definitions of “blackness,” of what it means to be African American in post-Reconstruction America. If Fanon was “battered down” by what he called the “racial epidermal schema”— the ways in which society held him responsible “for my body, for my race, for my ancestors,” Chesnutt was paralyzed by racial expectations and stereotypes as well (112). He certainly knew the kind of firm intervention he wanted to make in the United States racial landscape, to call attention to racist practices and policies, but he was never able to find a satisfactory means of doing so, trying one method and then altering his approach. In order to explore Chesnutt’s engagement in the era’s racial dynamics and its significance for students today, I will examine in this essay two moments in Chesnutt’s publishing career. These two moments could perhaps be called the bookends of his time in the national spotlight: the first time we meet Julius McAdoo at the beginning of “The Goophered Studies in the Literary Imagination 43.2, Fall 2010 © Georgia State University