Rethinking African American Female Writers’ Resistance: The Case of Strategic Deracination in Sarah E. Farro’s True Love (1891)

Abstract

This article examines Sarah E. Farro’s understudied novel True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life (1891) as a form of literary resistance that I call “strategic deracination.” The term describes what happens when an author who is publicly marketed as racially representative writes a text that deliberately leaves race out. The political force of such a work lies in the visible gap between how the author is framed by the marketplace and what the text itself refuses to say. The concept is specified by three jointly necessary conditions (paratextual, textual, and relational) and tied to the late-nineteenth-century “essentializing phase” of print racialization in which Black-authored books were expected to function as racial testimony (Rezek, 2020). While scholarship on nineteenth-century African American women’s writing has primarily focused on direct confrontations with racial prejudice, Farro’s work presents an alternative mode of refusal that operates by subtraction rather than by addition, performance, or appropriation. This is a mode that neither transnationalism, racial performativity, nor literary appropriation taken individually, can adequately capture. Through close textual analysis coordinated with paratextual analysis of the novel’s 1892 press reception, I demonstrate that Farro’s adoption of Victorian domestic tropes while she was being marketed as an African American novelist produces a structural negotiation that cannot be reduced to assimilation, market accommodation, or aesthetic preference alone. The textual evidence (the displacement of spiritual reflection from a female to a male character, the unmythologized treatment of the protagonist’s death, and the medical framing of the male character’s decline) shows that gender critique occupies the structural position the marketplace reserved for racial testimony. This study expands our understanding of dissent in African American literature beyond explicit content to include formal innovation and patterned absence.