New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance : Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse [1 ed.] 9780838644089, 9780838640739

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New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance

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New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse

Edited by

Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

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䉷 2006 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-4073-7/06 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New voices on the Harlem Renaissance / edited by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8386-4073-7 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—New York (State)—New York—History and criticism. 3. African Americans—New York (State)—New York— Intellectual life. 4. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. African Americans in literature. 7. Harlem Renaissance. I. Tarver, Australia, 1942– II. Barnes, Paula C., 1952– PS153.N5N47 2005 810.9⬘89607307471—dc22 2005017149

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In Memory of Darwin T. Turner who helped set the course for the study of African American literature and mentored us in the process

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Part I: Speaking for Race and Art: New Negro Writers Claiming Space in the Modernist Project What Was Africa to Him?: Alain Locke, Cultural Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Empire During the New Negro Renaissance John C. Charles ‘‘Feminine Calibans’’ and ‘‘Dark Madonnas of the Grave’’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance Emily J. Orlando Part II. Identity, Sexuality, and Hybridity in Fiction and Poetry Dorothy West: Harlem Renaissance Writer? Paula C. Barnes ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’’: Migrating Lives in the Short Fiction of Jessie Fauset Australia Tarver Wandering Aesthetic, Wandering Consciousness: Diasporic Impulses and ‘‘Vagrant’’ Desires in Langston Hughes’s Early Poetry Nicholas M. Evans Decadence, Sexuality and the Bohemian Vision of Wallace Thurman Granville Ganter No Heaven in Harlem: Countee Cullen and His Diasporic Doubles David Jarraway

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Part III. Imaging and Imagery in Poetry and Fiction Rereading Langston Hughes: Rhetorical Pedagogy in ‘‘Theme for English B,’’ or the Harlem Renaissance in the Composition Classroom Frank E. Perez ‘‘By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light’’: Technology and Vision in Langston Hughes’s ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ Steven A. Nardi Getting the Full Picture: Teaching the Literature and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance Anne E. Carroll Notes on Contributors Index

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Illustrations Aaron Douglas, cover of Opportunity, December, 1925 Winold Reiss, ‘‘The Brown Madonna,’’ frontispiece, The New Negro, 1925 Aaron Douglas, cover of Opportunity, October, 1925 Aaron Douglas, ‘‘Sahdji,’’ The New Negro, 1925 Winold Reiss, ‘‘From the Tropic Isles,’’ The New Negro, 1925 Winold Reiss, ‘‘Mary McLeod Bethune,’’ The New Negro, 1925 Winold, Reiss, ‘‘Elise J. McDougald,’’ The New Negro, 1925 Gwendolyn Bennett, cover of Opportunity, July, 1926 Gwendolyn Bennett, cover of Opportunity, January, 1926 Lois Mailou Jones, ‘‘Jennie,’’ 1943

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Acknowledgments THIS PROJECT HAS INCLUDED THE ADVICE, SUPPORT, AND HELP FROM

a number of people to whom we are very grateful. We benefited extensively from the advice and direction of scholars Sharon M. Harris, Alan Shepard, Simon Joyce, Linda K. Hughes, and Richard Enos. For aid in researching and locating copyright owners and sources for illustrations we are grateful to authors Maureen Honey, Venetria Patton, and Anne Carroll, who responded quickly and precisely, despite busy schedules. We thank Jimmy N. Webb, Copyright Clearance Coordinator, our library ‘‘angel,’’ at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, who went to great lengths to help us identify copyright sources. We appreciate the generous and expeditious consent by the Urban League to use illustrations from Opportunity. We owe a special thanks to Sherin Henderson, Peabody Librarian at the William R. and Norma B. Harvey Library, Hampton University, for the digital versions of two illustrations from Opportunity, and Eileen Johnston, Registrar of the Howard University Gallery of Art, for her generous agreement to loan us a slide of an art piece by Lois Mailou Jones. Identifying and locating illustrations brought us closer to the possibility of including them in this collection, but the real credit for transforming a number of the illustrations into camera-ready form goes to Nancy White, administrative secretary in the English Department at Texas Christian University, Damon Mack, Australia’s nephew, and Austin Lingerfelt, whose photoshop skills far exceeded our expectations. We received manuscript support from Danielle Gueguen, a student assistant at TCU who reformatted and typed sections of the manuscript with amazing speed, Susan Layne, a TCU administrator, who patiently retyped and revised the most difficult sections of the manuscript, and Jennifer Hritz, a doctoral graduate who seemingly performed miracles in reformatting text. Support from family and friends and advisors must also be recognized. Australia appreciates the assurance of her teenaged 11

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

cousin, Kwame Webster, who assured her that computer technology did, indeed, include software called photoshop. Special thanks goes to Australia’s husband, Duane Urquhart, who assisted with the numerous mailings, computer supplies, xeroxing, and who bestowed comfort and spiritual support during stressful moments. Paula thanks Carolyn Mitchell for her assistance in editing during the early stages of manuscript preparation, and Australia, who had to go it alone at the end. We thank Harry Keyishian, the director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, the readers of the manuscript, and Christine Retz, the managing editor of Associated University Presses, for their support, direction, and advice. We both want to thank all those who responded to our call for papers and the contributors who were so patient and understanding during this lengthy process. We have learned in this process, gleaned from Harlem Renaissance models and all who helped us, that forming a community of writers benefits all concerned. *

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Permissions/Credits ‘‘Incident,’’ ‘‘Atlantic City Waiter,’’ ‘‘To a Brown Girl,’’ by Countee Cullen. Published in Color 䉷 1925 by Harper and Brothers, renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen. ‘‘Cor Cordium,’’ ‘‘The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth,’’ ‘‘Advice to a Beauty,’’ ‘‘Hunger,’’ by Countee Cullen. Published in Copper Sun 䉷 1927 by Harper and Brothers, renewed in 1955 by Ida M. Cullen. ‘‘The League of Youth Address’’ by Countee Cullen. Published in Crisis 26 (1923), renewed 1951 by Ida M. Cullen. ‘‘Negro Poetry’’ by Countee Cullen. Published in Crisis 28 (1928), renewed 1956 by Ida M. Cullen. All lines from One Way to Heaven by Countee Cullen. Published 1932 by Harper and Brothers, renewed 1959 by Ida M. Cullen. All of the above reprinted by permission of GRM Associates, Inc., agents for the estate of Ida M. Cullen. ‘‘Theme for English B’’ by Langston Hughes. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, copyright 䉷 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House. ‘‘Danse Africaine,’’ ‘‘Poem[1] For the portrait of an African boy after the manner of Gauguin,’’ ‘‘Our Land,’’ ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ ‘‘Poem

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[2] (to F.S.),’’ ‘‘Summer Night,’’ ‘‘Harlem Night Club,’’ ‘‘Old Walt,’’ by Langston Hughes. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, copyright 䉷 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House. Permission to photograph covers of December, 1925 and October, 1925 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life, courtesy of Richard Roberts, History and Genealogy, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut. ‘‘Decadence, Sexuality and the Bohemian Vision of Wallace Thurman’’ by Granville Ganter from Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 28.2 (summer 2003) 83–104, reprinted courtesy of Veronica Makowsky, editor, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

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New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance

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Introduction Harlem is a place—a city really—where almost anything any person could think of to say goes on, . . . it must escape any blank generalization simply because it is alive, and changing each second with each breath any of its citizens take. —‘‘City of Harlem,’’ LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka]

THE

EVOLUTION OF THE GEOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL HARLEM

mirrors a kind of parallel unfolding in the literary criticism and theory of the renaissance associated with the Harlem name. Just as Harlem has developed from the seventeenth century Dutch Haarlem to the politically and economically favored locale of a former president and middle-class blacks and whites during the twenty-first century, so has the literary discourse changed over time from New Criticism to a plethora of discourses shaped by intersections of race, class, and gender; identity and sexuality; and theories of empire, rhetoric, and pedagogy.1 While its aim is to focus primarily on selected literary criticism rather than on the other arts of the Harlem Renaissance, this collection of essays offers what we believe is a nuanced response to the changes in the way literature is read: the discourse in these essays exemplifies a recasting of the past though a current critical lens. The volume’s title reflects the layered perspectives we offer. Race is an overarching perspective here, intersecting with analyses of gender, sexuality, class, and nationality. While race is used to implant its importance for Harlem Renaissance writers, it is also presented to interrogate interracial bigotry, color consciousness, and elitism. Diana Fuss constructs multiple positions of essentialism, suggesting that its variability or discursiveness allows for a pluralization of the word. Similarly, recognizing the debates over essentialism by such theorists as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates, these new literary voices nevertheless invoke multiple ‘‘race cards’’—biological, psychological, pedagogical, sociological—as critical tools to interrogate Harlem Renaissance writers, who used race as a self17

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referential project to advance their own celebration (as Langston Hughes and Helene Johnson did), critique (Alain Locke), and/or interrogation (Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Jessie Fauset) of blacks against preconceived, nineteenth-century notions of ‘‘acceptable’’ behavior.2 As Alain Locke, the dean or ‘‘midwife’’ of the Renaissance, suggested with the term ‘‘New Negro’’ in his promotional Survey Graphic issue, race and racial awareness was at the center of being able to declare oneself ‘‘reborn’’ or transformed from the ‘‘sambo’’ images of blacks that dominated the media during the turn of the century.3 With Locke at the helm, the term, ‘‘New Negro,’’ seemed to announce to the white world in particular, in the words of an African proverb, ‘‘It is not what you call me, but what I answer to.’’ For Locke and other Harlem writers, the black arts were to be the vehicle through which black racial images could be elevated and transformed. This transformation, according to Walter Benn Michaels, was a divestiture of the myth that black identity was achieved by mimicking whites and devising a protective mask.4 The intersections of race and gender are also viewed discursively in this collection of essays, as they suggest how New Negro women created literary spaces for themselves both individually and communally, sometimes in ways that countered the literary and personal projects of male writers. Indeed, as Dorothy West observed in an interview, male inclusion of women writers sometimes bordered more on the sexual (and racial) rather than the artistic. West reluctantly admitted to Deborah McDowell that she felt that young women (as aspiring artists) in New York during the 1920s ‘‘were so helpless,’’ subject to the unwanted advances of men. West explains that she and her cousin, Helene Johnson, were propositioned, supposedly by the very men to whom they looked for artistic support and guidance.5 Thanks to Cheryl Wall, Deborah McDowell, Thadious Davis, Verner Mitchell, Gloria T. Hull, Ann duCille and others, New Negro women are being placed at the critical center of Harlem Renaissance discourse.6 For example, it is Wall, in The Women of the Harlem Renaissance, who questions the periodization of the era, suggesting that to confine it to a fifteen- or twenty-year time frame excludes some of the women writers (10–11). Joyce Warren and Margaret Dickie, in their edited volume, Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization (2000), contest this issue by pointing to a ‘‘white male literary tradition,’’ with its static notions of literary periods as an ‘‘unyield-

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ing’’ standard in classrooms and search committees (ix). In Challenging Boundaries, Crystal Lucky follows Wall’s lead in a discussion of Harlem Renaissance women writers such as Beatrice Murphy, Mary Effie Lee Newsome, and Anita Scott Coleman—all of whom extend and challenge the traditional Harlem Renaissance boundaries of time, geography, and the canonical preference for male writers. Lucky reminds us that reading women during the Harlem Renaissance was largely governed by the profile of the New Negro constructed in the seminal text of the period, Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro (1925). In this light, Lucky’s recovery work involving Murphy, Newsome, and other women helps to redefine the role and presence of ignored New Negro women whose writings extend beyond the time and locale of this period. Ultimately, like the contributors to this volume, Anne Carroll and Emily Orlando, Lucky calls for a holistic restructuring of Harlem Renaissance studies. She argues that teachers should lead the way in selecting and recovering women writers like Murphy for classroom work so that students can see ‘‘how periodization and geography shift when black women writers are considered’’ (92). As if in answer to Lucky’s call for revision, Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey also redress the imbalance of works between New Negro men and women in their anthology, Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001). If the recovery of New Negro women helps to redefine the period and locale of this era, the examination of the intersections of sexuality, race, and writing also points to the multiple intent of this volume. ‘‘Sex[uality] in the text,’’ as Anne duCille puts it in The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (1997), is important for exploring and reconfiguring the identities of New Negro writers and for privileging black homosexuality, a major omission in African American literary discourse according to Suzette Spencer in ‘‘Swerving at a Different Angle and Flying the the Face of Tradition: Excavating the Homoerotic Subtext in Home to Harlem.’’ Spencer maintains that an examination of homosexuality’s effects ‘‘on the narrative content and structure of particular artists’ works’’ (164) would prompt a reevaluation of some Harlem Renaissance texts. Further, to explore the homoeroticism of the black text, Spencer reminds us, is to critique and give voice to the same hegemony that silences black men and women (165). While Spencer and Michael L. Cobb in ‘‘Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers’’ blame the erasure

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of some Harlem Renaissance texts on the ‘‘homophobia of literary critics,’’ the essays in this collection by Nicholas Evans, Granville Ganter, and David Jarraway are conversant with both Spencer and Cobb in that they explore the hybrid manifestations of homosexuality, the literary subversion and the communal constraints on Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Countee Cullen.7 It is not the intent of this volume to cover all genres and aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, although one contributor, Anne Carroll, reminds us of the importance of a multigenre, multidisciplinary approach in teaching the Harlem Renaissance to undergraduates and graduate students. While this collection is by no means inclusive of all Harlem Renaissance writers who need attention, its very selectivity may highlight the necessity to rethink or reassess even some of the established writers, given the possible application of critical perspectives in gay and lesbian studies, cultural and multicultural studies, feminist studies, subaltern and postcolonial studies, and transatlantic studies. The wealth of publications on this era underscores the continued interest in the era. A number of these publications are critical biogrphies and analyses of individual authors: Eleonore Van Notten’s Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance (1994); Thadious Davis’s Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994); Leon Coleman’s Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, A Critical Assessment (1998); or Verner Mitchell’s This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (2000). Scholars have also continued to publish anthologies of individual authors with accompanying critical commentary. Two examples are Gerald Early’s My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance (1991) and Robert B. Jones’s Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism (1996). We cannot overlook the reference sources that have been published. Cary Wintz’s seven volumes on the Harlem Renaissance are a series of reprints of selected criticism organized by decades through the 1980s. The purpose of these volumes is to provide a central source for previously inaccessible documents.8 Other reference works include Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph’s Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers: 1900–1945 (1990). What is noticeably absent from the list of titles above is more recent, broad based literary criticism. This volume of selected essays reflects the need for more recent criticism in theoretical

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areas such as identity politics, race, rhetorical studies, and multidisciplinary studies. Following critical, reissued texts like Victor Kramer and Robert Russ’s The Harlem Renaissance ReExamined (1997), this volume offers an expanding vision of the Harlem Renaissance into more current theoretical areas for scholars, college instructors, graduate students, college seniors, and Harlem Renaissance aficionados. Developed largely from contributors who are just beginning to publish in this field, this collection offers a number of perspectives and intertextualities from which to explore the intersections of race, gender, class, and literary discourse. Taken together, the essays resonate with parallel discourses and observations. Male icons of the era—Locke, Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Countee Cullen, and Winold Reiss—are critiqued and redefined as having appropriated Eurocentric or western views in constructing black images in their works. Women writers are viewed as arbiters of New Negro talent, identity and consciousness. Therefore, as women, they are as involved in being practitioners and constructionists of Harlem Renaissance identity as the men. Close parallels are made between West, Fauset, and Larsen, all of whom critique women characters of the era. Although Fauset and Thurman occupy varying positions among Harlem literati, both view the reality of racial passing similarly. There is a sense in which New Negro writers signified, wrote back against each other, or commented on one another’s views or behavior. Ganter draws on the notion that Emmy Lou Morgan in Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry is a revision of Joanna in Fauset’s There Is Confusion. Ganter also reports Dorothy West’s strong opinions about Thurman’s homosexuality. The discursivity of certain Harlem Renaissance themes—the virtual, subjective, and dynamic forces shaping identity politics—link contributors offering rhetorical and or pedagogical readings of texts with those offering readings on identity politics. Anne Carroll’s essay mirrors those by Ganter, Jarraway and Evans because of the view that the Harlem Renaissance can be read diasporically, from multiple perspectives or disciplines at once. While neither Carroll nor Frank Perez probably would recommend that undergraduate teachers urge administrators to finance the extremely expensive virtual Harlem classroom developed by Bryan Carter at the University of Missouri at Columbia, they both advocate an inclusive, multilayered approach to teaching this era.9 John Charles’s reading of Alain Locke is an example of a discursive critique in that Charles draws on national and interna-

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tional perspectives to examine the intellectual underpinnings of Locke’s effort to bring his vision of New Negro writing to birth. Charles contextualizes Locke’s view of black American folk culture with his effort to invent an African tradition suitable for helping blacks achieve equality in America. This image of Africa, says Charles, was political, designed to enhance the New Negro image in white American eyes. Locke’s view of Africa reflected that of late nineteenth-century black Victorians who espoused the imperialist belief that Africa needed to be saved. One group equipped to do this was African Americans, who could use the effort to ‘‘uplift’’ Africa as a vehicle to their own acceptance in America. Charles maintains that although Locke ‘‘criticizes the ‘missionary condescension’ of earlier black leaders vis-a`-vis Africa, he nonetheless utilizes missionary rhetoric’’ on behalf of his New Negro project. Charles uses Mariana Torgovnick’s model of relating culture and politics to highlight Locke’s awareness that African Americans could improve their political position using the New Negro movement as their base. Locke saw the value in black American artists linking themselves to African art, but, Charles maintains, Locke implies that African art ‘‘was devoid of value until refined by the western imagination and placed in its cultural economy.’’ Charles infers that Locke’s view here mirrors the attitudes in European colonial discourse, which appropriated goods from colonial countries without discovering their artistic meaning or context. Charles concludes that while Locke voices doubt in the ‘‘discourse of primitivism,’’ he nevertheless joins it. While Charles’s essay helps us to understand the complexity of the multiple discourses occurring during the Harlem Renaissance—especially the intersections of race, the transatlantic, and the emerging artistic consciousness of Harlem Renaissance writers—the discursivity of Harlem Renaissance identity also models the variations in how these contributors read images and imagery in poetry, fiction, the visual and performing arts, and technology. Emily Orlando links iconography and literature in works by male and female writers of the period. The works Orlando discusses include Locke’s The New Negro; Jean Toomer’s Cane; poetry by Countee Cullen, James W. Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson; the fiction of Nella Larsen; nonfiction by Marita Bonner and Elise Johnson McDougald; and the visual art of Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Lois Mailou Jones. Orlando constructs a comparative approach to the images of women by

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male and female writers, placing Locke at the center of her observations. Orlando maintains that while Locke emphasizes the ‘‘imaging of African Americans in art and literature,’’ his emphasis is decidedly male, and ‘‘the women of this era are responding to the damaging ways in which they are imaged in Locke’s anthology.’’ In summary, Orlando maintains that male writers portrayed women as Madonnas, objects d’ art, beautiful corpses, and ‘‘feminine Calibans,’’ a term Orlando adopts from Marita Bonner’s ‘‘On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored.’’ Conversely, while women writers created female images that ‘‘can be read as responses to, and rejections of’’ those depicted by men, women writers also ‘‘carved out a space for their own creativity.’’ As an example of the artistic dialogue between New Negro men and women, Orlando uses one of the dominant images of women, the Madonna. In both Locke’s frontispiece by Winold Reiss (in The New Negro) and Albert Rice’s poem in Caroling Dusk, the Madonna is black but unempowered. In contrast, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem, ‘‘Motherhood,’’ rejects the role, suggesting an uninhabitable world for her child. Another image in male Harlem Renaissance literature and visual art is the conjoining of the romantic aura associated with the dead, beautiful, dark woman, or, as Orlando reminds us, the combined image in Cullen’s phrase in ‘‘A Brown Girl Dead,’’ ‘‘Dark Madonna of the grave.’’ Orlando observes that this binary of the beautiful, dark woman, sometimes seen as dead or sexualized, has a similar effect of being subjected to the male gaze or of being confined, without agency, or silenced. Orlando presents the works of Larsen, Bennett, and Jones as countertexts to the male writers’ and artists’ silencing in The New Negro. Larsen, for example, in short pieces such as ‘‘The Wrong Man’’ and ‘‘Freedom’’ and in Passing, devotes attention to the female body in spectacle and to the failure of the spectator to ‘‘see’’ the woman beyond the artistic image. West continues to be the center of critical attention, as Paula Barnes offers an assessment of West’s role and function as a Harlem Renaissance writer. The question of gendering the periodization of the era has significant emphasis here because West continued to write in the 1930s, 1940s, and even more recently, before her death in 1998. Barnes suggests that this literary span does not preclude West’s identity as a Harlem Renaissance writer because West herself identified with the era. Barnes maintains further that West published such short stories as ‘‘The Typewriter,’’ ‘‘Hannah Byde,’’ and ‘‘Prologue to a Life’’ during

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the 1920s and 1930s. But West’s later novels, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995), when compared to Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, present a Harlem Renaissance consciousness, despite the traditional assumptions of the period ending in 1930. Barnes characterizes West’s Harlem Renaissance consciousness by drawing on Robert Ellrodt’s idea of ‘‘trends-of-a-period.’’ West’s literary ‘‘trends’’ are the use of the mulatta protagonist, a critique of the middle class and the marriage plot, and an interpretation of family lineage, all of which are mirrored in the novels of Fauset and Larsen. Further, Barnes demonstrates that West works ‘‘within the Harlem Renaissance women’s literary tradition’’ even with such contemporary novels as The Wedding, an ‘‘update of the Harlem Renaissance theme of the middle class for a new era.’’ Australia Tarver gives credence to the gendering of periodization in her discussion of Fauset because Fauset’s pre-1920s short stories allow one to see her developing theories of identity through characters whose explorations of self become more complex as she continues to write. Tarver offers an evolutionary reading of Fauset’s short stories, written from 1912 to 1923, showing that the social, economic, and racial migration of her characters mirrored the historical flux of the Great Migration, which spawned Harlem and other black enclaves of northern cities. Tarver deconstructs the migration trope from the perspective of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s and Lawrence R. Rodgers’s views of the literary, cultural, and and historical impact of migration on black Americans. Migration, Tarver suggests, has a ‘‘pluralizing function,’’ linked to text, geography and physicality, as ‘‘the movement of Fauset’s characters into alternative spaces drives’’ the text. Some of these stories, such as ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ and ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ also prefigured the plots and characters of Fauset’s novels, indicating an early interest in the intersections between race, class, and gender. In examining Langston Hughes’s early poetry, Nicholas Evans theorizes a different view of hybridity from that offered by Tarver. Evans asks how the diasporic experience or a diffusion of impulses influences Hughes’s early poetry. Evans defines these impulses as Hughes’s responses to the pressures of ‘‘respectable masculinity,’’ emanating from 1920s Black Nationalism, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. The contradictory ways that Hughes responded to both queer and black identities determine the focus of Evans’ project. Evans examines Hughes’s early poetry to explore the ‘‘ambivalent’’ variants of ‘‘respectable mas-

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culinity, heterosexuality, and homosexuality, marked at the time as bohemian and ‘white.’ ’’ The intent here is to contest the interpretations of Hughes’s work from the 1920s to the present, especially as these readings have been influenced by the Black Nationalist view of homosexuality. Instead, Evans draws on Judith Butler’s multilayered interpretation of queer as a way to open up the reading of Hughes’s work, rather than joining the recent criticism, which sees him as gay, or critics like Rampersad who do not. Butler’s definition of queer is preferable to Evans’s because of its inclusion of gay, straight, and bisexual identity. The inclusive nature of Harlem’s gay writers is the core of Granville Ganter’s examination of Wallace Thurman. While Thurman was bisexual, Ganter argues that it is his ‘‘resistance to characterization,’’ his queerness in the sense of not ‘‘operating by the norm of strictly homosexual or heterosexual culture’’ that is central to a reading of his work and to viewing him as an exhorter of Harlem Renaissance hybridity. Ganter observes that the evidence of Thurman’s ability to offer multiple depictions in his work is that women characters dominate at least two of his early works, the short story, ‘‘Cordelia the Crude’’ and his novel, The Blacker the Berry. Ganter explains that Thurman’s idea of ‘‘authorial freedom’’ was expressed in his approval of the white female author, I. A. R. Wylie, who portrayed a male mulatto protagonist in Black Harvest, and in his idea that Harlem life should be presented, not as it ought to be, but as it is, with its ‘‘discrimination among blacks, unusual sexual choices, and, in some cases, people’s dissatisfaction with their own skin color.’’ Thurman, says Ganter, can be read as a writer who ‘‘passed’’ racially and sexually ‘‘into the experience of a different person.’’ Indeed, Ganter implies that it is the bohemian nature of Thurman’s art and writings that encode the true nature of Harlem Renaissance iconoclasm. Thurman’s participation in a discussion of how blacks should be depicted in fiction in the 1926 February–November issues of Crisis reveals more of the philosophy behind his willingness to challenge the erection of boundaries between race, sex, and gender. Ganter theorizes that perhaps because Thurman insisted on the reality of blacks passing for white, he has not been included in critiques by ‘‘queer-friendly literary scholars interested in identity politics.’’ Ganter reads Infants of the Spring as an even more ‘‘explicit’’ example of Thurman’s ability to collapse boundaries, transcend race and sex prejudice, and connect to a ‘‘transforming international bohe-

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mian literary movement stretching from the Romantics, to the Decadents and the Beats to rap music.’’ Joining Evans and Ganter in treating hybridity and identity, David Jarraway sees Countee Cullen as a multilayered figure. Jarraway is not alone in critiquing Cullen’s hybridity. Du Bois, says David Levering Lewis, probably was aware that Cullen was gay but supported Cullen’s marriage to Yolanda Du Bois because he (Du Bois) thought Cullen would want to marry ‘‘for the sake of having brilliant children.’’10 Jarraway ‘‘resist[s] all attempts to separate the real writer from his racial identity or sexual orientation,’’ thereby taking in ‘‘diasporic’’ options or multiple views or ‘‘the Harlem identity that double both as poet and novelist, straight and gay, American and Negro.’’ Jarraway defines the ‘‘diasporic consciousnss’’ as an identity that is ‘‘always an open, complex, unfinished game,’’ one that can only ‘‘move into the future through a symbolic detour through the past.’’ Jarraway interprets Cullen’s denial that he is a ‘‘Negro poet’’ as a resistance to assimilative ideas about eliding a black past and accepting only an American/European reality. It’s an avoidance of a reductive artistic experience. Just as his denial of being a Negro poet constitutes acknowledging an unknown African past, and acceptance of European poetic influences, Cullen may be seen to imbibe a homosexual identity as well as a heterosexual one. Jarraway explores the ‘‘unfinished game’’ through the trope of ‘‘decontainment’’ in selected poems in Color and Copper Sun and Cullen’s novel, One Way to Heaven. For the purposes of this collection, while we agree with David Fleming that the term ‘‘rhetoric’’ still has many uses, we determine that Frank Perez’s essay examines the rhetorical underpinnings of race to persuade audiences in multiple contexts.11 Perez examines Hughes’s ‘‘Theme for English B’’ as a rhetorical aid to teaching composition and fostering discussions about race and pedagogy. Perez’s analysis becomes an argument for using literature in the composition classroom as well as a historical account of how compositionists have changed their teaching strategies over time. In explaining why the poem is suitable for composition, Perez outlines the features that foreshadow pedagogical issues in composition studies: ‘‘invention, voice, student identity or ethos, institutional ethos, decentering classroom authority, and the nexus of an implicit relationship between students and instructors.’’ Perez explores each section of ‘‘Theme for English B’’ to demonstrate not only how teaching composition has evolved, but also how the poem raises questions about voice,

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identity, race, class, and power, subjects that students could address in discussions and writing. Just as Orlando challenges male visual and literary images of women in The New Negro, Stephen Nardi questions the images Langston Hughes evokes in ‘‘The Weary Blues.’’ In emphasizing that the role of technology and history are as important as a poet’s identification with race, Nardi challenges both Rampersad’s notion that ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ records ‘‘the transmission of the folk voice from musician to poet’’ and Steven Tracy’s view of the interconnection and mutual support of musician and poet. Nardi argues instead that Hughes is as interested in the difference between these voices as in their connectedness. These differences, Nardi offers, are the rhythmic distinctions between the voices and the separation of time and space. Nardi relies on the line in ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ ‘‘the pale dull pallor of an old gas light’’ to reinforce the narrator’s distance in time from hearing the musician play and on the historical reference to the change from gas lighting in Harlem to electric street lights before the date of the poem. Nardi juxtaposes this spatial distancing of the poet, nostalgically envisioning a gas-lit world enhanced instead by a jazz musician, with public acceptance of and identification with Manhattan’s modern technology. Nardi reads ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ then, as an antimodernist poem, standing against ‘‘[t]he very agencies of technology that are creating the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In her advocacy of incorporating additional images into the teaching of this era, Anne Carroll’s essay, ‘‘Getting the Full Picture,’’ embraces the intent of this collection and serves to challenge us to offer a multilayered approach to reading literary, visual and performance pieces. Carroll’s broader view advocates including film, music, dance, painting, drawings and illustrations, photographs, journal essays, the oral tradition, and popular culture in teaching undergraduates and graduate students. Her essay is a demonstration of how this inclusivity transforms teaching. Caroll offers specific examples of sources that ‘‘illuminate the connections among the arts,’’ especially, perhaps, for those teachers whose training might be limited to literary texts. She suggests that this approach also enhances the variety of student responses to texts, and her suggestions are characterized by both an explanation and demonstration of certain roles that the interconnections of literature and other art forms can play. For example, the articles in Crisis and Opportunity ‘‘can be used to outline the ideological context in which literary texts were pro-

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duced,’’ and documentary films such as From These Roots and Ethnic Notions provide historical, racial, and political backdrops for the era from World War I through the Harlem Renaissance. While this collection does not cover all genres or writers of the Harlem Renaissance, we posit it as evidence of continued interest in the field and as a ‘‘rhetorical moment’’ to highlight multiple critical approaches reflecting fresh perspectives and redrawn boundaries among critical disciplines and periods.

Notes 1. The recent upsurge in the regentrification of Harlem during 2000 to 2002 is both celebrated as a much-needed economic rebirth and vilified as a deliberate economic erasure of older black Harlem businesses connected to Harlem’s historical consciousness. The presence of Bill Clinton, former U.S. president, while widely celebrated on July 31, 2001, was also regarded as selfserving and not necessarily good for Harlem. 2. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 19–21; 73–96; Anthony Appiah, ‘‘Illusions of Race,’’ in In My Father’s House: Africa and the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28–46 and ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,’’ Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 21–37; Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Henry Louis Gates, ‘‘Race,’’ Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 3. Survey Graphic, a magazine that had published articles on social work since 1910, is viewed as the literary catalyst of Harlem Renaissance consciousness. The magazine’s editor, Paul Kellogg, invited Locke to be guest editor for the March 1925 issue, ‘‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.’’ Locke’s title reflects his intent to proclaim Harlem as a literary center for emerging black writers. Locke expanded that issue of the magazine into the anthology, The New Negro. 4. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), 86–87. 5. See Victor Kramer and Robert A. Russ, Harlem Renaissance Re-examined: A Revised and Expanded Edition (Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing Co., 1997), 273. 6. Among a number of critical works on Harlem Renaissance women are Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Deborah McDowell, introduction to Plum Bun, by Jessie Fauset (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), ix–xxxiii; Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); Verner Mitchell, ed., This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Gloria T. Hull, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (New York: Norton, 1984); Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); additionally, anthologies that center on or include forgotten New Negro

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women writers are Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph’s Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey’s Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 7. See Suzette A. Spencer, ‘‘Swerving at a Different Angle and Flying in the Face of Tradition: Excavating the Homoerotic Subtext in Home to Harlem,’’ CLA XLII (December 1998): 164–93; Michael L. Cobb, ‘‘Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers,’’ Callaloo 23.1 (winter 2000): 328–51. 8. The titles of Cary Wintz’s series are: The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance; The Politics and Aesthetics of ‘‘New Negro’’ Literature; Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance; The Critics and the Harlem Renaissance; Remembering the Harlem Renaissance; Analysis and Assessment, 1940–1979; Analysis and Assessment, 1980–1994. 9. When Bryan Carter was a graduate student at the University of Missouri at Columbia, he taught a Harlem Renaissance literature class that featured a re-creation of 1920s Harlem using a high-definition video projector and concave screen in Missouri’s Advanced Technology Center. Carter’s class, ‘‘Virtual Harlem,’’ brought to life—in a surround sound effect—the sights and sounds of the Harlem of the writers students were assigned to read. See Curt Wohleber’s article, ‘‘Virtual Harlem,’’ American Legacy (winter 1999): 43–48. 10. See David Levering Lewis. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1923 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), 224. 11. See David Fleming, ‘‘Rhetoric as a Course of Study,’’ College English 61: 169–91.

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Part I Speaking for Race and Art: New Negro Writers Claiming Space in the Modernist Project

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What was Africa to Him?: Alain Locke, Cultural Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Empire During the New Negro Renaissance John C. Charles

ALAIN LOCKE, RENOWNED CULTURAL CRITIC AND HOWARD UNIVER-

sity philosophy professor, is best known for his role in defining and publicizing the ‘‘New Negro,’’ the most salient emblem of African American modernity in the first third of the twentieth century.1 Sociologist Charles Johnson dubbed Locke the ‘‘Dean’’ of the New Negro Renaissance, a role that culminated in his editing of, and contributions to, the famous 1925 collection The New Negro. Locke used this collection as an opportunity to trumpet the profound ‘‘internal’’ changes that he saw taking place among African Americans, ones that signified an unheralded ‘‘race spirit’’ (xvii). These internal changes amount to more than a new attitude; rather ‘‘the galvanizing shocks and reactions of the last few years are making by subtle processes of internal reorganization a race out of its own disunited and apathetic elements’’ (emphasis added xvii). Central to the development of this ‘‘racial awakening’’ (xvii) is a ‘‘new internationalism,’’ which Locke describes as ‘‘primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation’’ (14– 15). For Locke, a new yet instinctive ‘‘love and respect for Africa’’ is a key component of the New Negro’s defining ‘‘selfrespect’’ and unprecedented ‘‘self-expression’’ (xv). While numerous scholars have noted Locke’s interest in ‘‘Africa,’’ thus far there has been little analysis of how Locke’s status as a westerner—as a Harvard and Oxford trained member of the western intelligentsia, and one committed to the fuller integration of Negroes into American society—shapes the content and function of his Africanist writing (what I call his ‘‘Africanist discourse’’) during the New Negro Renaissance. In this essay I will explore how Locke’s ideological influences, allegiances, and 33

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investments determine the kinds of cultural and political work that the idea of Africa performs in the production of the ‘‘New Negro’’ as a cultural formation. To be sure, Locke’s Africanist writing can be seen as an early attempt to generate an African diasporic discourse, a transnational vision that can encompass and express his antiracist and antiimperalist commitments. But as Kenneth Warren has shown, diasporic discourse operates via necessary and even strategic misrecognitions, misapprehensions, and ambiguities.2 The contradictions of diasporic discourse arise from the problematics of cultural translation—translation across boundaries of nation, religion, race, class, etc. Following Warren’s cautionary remarks, I call attention to the effects of Locke’s translation of ‘‘Africa’’ and its nonwestern cultural production into a western discursive economy. In particular, while I am aware that my reading of Locke reflects a discourse developed after his time, I highlight the difficulties Locke encounters in negotiating the overwhelming weight of western cultural authority in his efforts to develop an Afro-centric discourse of diaspora. Locke’s call for a cultural reconnection with Africa was part of his overall cultural nationalist project. Like other cultural nationalists, including nineteenth-century German nationalist Johann Gottfried von Herder, as well as other contemporary anticolonialist cultural nationalist movements at home and abroad, Locke looked for the roots of the modern nation in the folk. He hoped that the valorization of folk culture, African and African American, would be a productive way to achieve greater recognition of black cultural contributions to American culture generally. This reassessment of the ‘‘value’’ of black culture was intended to foster greater ‘‘self-esteem’’ among African Americans and, ideally, greater inclusion in American society at large. Reconstructing Africans as the original folk and creators of a ‘‘classical’’ black heritage—in effect, bridging the gap created by the Middle Passage and thereby inventing a continuous tradition—constitutes the foundation of his cultural nationalist enterprise. Of course, Locke’s cultural nationalist project is fundamentally Western, and, moreover, tied to his ideas of American cultural nationalism—a contemporary cultural pluralist movement invested in identifying and celebrating America’s folk heritage.3 I contend that Locke’s Africanist discourse must be seen as emerging within these larger efforts to consolidate a national cultural identity. Locke’s Africanist discourse, echoing other

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Western appropriations of African culture, principally functions to satisfy Western objectives—in this case, Africa serves to bolster the (American) New Negro’s sense of pride, power, and prestige—despite Locke’s avowed efforts to establish a sense of ‘‘cultural reciprocity’’ (‘‘Internationalism—Friend or Foe of Art?’’ 75). Time and again Locke draws on the language of the marketplace and in effect commodifies African art and culture when he calls for African American artists to infuse their work with these exotic signs, and thereby capitalize on the ‘‘modern’’ European and American obsession with the primitive and notions of absolute racial difference. At a time when American artists were struggling to establish a national cultural identity, one independent of European influence, Locke argues that the integration of African signs into black American cultural production will enable black American artists to offer something authentically and distinctly racial to the American cultural scene. While Locke’s attitude toward Africa was undoubtedly among the most progressive of his time, he remains unable to imagine ‘‘Africa’’ beyond the realm of Western needs and desires; Africa’s function, first and last, is to shore up the cultural and political position of the African American.

II Until recently, there has been very little critical analysis of Locke’s Africanist discourse. This is due in part to the influence of the best-known studies of the Harlem Renaissance. For example, Nathan Huggins’s landmark study, Harlem Renaissance, does little more than summarize Locke’s ‘‘New Negro’’ theses and report (without analysis) that Locke encouraged black Americans to emulate European interest in African themes. Huggins writes, ‘‘It was easier to use the African artistic tradition as a means of giving racial equality to art than it was to discuss the significance of Africa to the Negro. Alain Locke had found it difficult and was reduced to a simple assertion of faith in a valuable African legacy’’ (80). Huggins tells us nothing about the sources of that ‘‘faith,’’ (e.g., the European avant-garde’s reevaluation of African culture) nor their possible effect on Locke’s thinking. David Levering Lewis’s take on Locke in When Harlem Was in Vogue is even less informative on this point. His treatment of Locke is frequently snide and anecdotal, and he says almost

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nothing of Locke’s interest in Africa beyond commenting on his willingness to listen to the condescending primitivist prattle of wealthy white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason in order to secure funds for a Harlem-based African museum of art. Lewis does offer the judgment, however, that Locke’s belief in the political efficacy of the cultural production of an artistic and intellectual elite was absurd: ‘‘To suppose that a few superior people, who would not have filled a Liberty Hall quorum or Ernestine Rose’s 135th Street Library, were to lead ten million Afro-Americans into an era of opportunity and justice seemed irresponsibly delusional’’ (117). Lewis’s remark fails to consider the complex motivations behind Locke’s interest in the political use of culture, especially his serious engagement with the cultural nationalist movements taking off all over the world, movements whose leaders used rhetoric that was quite similar to Locke’s. Ultimately, neither of these important and informative studies explores the internal logic of Locke’s positions vis-a`-vis Africa. Nor do they touch on the broader significance of Locke’s western perspectives and the persistence of romantic racialism and primitivism in Locke’s thought. Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is partly a response to these and other influential but negative assessments of the Harlem Renaissance (including those of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes). Baker focuses instead on black artists and intellectuals deploying a subversive and selfconscious ‘‘mastery of [Western] form’’ to achieve their ends; he also eloquently articulates the importance of the nationalist ethos in works such as The New Negro, describing it as an ‘‘emergent Afro-American national enterprise’’ (71). Baker rightly argues that Locke’s contributions to The New Negro, along with the other works in the anthology, are an attempt to articulate ‘‘a newly emergent ‘race’ or ‘nation’—a national culture’’ (73). I would like to qualify Baker’s argument, though. He overstates the case when he suggests that ‘‘Locke’s declaration of a nation . . . was a gesture commensurate with what Richard Price describes as . . . ‘marronage on a large scale’ ’’ (76). While I agree with Baker’s remark that The New Negro is the communal (if not inclusive) project of a ‘‘nation existing on the frontiers or margins of all American promise, profit, and modes of production’’ (77), the renegade, militaristic connotations of a maroon society are more aptly applied to the thought of individuals such as A. Philip Randolph, Hubert Harrison, and Marcus Garvey,

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three prominent radical figures that do not appear in the anthology. Though The New Negro was certainly noteworthy for its brazen posture, it was by no means ‘‘set in direct opposition to the general economic, political, and theological tenets’’ (77) of America, as Baker suggests. Indeed, Locke himself writes that the New Negro movement ‘‘is radical in tone, but not in purpose. . . . The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas.’’ (New Negro, 11–12). In recent years, there have been new studies that address Locke’s interest in Africa in more detailed and productive ways.4 However, none of these studies pulls together all of the divergent threads that determine the form and significance of Locke’s ‘‘use’’ of Africa. I draw on these studies below in my own analysis and expand on their efforts by examining Locke’s Africanist discourse across a broader selection of his writings and in a variety of contexts.

III Locke was, of course, part of a long history of African American leaders and intellectuals who advocated greater interest in Africa—historian St. Claire Drake dubbed this perennial concern the ‘‘Africa interest’’ (‘‘Negro Americans and the Africa Interest’’). Throughout the nineteenth-century, African American leaders spoke of literal and imaginative returns to the motherland. Wilson J. Moses has shown how many nineteenth century African American intellectuals and leaders called for whites and blacks to recognize the contributions of ancient African civilization, usually Egyptian civilization in particular, to the development of world civilization.5 More radical versions of this thinking took shape as ‘‘Ethiopianism’’—an African American form of messianic ancestralism based on the premise that Ethiopia, once the dominant force in the world, will, by providential design, one day rule again.6 Many black spokespeople, including Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell, Frances Harper, and Pauline Hopkins, also promoted evangelical ‘‘civilizing,’’ or ‘‘uplift,’’ missions for their ‘‘benighted’’ pagan African brethren. Although these leaders held widely differing perspectives on social and political matters, one thing they all shared was an unquestioned presumption that African Americans were the best qualified to redeem and regenerate Africa, religiously and politically.

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As historian Kevin Gaines puts it, black Americans saw themselves ‘‘as privileged agents of progress and civilization for the disadvantaged black majority’’ (470). Implicit in this ‘‘civilizationist’’ ideology, of course, are basic imperialist assumptions, including Racial Darwinism. Drawing on Enlightenment notions of a ‘‘great chain of being,’’ Racial Darwinism asserts that a race’s position in the racial hierarchy derives from its attainment of Western ideas of civilization (436). Many middle-class black Americans naturally considered themselves highly ‘‘civilized,’’ especially in contrast to ‘‘primitive’’ Africans. Gaines reminds us, however, that even granting the relative privilege of black Americans when compared with Africans, it was the adverse social conditions in America that were the true inspiration for African American missionary endeavors: ‘‘the imagined uplift of African peoples from their so-called degraded condition promised refuge, psychic and otherwise, from the desperate situation black Americans faced’’ (440, emphasis added). The rhetoric of uplift was also intended to fight racist stereotypes in America; black Victorians hoped that their ‘‘representative’’ conduct and ideas would lead to fuller acceptance by white America. As the child of a staunchly middle-class family in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Locke grew up surrounded by the rhetoric of uplift. He was, however, a harsh critic of missionary activity. He recognized that ‘‘missionarism is practically a corollary of modern imperialism’’ (Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 26) and that ‘‘the missionary condescension of the past generations in their attitude toward Africa was a pious but sad mistake’’ (‘‘Apropos of Africa,’’ 37). Locke’s attitude reflected the emergent cultural relativism of his day and accordingly his Africanist thought stressed secular concerns over spiritual ones. Cultural politics supplanted Christian salvation, as Locke believed that ‘‘more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and present’’ (New Negro, 15). In spite of Locke’s efforts to distance himself from the attitudes of his parents’ generation, his construction of Africa retains many of their assumptions. For example, when Locke describes the relationship between African Americans and Africans, his language conveys a similar unquestioned power, asymmetry, and sense of presumption. In his essay, ‘‘The New Negro,’’ he declares that African Americans possess a clear ‘‘con-

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sciousness of acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization’’ (New Negro, 14 emphasis added).7 As modern Americans, the ‘‘enlightened minority’’ of African Americans are the ‘‘representative’’ people of African descent. Locke believes that these African Americans (the [in]famous ‘‘Talented Tenth’’) are the self-evident cultural and intellectual leaders of all African peoples. He makes this point more explicitly in another essay where he asserts that the blend of ‘‘African stocks’’ in African Americans makes them ‘‘in a real sense the true Pan-African, and . . . on the grounds of opportunity and strategic position, . . . the leaders in constructive Pan-African thought and endeavor.’’ He goes on to say, ‘‘the American Negro must reach out toward his rightful share in the solution of African problems and the development of Africa’s resources.’’ Locke’s phrasing conveys a sense of recuperative solidarity, even as it constructs Africa as an undifferentiated continent, passive and voiceless regarding its destinies. Although he credits Africa for being the ‘‘mother of civilization in general,’’ it is nonetheless a place with ‘‘problems’’ and in need of ‘‘regeneration’’ (‘‘Apropos’’ 37). Like most of his contemporaries, Locke seems unable to imagine the relative value of traditional (indigenous) African social structures or the possibility of African nations embarking on self-determination without Western guidance; rather, he automatically presumes Africa’s redemption will require Western leadership and Westernized development of its ‘‘resources.’’8 While Locke criticizes the ‘‘missionary condescension’’ of earlier black leaders vis-a`-vis Africa, he nonetheless utilizes missionary rhetoric. He declares that there exists a ‘‘sense of a mission [on the part of African Americans] of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible’’ (New Negro, 14 emphasis added). He elsewhere suggests that the black American is a ‘‘possible missioner of civilization’’ to ‘‘his handicapped brother in Africa.’’9 The global center for this missionary activity is Harlem. Locke tells us that ‘‘in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or a least promises to be—a race capital’’ (New Negro, 7). Recalling the rhetoric of empire, Locke configures Harlem as the metropole, the center of global race leadership, the point from which all cultural ‘‘missionary’’ activities begin. As we’ve seen with Locke’s nineteenth-century forebears, when African Americans claim the mantle of global leadership

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for all African peoples it inevitably signifies more than a simple act of altruistic racial solidarity. Renewed interest in Africa, Locke tells us, will provide ‘‘constructive channels . . . into which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely’’—and he follows this remark with an ominous aside, ‘‘Without them there would be much more pressure and danger than there is’’ (13–14). Locke considers the African American’s possible role in the ‘‘development of Africa’’—along Western lines of progress—a ‘‘universally helpful mission’’ that offers African Americans ‘‘valuable group incentives, increased prestige at home and abroad’’ (15). Like the generation before him, Locke’s missionary rhetoric ultimately refers back to the needs of African Americans—the regeneration of Africa aids African Americans in their search for status in America.10 This simultaneous turn toward Africa and mainstream America creates an unresolved tension in many of his essays. Although Locke’s engagement with ‘‘Africa’’ must be understood as fundamentally shaped by the politics of contemporary American race relations, his Africanist discourse in most cases addresses itself to matters of culture. This orientation was due in part to the groundbreaking work of contemporary anthropologists, especially Franz Boas, who held the then radical opinion that the culture of ‘‘primitive’’ groups was on a par with that of any in Western civilization.11 Anthropologist James Clifford writes that ‘‘the plural, anthropological definition of culture emerged as a liberal alternative to racist classifications of human diversity. It was a sensitive means for understanding different and dispersed ‘whole ways of life’ in a high colonial context of unprecedented global interconnection.’’ (64). The work of Boas and others gave Locke the critical and ‘‘scientific’’ vocabulary he needed to begin revising pseudoscientific racist discourses that allegedly proved the Negro’s inferiority.12 These developments bolstered Locke’s belief that culture was the most viable avenue for African American social and political advancement. Despite these historical considerations, some critics, such as David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue, see Locke’s culturally based social vision as grossly irresponsible, as little more than the vagaries of an elitist aesthete. However, as Marianna Torgovnick explains in her work, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, there is much at stake in determining whether or not a ‘‘people’’ have ‘‘Culture’’ according to Western standards: ‘‘For many Western thinkers, the production of ‘art’ is a basic element of ‘culture.’ . . . The attribution of ‘art’ or ‘aes-

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thetics’ to a particular group is thus often connected, whether rightly or not, to political identity.’’ (83, emphasis added). Locke was well aware of this dynamic, and hoped that dominant culture recognition of African and African American achievement in the arts would help improve the political situation of African Americans.13 An international historical phenomenon contributed to Locke’s emphasis on culture as well. Since the turn of the century, nationalist movements had been springing up all over the world in countries such as Ireland, Italy, and India. Locke watched these movements with great interest—especially their accompanying cultural activities—believing that they augured a new world order. In a 1915 lecture entitled ‘‘Racial Progress and Adjustment,’’ a decade before The New Negro’s publication, Locke wrote, ‘‘The prologue of political recognition of submerged nationalities in Europe has been their separate struggle for artistic expression—a recognition in music, in the arts, . . . and in the representative arts of letters’’ (Stewart, ed., Critical Temper of Alain Locke 99–100).14 Because Locke’s goals for the social advancement of African Americans seem rather conservative by today’s standards, few scholars take his interest in nationalism seriously. However, even a cursory reading of Locke’s essays during this period reveals his frequent use of nationalist rhetoric when describing the New Negro. This was an entirely discursive project, of course; Locke never entertained dreams of creating a separate African American state or literally returning to Africa.15 It is worth pausing over Locke’s interest in cultural nationalism, however, as it embodies an important component of the role of Africa in his thought. One source of Locke’s interest in nationalism was his belief that African Americans were colonial subjects, despite their status as archetypal Americans. In a lecture critiquing imperialism, Locke stated: . . . we lose considerable perspective when we differentiate between what we call the fate of peoples confronting an imperial system and the fate of our group that confronts not an imperial system, but, nevertheless a system of practical racial distinctions and discrimination. . . . If you live within the system, you confront what is, after all, the internal or home policy of imperialism. (Race Contacts, 33)

It comes as no surprise, then, to find that Locke self-consciously and repeatedly uses nationalist metaphors to develop his cul-

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tural-political project, even if he didn’t advocate militant or separatist nationalism for African Americans.16 In the forward to The New Negro, Locke writes: The New Negro must be seen in the perspective of a New World, and especially of a New America. Europe seething in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a renascent Judaism— these are no more alive with the progressive forces of our era than the quickened centers of the lives of black folk. America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and a national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives. (xv–xvi)

Locke declares that as African Americans become a race for the first time, ‘‘our comparison is taken with those nascent centers of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world today. Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia’’ (7). As the preceding passages make clear, Locke aligns the New Negro movement with colonized and subjugated groups throughout the world whose struggle toward a national identity is coextensive with their struggle for political liberation. But here as elsewhere Locke also simultaneously connects New Negro efforts to define an emergent racial identity with America’s cultural nationalist efforts to define a new national identity—America and the New Negro are ‘‘seeking the same satisfactions and objectives.’’ Despite the significant differences of objective and rationale between anticolonial nationalist movements and the rise of American cultural nationalism, Locke draws from both movements the one thing they share—the valorization of the folk. While Locke was studying at Oxford and Berlin he encountered the work of eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Herder— considered the ‘‘father’’ of cultural nationalism. Herder held that the Volk were the bearers of an authentic culture, and that folk cultural production, such as songs and tales, expressed the spirit of the people and thereby constituted the roots of the nation. Practically all of Locke’s essays on culture during this period praise the New Negro’s ‘‘folk-spirit.’’ For example, Locke crowns Langston Hughes the ‘‘spokesman’’ of the ‘‘Negro masses’’ since his ‘‘poems seem based on rhythms as seasoned as folk songs and

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on moods as deep-seated as folk ballads’’ (‘‘Review of ‘The Weary Blues’ by Langston Hughes,’’ in Stewart, ed., CTAL 41). The ‘‘new’’ national culture is founded on the folk.17 Locke also ties his definition of the New Negro to nationalist discourse via his celebration of ‘‘youth’’—drawing on rhetoric similar to European vernacular nationalist movements, such as ‘‘Young Ireland’’ and ‘‘Young Italy.’’ While most of the ‘‘representative’’ New Negro artists are in fact several years younger than Locke, he uses the term in a larger sense as well to indicate the spirit of the movement. In ‘‘Negro Youth Speaks,’’ his second essay in The New Negro, Locke says it is the spirit of the young Negro that has broken from the old Negro’s ‘‘cautious moralism and guarded idealizations’’ (50) and now digs ‘‘deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life’’ (51). The Negro youth are also, in Locke’s estimation, the first generation to live beyond the memory of slavery and are thus free of its psychic shackles. In his now classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson points out that among the emerging colonial nationalist intelligentsia there was ‘‘a complex political significance [attached to] youth’’ (119). In addition to symbolizing ‘‘dynamism, progress, self-sacrificing idealism and revolutionary will . . . [y]outh meant, above all, the first generation in any significant numbers to have acquired a European education, marking them off linguistically and culturally from their parents’ generation, as well as from the vast bulk of their colonized agemates’’ (119). Similarly, for Locke the achievements of the younger generation of African Americans in traditional forms of Western culture signify most clearly their break from past generations. Africa played a vital role in Locke’s efforts to foster his ‘‘emergent Afro-American national enterprise’’ (Baker 73). Locke’s project was, in effect, an effort to construct a ‘‘racial nation’’ within and for the larger national project of American cultural nationalism. When The New Negro was published, Locke’s ‘‘racial nation,’’ (or, more specifically, his ‘‘imagined community’’) was still very much a work in progress. Despite his bravado, he often qualifies his optimistic declarations. Locke admits that Harlem is still a nascent center, that as yet it only ‘‘promises at least to be . . . a race capital,’’ that ‘‘No sane observer, however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet.’’ (New Negro, 7). The foundations of Locke’s national edifice were still incomplete, and, as I will

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argue, Locke looked to Africa, or at least an idea of Africa, to bolster those foundations. Nationalist movements are heavily invested in validating historical origins and native cultural production. Likewise, Locke was attempting to revise the current status of African culture to validate the origins of the African American nation. But Locke had to take a different approach than most nationalist leaders. Unlike Herder, for example, who could advocate a rejection of French culture for all things German, Locke was part of a heterogeneous nation. Moreover, Locke’s New Negro was, on most counts, prototypically modern and Western, while Africa was considered the antithesis of the modern West. Locke tried to turn this complication to his advantage. He attempted to rewrite a racist theory of origins in Africa with those of the noble and intuitively sophisticated primitive. By translating and domesticating African culture and signs, Locke hoped to bolster the racial nation and the African American’s bid for full initiation into American society. Specifically, he argued that through a celebration of African heritage and internalization of African signs, the New Negro could produce ‘‘fresh sources of beauty in America,’’ something racially ‘‘intimate and original’’ yet fundamentally familiar to most Americans (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 148). At first glance Locke’s use of nationalist rhetoric may seem entirely at odds with his Western perspective on Africa—what I call Locke’s rhetoric of empire—and his efforts to assert the New Negro’s Americanness. A juxtaposition of these issues reveals, instead, that they are inextricably linked. Like nationalism, the goal of imperialism is nation building. Cultural imperialism acquires and domesticates foreign cultures for the purposes of consolidating domestic relations. A few years before the New Negro movement, Locke himself pointed out that counterimperialist movements arise ‘‘partly in imitation of, partly in reaction to’’ imperialism itself (Race Contacts, 34, emphasis added). As I will demonstrate, Locke’s Africanist discourse, which constitutes his reaction to imperialism, frequently bears an unmistakable resemblance to certain trademark attitudes and assumptions of Western imperialist rhetoric.

IV The gesture of reaching out to the most unknown part of the world and bringing it back as language . . . ultimately brings Europe face

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to face with nothing but itself, with the problems its own discourse imposes. Thus Pigault-Lebrun takes us to the banks of the Niger to introduce us to women named ‘‘Calipso’’ or ‘‘Fanny,’’ creatures of European origin, fulfilling European desires.18

Locke’s efforts to legitimate an African American racial nation through culture take shape in a range of essays on Africa, Africans, and African art. His writing on African art provides among the clearest echoes of imperialism’s discursive order. ‘‘The Legacy of Ancestral Arts,’’ one of four essays that Locke authored in The New Negro, is particularly illuminating. The bulk of this essay is given over to the cultural value of African art for African Americans. The source of this value is the ‘‘quite unanimous verdict of the modern creative mind upon the values, actual and potential’’ (262) of African art.19 By ‘‘modern creative mind’’ Locke clearly means Western artists and critics, especially the leading figures of European avant-garde aesthetic modernism: he backs up his claim by including several lengthy lists of prominent artists, such as Picasso and Matisse, who acknowledge the influence of African art on their work. Locke goes on to say that because African Americans come to African art in ‘‘as alienated and misunderstanding an attitude as the average European Westerner’’ (255), African Americans owe their reconnection to this tradition, in Locke’s estimation, primarily to the ‘‘growing influence of African art upon European art in general’’ (255–56). The main thrust of the essay is that, with the European stamp of approval, African Americans can now lay claim to a ‘‘classic’’ heritage, and thus have the ‘‘valuable and stimulating realization that the Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own inheritance’’ (256). This newly authenticated tradition has particular significance for Locke’s cultural-political project. First, it brings African American cultural production closer to being on a par with the Western aesthetic tradition—i.e., where the white (and black) West claims the classic tradition of Greek art and culture, African Americans can now at least claim the classic tradition of African art. African art’s admission into the sphere of Western culture simultaneously grants Africans one of the prerequisite signs for Western subjectivity. The Western authentication of African art also allows Locke to bridge the gap in his nationalist search for origins. In keeping with the nationalist valorization of the folk, Locke states that the African use of design is an aspect ‘‘of a folk tradition, [a]

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slumbering gift of the folk temperament’’ (267). In another essay on African art, Locke writes that ‘‘African art should act with all the force of a rediscovered folk-art, and give clues for the reexpression of a half-submerged race soul’’ (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 179). Through Western pronouncements on African art, Locke establishes an already authenticated Ur-folk, which lends cultural authority to both the African American folk tradition and contemporary African American art. African American artists can now proudly affirm a ‘‘tradition’’—signifying a legitimate cultural paternity—that precedes the Middle Passage. For Locke, African art also offers African American artists ‘‘a mine of fresh motifs’’ (New Negro, 256) and an ‘‘unexhausted reservoir of art material’’ (262), which, as he points out, is precisely what it has offered European artists. Locke’s unqualified reliance on European cultural authority in this essay suggests, intentionally or otherwise, that African art, like a body of raw natural resources, was implicitly devoid of value until refined by the Western imagination and integrated into its cultural economy. Luckily, Locke avers, the veritable gold mine of African art’s influence and popularity remains ‘‘yet unexhausted.’’ He boasts that African American artists are practically guaranteed success if they look to African art for inspiration, since ‘‘to a certain extent contemporary art has pronounced in advance upon this objective.’’ (262). African American artists should capitalize on Africa’s status as a hot cultural commodity. From his experience with wealthy white patrons such as Charlotte Mason, Locke knew that Western audiences would find it ‘‘natural,’’ would even expect African Americans to infuse their cultural expression with African signs.20 Thus, the African masks and sculptures that adorn the pages of Locke’s ‘‘The Legacy of Ancestral Arts’’ (in New Negro) are like so many rare coins or bibelot, mute signs of cultural capital. Locke never even mentions these pieces in the essay; they acquire their value and implicit meaning by virtue of their literal and figurative placement within the economy of European aesthetic discourse. This is true of most colonial appropriations of ‘‘primitive’’ African objects at the time. James Clifford explains that no effort is made to establish the objects’ ethnographic meaning. In fact, ‘‘ignorance of cultural context seems almost a precondition for artistic appreciation. In this object system a tribal piece is detached from one milieu in order to circulate freely in another, a world of art—of museums, markets, and connoissuership’’ (200, emphasis added). The similarity between

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Locke’s use of African art in this essay and that of most contemporary Western primitive art collectors is not coincidental, as Locke was himself a broker and connoisseur of African art (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 129). Locke believed that the European artists’ use of African idioms should be ‘‘the inspiration and guide-posts of a younger school of Negro artists’’ (264). Although Locke was obviously pleased to see the European avant-garde’s positive reevaluations of African culture replacing colonial contempt, in recent years a large body of scholarship has developed that critiques the assumptions behind many Western representations of Africa, including those by the modernists that Locke uses for cultural authority. These critics argue that the Western use of African signs, culture, and other ‘‘primitive’’ art forms replicates the exploitive dynamic of the colonizer’s encounter with native populations. One such critic is Abdul JanMohamed, who draws on Foucault when he writes, in reference to colonialist fiction, that the value of these texts depends on ‘‘their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility for transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources’’ [quoting Foucault, emphasis added]. Just as imperialists ‘‘administer’’ the resources of the conquered country, so colonialist discourse ‘‘commodifies’’ the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a ‘‘resource’’ for colonialist fiction. (JanMohamed 82–83)

Colonial artists and intellectuals construct the native subject in ways that perpetuate and reinforce the colonialist enterprise— the development of the homeland through the resources of the colonial subject. Locke similarly reproduces elements of imperialism’s discursive order by uncritically advocating an appropriation of African signs for the development of, at least initially, an entirely Western African American cultural discourse. If African American artists are willing to augment their ‘‘original artistic endowment’’ with avant-garde European aesthetics, then Locke foresees that ‘‘the Negro may well become what some have predicted, the artist of American life’’ (New Negro, 258). Locke’s prediction is ironic—if African American artists internalize Europe’s assessment of African art then they may have something ‘‘original’’ and, more importantly, something valuable to offer America. Europe, Africa, America: the triangle of European colonization remains intact.

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Within the framework of the essay, the legacy of the ancestral arts is their place in the realm of Western aesthetics, their value as artistic currency in a Western cultural economy. European cultural authority drowns out all other voices. Locke uses only one quotation in the essay, a remark by the influential British art critic, Roger Fry, about the provocative use of form in African sculpture; the African objects remain unglossed and, beyond a legend which identifies the nationality of the ‘‘artisan,’’ wholly divorced from their original context.21 But if Africa provided an ‘‘authentic’’ and ‘‘classic’’ artistic tradition—a usable past for African American artists—it continued to represent a usable present as a source of exotic signs. Locke’s repeated emphasis on the formal sophistication of traditional African art stands in stark contrast to his figuring of ‘‘Africa’’ and ‘‘Africans’’ as alluringly ‘‘primitive’’ material for black American cultural production. Consider, for example, Locke’s attitude toward Africa in an article he wrote for Theatre Arts Monthly on the role of African Americans in contemporary American drama. He concedes that even though Africa ‘‘may seem a far cry from the conditions and moods of modern New York and Chicago and the Negro’s rapid and feverish assimilation of all things American’’ (‘‘The Negro and the American Stage,’’ in Stewart, ed., CTAL 85), it nevertheless offers perfect ‘‘material’’ to foster a ‘‘dramatic renascence’’ (86). Locke writes, The emotional elements of Negro art are choked by the conventions of the contemporary stage; they call for freer, more plastic material. They have no mysterious affinity with African themes or scenes, but they have for any life that is more primitive and poetic in substance. . . . Especially with its inherent color and emotionalism, its freedom from body-hampering dress, its odd and tragic and mysterious overtones, African life and themes, apart from any sentimental attachment, offer a wonderfully new field and province for dramatic treatment. Here both the Negro actor and dramatist can move freely in a world of elemental beauty, with all the decorative elements that a poetic emotional temperament could wish. (85, emphasis added).

This passage rivals that from any imperialist writer for its unself-conscious projection of Western desire. Through a critical sleight of hand, Locke proffers Africa as a source of inspiration to black American dramatists, not because of a ‘‘mysterious affinity’’ of race, but rather because African life has ‘‘mysterious overtones’’ and is ‘‘more primitive and poetic in substance.’’ Locke manages to critique the idea of a ‘‘mysterious’’ and essen-

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tialist racial bond among people of African descent in one sentence, only to reinsert a ‘‘mysterious’’ fantasy of ‘‘African life and themes’’ a few lines later. Here, Africa is not a dark continent, but rather a brightly colored tropical paradise, an undifferentiated ‘‘world of elemental beauty’’ ripe for wish fulfillment. As in colonialist writing, Africa is an exoticized site of imaginative license, a place ‘‘free’’ from the constraints of Western civilization, a figurative new land that African Americans can possess by right—it is, so to speak, ‘‘free’’ for the taking. Locke describes Africa as a ‘‘province,’’ again positing Africa as a hinterland, a figurative colony, a far-flung possession of the Harlemite dreaming in the metropole. There are apparently no African subjects in Africa, only provocative settings, such as ‘‘inherent color and emotionalism, freedom from body-hampering dress, [and] odd and tragic and mysterious overtones.’’ The absence of people in Locke’s African fantasy is, I believe, a necessity; the vicissitudes of life under colonial subjugation would poison its mystical aura. The inattention to particulars, (such as the lack of ‘freedom’ for colonized Africans) allows the Western imagination to ‘‘move freely in a world of elemental beauty.’’ Once again, a feeling of constraint at home—in this case, ‘‘the conventions of the contemporary stage’’—send the Western artist ‘‘abroad’’ in search of aesthetic ‘‘freedom.’’ ‘‘African life and themes’’ are so much raw material, passively awaiting the transforming imagination of the civilized (and, in Locke’s estimation, overassimilated and timidly imitative) Negro dramatist and actor. ‘‘Africa is,’’ Locke insists, ‘‘naturally romantic. It is poetic capital of the first order’’ (‘‘Negro in American Culture’’). Its alleged naturalness is clearly what qualifies it as ‘‘authentic’’ cultural currency. Moreover, Africa’s inhabitants purportedly retain a ‘‘natural’’ affinity with Nature, superior to what Locke sees as the ‘‘contrived’’ and ‘‘rarefied’’ use of Nature in English Romanticism. Locke declares in his review of the players of the contemporary Ethiopian Art Theatre that the use of African life and themes grants this troupe of American actors and dramatists license to ‘‘become as naive and spontaneous’’ as they wish. He reports that, ‘‘discerning critics noticed ‘the freshness and vigor of their emotional responses, their spontaneity and intensity of mood, their freedom from intellectual and artistic obsessions’ ’’ (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 82, emphasis added). Locke’s African fantasy allows African American artists, like other Westerners, to feel and act primitive, to imaginatively move outside the con-

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straints and conventions of Western civilization. In the name of culture, Locke abandons his critical acumen and gives himself over to a conception of Africa that is ‘‘a definite attempt to poetize the race origins and supply a fine imaginative background for a fresh cultural expression.’’ Thus, Locke clearly participates in, even if he is skeptical of, the discourse of primitivism. His use of primitivist discourse is especially problematic when we consider his ideas on race. In a series of lectures on race that Locke gave in 1915 and 1916, he wrote that physical race or ‘‘pure race’’ is a scientific fiction—biologically it is irretrievable, if ever possessed—historically, it is an anachronism, being attributed to national, not racial, groups, and then only to justify the historical group sense—politically, it is a mere policy or subterfuge of empire. . . . Social race, or ‘‘civilization type’’ and ‘‘kind,’’ [is] the only thoroughly rational meaning of race. (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 412)

Even though Locke rejected essentialist, ahistorical ideas of race in the most sophisticated terms, he nonetheless reinforces popular ideas of the connection between African ancestry and the primitive. In a 1928 essay entitled ‘‘The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,’’ Locke writes, ‘‘And yet from the earliest efforts at crude self-expression, it was the African or racial temperament, creeping back in the overtones of his halfarticulate speech and action, which gave to his life and ways the characteristic qualities instantly recognized as peculiarly and representatively his’’ (Stewart, ed., CTAL, 439 emphasis added). Locke was fully aware that most whites, including his wealthy patrons, attributed the African American’s putative primitiveness to residues of an African temperament, a tropical heritage that survived the dulling effects of civilization. Locke capitalized on these beliefs and offered African American cultural production—made more natural, ‘‘free,’’ and poetic by its African leavening—as an exotic yet familiar tonic for modern America’s spiritual malaise—the widespread sense of loss and alienation at the hands of a supposedly hyperrationalized, crass, and mechanistic society—one suffering from what Locke refers to as ‘‘the blight of the machine’’: ‘‘For the Negro’s predisposition toward the artistic . . . makes him a spiritually needed and culturally desirable factor in American life’’ (448, emphasis added).

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V Africa, its signs and cultural production, never leave the Western context; Locke’s Africa remains the subject of a conversation between Western interlocutors. There is no African voice, no African subjectivity, no African epistemology. Mark Helbling has noted the frustration Franz Boas felt at having so little historical material available to him in his efforts to contextualize the various kinds of art that were the subject of his influential study, Primitive Art. Helbling goes on to argue that, despite Boas’s best efforts, ‘‘the leaves of this book, much like the ethnographic exhibits Boas battled to change, do not echo with the voices of those whose work we try to understand. Instead, the interpretive logic of Franz Boas fills the void left by history and research’’ (60). The same can certainly be said of Locke’s Africanist writing, where he is left to ‘‘fill the void left by history and research’’ with his own imagination and the pronouncements of the European cultural elite. Ultimately, however, it is the interpretive logic of his nationalist project that drives his analysis of African culture generally. Locke did in at least one place call for more conscientious study of African culture during this period, in his 1924 Opportunity essay, ‘‘Apropos of Africa.’’ But this expression of awareness by Locke for the need for more intellectual exchange between black Americans and Africans, as opposed to black Americans simply speaking for Africans, represents the exception. He typically allows African objects (such as art) or ‘‘African themes’’ stand in for the presumably monolithic ‘‘African’’ perspective; moreover, he also seems to express no selfconsciousness that when he assumes the mantle of Pan-African leadership on behalf of all black peoples, it is always within the context of achieving greater integration into American society. These divergent elements in Locke’s thinking seem to affirm Wilson Moses’s contention that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black nationalist movements were, despite their powerful rhetoric, in many ways quite conservative and assimilationist.22 Another way to contextualize Locke’s Africanist discourse is to see it as ‘‘pre-’’ or ‘‘proto-diasporic.’’ Here I am referring to the history of the concept of the African Diaspora, which, according to Brent Hayes Edwards, did not enter into the analysis of black culture and history until 1965, with an essay by historian George Shepperson.23 Edwards explains in his analysis of the origins and uses of the concept of the African Diaspora that Shep-

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person introduced this term to ‘‘account for the transformative ‘sea changes’ that Pan-African thought undergoes in a transnational circuit.’’ (49). In particular, Edwards notes, African Diaspora as a concept is alert to the ‘‘constitutive differences’’ (in aims, political and cultural perspectives, orientations, etc.) of ‘‘Africans abroad.’’ According to Edwards, African Diaspora inaugurates a ‘‘radically decentered analysis of transnational circuits of culture and politics that are resistant or exorbitant to the frames of nations and continents’’ (52, emphasis added). As I have tried to show, Locke’s early Africanist discourse attempts to reach beyond the boundaries of the nation, yet it remains anchored exclusively in Western, especially American, thought and objectives—it is marked by discursive imbalance, a conversation among Westerners about non-Western objects. Even though Locke’s Africanist discourse strives to initiate a meaningful and recuperative notion of racial ‘‘difference,’’ within the context of his nationalist endeavors—his efforts to facilitate the birth of the New Negro—this ‘‘difference’’ is translated into a kind of generic racial sameness (i.e., into a Westernized trope of primitive nonwhiteness). Tracing the sources, aims, and forms of Locke’s Africanist discourse allows us to engage with a brilliant thinker who could launch subtle critiques of racialist and imperialist logic virtually alongside his articulation of what I have called the ‘‘rhetoric of empire.’’ His thinking was at times remarkably prescient and progressive, while at others still deeply indebted to the imperialist ways of knowing that he worked so assiduously to undermine. The apparent incommensurability of his Africanist discourse, his ambivalent and at times contradictory representations of Africa, speaks not only to the historical and discursive limits under which he was operating, but also has much to teach us insofar as it illustrates the difficulty that African American intellectuals and leaders faced—and to some extent still face today—when trying to simultaneously reach a wide audience and register an autonomous and liberatory group consciousness. In the final analysis, however, despite the persistence of a previous generation’s attitudes in Locke’s thinking on Africa, his efforts are still best understood as those of a pioneer, of one existing in the uncertain region of an intellectual frontier. Locke’s Africanist writing during the Harlem Renaissance represents an illuminating phase, a period of transition, in the still unfinished process of evaluating the histories and meanings of the African Diaspora. When thinking over the implications and

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assumptions of Locke’s efforts to reconstruct ‘‘Africa’’ in the Western imagination, it is worth recalling Paul Gilroy’s cautionary point that ‘‘the history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade’’ (xi).

Notes 1. Alain Locke (1886–1954), Harvard PhD and the first African American Rhodes Scholar, was unquestionably one of the most well-known and influential arbiters of Harlem Renaissance culture and aesthetics. Locke wrote widely on African American culture, from literature, to visual arts, to music, to drama, to all forms of humanities scholarship, including philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, and education; Locke published in numerous mainstream and cultural publications, though many of his articles appeared in the Urban League’s Opportunity, where he was the literary editor. Locke was also connected to virtually all of the best known and influential white patrons and ‘‘friends’’ of New Negro movement, in America and overseas. With the possible exception of W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, author, activist, and editor of The Crisis magazine, no other single individual’s opinion carried more authority on matters of African American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Wilson J. Moses has written that, ‘‘No person was better qualified during the 1920s than Alain Locke to define the New Negro movement, or to appreciate its paradoxes’’ (Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 212). Art historian Mary Ann Calo writes of Locke that, ‘‘more than any other single individual—with the possible exception of James Porter, whose influence will be felt somewhat later—Locke was responsible for shaping the historical understanding and critical appraisal of African American art in the imagination of the interested public’’ (‘‘African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars,’’ American Quarterly, 51.3 (1999): 585). 2. Kenneth W. Warren, ‘‘Appeals for (Mis)Recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,’’ in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 392–406. 3. See George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)—especially chapter 4. 4. See John Cullen Gruesser, Black on Black: Twentieth Century AfricanAmerican Writing About Africa (2000), especially chapter 3; Mark Helbling, ‘‘African Art and the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, Melville Herskovits, Roger Fry, and Albert C. Barnes’’ in The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke, 1999, 53–84; Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White; and Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘‘Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance’’ in Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, 2001, 288– 313. 5. See Afrotopia, especially chapter 2. 6. This view of history is inspired by the Psalms verse, ‘‘Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God’’ (68:31). For a suggestive and thorough analysis of Ethiopianism and its twentieth century incarnations, see Gruesser, Black on Black.

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7. Du Bois also calls African Americans the ‘‘advance guard of Negro people,’’ encouraging them ‘‘to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism’’ in ‘‘The Conservation of Races’’ (1897) (qtd. in Gruesser, 13). In his contribution to The New Negro, ‘‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out,’’ Du Bois would reiterate nearly three decades later that, ‘‘This hundred and fifty millions of people [of the African Diaspora] are gaining slowly an intelligent thoughtful leadership. The main seat of their leadership is to-day the United States.’’ He continues that the greatest sign of progress among black Americans is ‘‘for the first time in America, the American Negro is to-day universally recognized as capable of speaking for himself’’ (411). The complex reasons why other African peoples are not recognized as capable of speaking for themselves—including Du Bois’s own attitudes on this question—remain unexamined. 8. Given Locke’s critical attitude toward imperialist activity (which I discuss below), we can assume that he is not recommending that black Americans participate in or endorse the exploitation of Africa’s land and labor resources. Nevertheless, he is quite vague regarding precisely how African Americans should help develop Africa’s ‘‘resources’’—and vague about which resources he is referring to. Here, as elsewhere, though Africa is putatively the subject of his analysis, the true referent is black America. 9. This quote comes from a paper Locke delivered for a symposium at Mt. Holyoke College in 1931, where he stated: ‘‘In white America, the Negro finds the pattern of practical endeavor and discipline, and the mastery of physical and scientific civilization, both for his own good and for the sake of his handicapped brother in Africa, to whom he is a possible missioner of civilization. (emphasis added, qtd. in Calo, ‘‘African American Art’’ 584). 10. It is worth restating here that Locke’s attitude toward Africa was much more positive than many of his fellow African Americans. However, despite his good will, he never expresses the sense that Africans are truly equal to African Americans in a social sense—in one essay he describes Africans in general as ‘‘backward.’’ He consistently figures African Americans in positions of leadership or uplift regarding Africans. My purpose in scrutinizing Locke’s Africanist writing is not to suggest that Locke was a reactionary among other enlightened thinkers. Rather, much of his thought is highly typical of the most ‘‘enlightened’’ discourses of the time. By extension, Locke is open to many of the same critiques as his contemporaries because he shared many of their prejudices, biases, and assumptions, even while he rejected others. Of course I in no way expect Locke to somehow have magically transcended his historical moment; rather, I am investigating how his historical moment and intellectual heritage determined his analysis of Africa. My hope is that this discussion may help clarify the limits of progressive racial thinking in early twentieth-century U.S. history, while also moving beyond the essentialist assumption that Locke’s Africanist thinking is exempt from critique because of his transhistorical racial connectedness to all things African. 11. Mark Helbling tells us that Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man enacts a revolutionary ‘‘revolt against the evolutionary racial science of the nineteenth century [by challenging] the fundamental presumption, ‘a lack of originality,’ that supposedly distinguished Europeans from non-Europeans and justified the world’s peoples being ranked in stages of ascending superiority’’ (‘‘African Art and the Harlem Renaissance,’’ 58–59). Helbling tells us that Boas argued for ‘‘creativity’’ as a universal human phenomenon, and that Boas’s ‘‘emphasis on

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a shared ‘aesthetic impulse’ was cast within an intellectual framework that stressed diversity and the plurality of standards necessary to evaluate the success and meaning of a people’s aesthetic achievements ’’ (59). See also Hutchinson for a good discussion of the connections between Boasian anthropology, pragmatism, and the Harlem Renaissance, 62–77. 12. In 1935 Locke credits the ‘‘unquestionably scientific school of anthropologists captained by Professor Boas [for having dared], in season and out, to challenge false doctrine and conventional myths, and [for being] the first to bring the citadel of Nordicism into range of scientific encirclement and bombardment.’’ Locke also attributes ‘‘the gradual liberalizing of the American historians and sociologists on the race question’’ to the influence of cultural anthropology (Jeffrey Stewart, ed., Critical Temper of Alain Locke, 232). 13. Another reason that Locke chose culture as his weapon in the struggle for the social advancement of African Americans derives from the widespread racial strife and fear of radicalism in America following the First World War. Ann Douglas has shown how culture took on greater political import at this time partly as a response to how limited African American access was to conventional forms of political power in 1920s Manhattan. See Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Locke knew that whites generally found cultural manifestos much less threatening than political critique. Prior to the New Negro movement, Locke held some relatively radical political beliefs. For a more detailed account of Locke’s shift to a more conservative emphasis on culture, see Jeffrey Stewart’s introduction to Locke’s Race Contacts and Interracial Relations. 14. All future references to this work will be noted as CTAL. 15. In fact, Locke’s international travel was almost exclusively limited to Europe; his only trip to Africa was a two-week visit to Egypt. 16. Locke’s initial encounter with cultural nationalists occurred when he was attending Oxford as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. While there, he experienced his first taste of bigotry and discrimination at the hands of a group of Southern Rhodes Scholars and the British. He was then befriended by several colonial students. These students, hailing from the reaches of the British empire, had a profound impact on Locke’s worldview. As Jeffrey Stewart writes, they ‘‘inspired Locke with a vision of African nationalism’’ and introduced him to a ‘‘conception of renaissance as a revival of native literature and culture’’ (‘‘A Black Aesthete at Oxford,’’ 425). 17. See David Nicholls, Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (University of Michigan Press, 2000) for a detailed analysis of the many incarnations and uses of the ‘‘Folk’’ in African American literary and critical discourse. 18. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 19. Locke never qualifies his use of Western cultural authority to recuperate African art. However, as Torgovnick makes clear, this approach cuts both ways: ‘‘Within the dominant narrative as told by art historians, the ‘elevation’ of primitive objects into art is often implicitly seen as the aesthetic equivalent of decolonization, as bringing Others into the ‘mainstream’ in a way that ethnographic studies, by their very nature, could not. Yet that ‘elevation’ in a sense reproduces, in the aesthetic realm, the dynamics of colonialism, since Western standards control the flow of the ‘mainstream’ and can bestow or withhold the label ‘art,’ ’’(82).

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20. Calo has shown that ‘‘With very few exceptions, critics writing for mainstream publications expected to see racial qualities in black art and were disappointed when they didn’t. . . . [They complained when the work] lacked what they regarded as pronounced racialism’’ (‘‘African American Art’’ 590). 21. The Roger Fry essay that Locke quotes in nearly all of his essays on African art from this period is from Fry’s collection, Vision and Design (1920). Although Fry enthusiastically praises the ‘‘vision’’ of African sculpture, he also makes several highly racist remarks that Locke leaves out. Fry writes that if African’s possessed an ‘‘apparatus of critical appreciation’’ like the Chinese, ‘‘we should have no difficulty in recognizing its singular beauty. We should never have been tempted to regard it as savage or unrefined. It is for want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of comparison and classification that the Negro has failed to create one of the great cultures of the world, and not from any lack of creative aesthetic impulse, nor from lack of the most exquisite sensibility and the finest taste.’’ (Fry, 103). He goes on to say that ‘‘It is curious that a people who produced such great artists did not produce also a culture in our sense of the word. This shows that two factors are necessary to produce the cultures which distinguish civilized peoples. There must be, of course, the creative artist, but there must also be the power of conscious critical appreciation and comparison’’ (103). Locke silently responds to Fry’s low estimation of the Negro’s ‘‘power of conscious critical appreciation and comparison’’ by writing numerous essays on African and African American art, among other topics. However, Locke undoubtedly agrees with Fry’s promotion of the critic’s status. Torgovnick puts it well when she says ‘‘[Fry] becomes the voice of Africa. He also irresistibly elevates the art critic’s, that is, his own, role in creating ‘cultures’ ’’ (94). Interestingly, by 1935, and when writing for a predominantly white audience in the American Magazine of Art, he concurs with the curator’s opinion that ‘‘African art is best understood directly, and in terms of its own historical development and background, and that it should be recognized in its own idiom and right, rather than in terms of its correlation with modern art or its admitted influence upon modern art’’ (CTAL 151). Locke concludes his review with the remark that the exhibition, ‘‘presents African art as really too great for imitation or superficial transcription’’ (155). Here Locke seems to be repudiating the very perspective that he enthusiastically endorsed—i.e., seeing African Art through the validating lens of contemporary European art. This apparent change of heart likely represents a recognition of the excesses of his earlier ‘‘commodification’’ of African art. 22. See Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism: 1850–1925. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978. 23. ‘‘The African Abroad or the African Diaspora.’’ In Emerging Themes of African History, ed. T. O. Ranger (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 152–76.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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Calo, Mary Ann. ‘‘African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars.’’ American Quarterly 51.3 (1999): 580–621. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Edwards, Brent Hayes. ‘‘Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance.’’ in Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith, 288–313. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. ‘‘The Uses of Diaspora,’’ Social Text 19.1 (2001): 45–73. Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. New York: Brentano’s, 1920. Gaines, Kevin. ‘‘Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism.’’ In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 433–55. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gruesser, John Cullen. Black on Black: Twentieth Century African-American Writing About Africa. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. Helbling, Mark. ‘‘African Art and the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, Melville Herskovits, Roger Fry, and Albert C. Barnes.’’ In The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke, edited by Leonard Harris, 53–84. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. JanMohamed, Abdul. ‘‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.’’ In ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 78–106. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Kaplan, Amy. ‘‘ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.’’ In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 3–21. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Locke, Alain. ‘‘Apropos of Africa.’’ Opportunity (Feb. 1924): 37–40, 58. ———. ‘‘Internationalism—Friend or Foe of Art?’’ The World Tomorrow (Mar. 1925): 75–76. ———. ‘‘The Negro in American Culture.’’ In Anthology of American Negro Literature, edited by V. F. Calverton, 248–66. New York: Modern Library Series, 1929. ———, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1965. ———. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations. Edited by Jeffrey Stewart. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992. ———. ‘‘Values and Imperatives.’’ In American Philosophy, Today and Tomorrow, edited by Sidney Hook and Horace M. Kallen, 313–33. New York: Lee Furman, 1935.

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Miller, Christopher. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978. Nicholls, David. Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Ranger, T. O. ‘‘The African Abroad or the African Diaspora.’’ In Emerging Themes of African History, edited by T. O. Ranger, 152–76. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968. Stewart, Jeffrey. ‘‘A Black Aesthete at Oxford.’’ Massachusetts Review (Fall 1993): 411–28. ———, ed. The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture. New York: Garland, 1983. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Warren, Kenneth W. ‘‘Appeals for (Mis)Recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora.’’ In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 293–406. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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‘‘Feminine Calibans’’ and ‘‘Dark Madonnas of the Grave’’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance Emily J. Orlando You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. Somehow all wrong. . . . Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination? . . . Why are you a feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel? —Marita Bonner, ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ Can you not hear us? . . . Can you not see us? . . . We yearn to hear The beauty of truth From your lips. —Mae Cowdery, ‘‘The Young Voice Cries: To Alice Dunbar Nelson’’ As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman. —Jean Toomer, Cane

THE DECEMBER 1925 NUMBER OF OPPORTUNITY: JOURNAL OF NEGRO

Life sports on its cover Aaron Douglas’s striking rendering of what came to be recognized as ‘‘The New Negro’’: a man’s silhouette—bold, directed, strong—with a cityscape, dwarfed in comparison, set off to the right (figure 1).1 This December issue promoted Alain Locke’s newly-released, much-awaited anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, an extension of the March issue of Survey Graphic.2 A full-page advertisement celebrates the ‘‘first complete book on and by The Negro.’’ The selective list of contributors reads like a ‘‘Who’s Who’’ of what often is referred to as the Harlem Renaissance: Locke, Albert C. Barnes, William S. Braithwaite, Countee Cullen, Arthur A. 59

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Fig. 1. Aaron Douglas, cover of December 1925 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life. Photo courtesy of the National Urban League.

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Schomburg, and other emerging voices of the African American race. While the text acknowledges Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset for contributing ‘‘fiction’’ to the issue, it is pointedly ironic that the additional women writers participating in this project are classed under the heading ‘‘Other Articles,’’ with ‘‘other,’’ of course, functioning as the pivotal term. Locke’s prefatory essay, titled ‘‘The New Negro,’’ recognizes ‘‘a renewed and keen curiosity’’ directed at the once-othered Negro: ‘‘the Negro is being carefully studied, not just talked about and discussed. In art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, he is being seriously portrayed and painted’’ (Locke, 9). Locke’s foreword to the volume is articulated in a kind of aesthetic discourse: ‘‘portraiture,’’ ‘‘the national canvas,’’ and ‘‘selfportraiture’’ all figure in the opening paragraph, underscoring the author’s interest in the ‘‘imaging’’ of African Americans in art and literature.3 Further, Locke’s rhetoric makes it clear this ‘‘New Negro’’ is decidedly gendered male; Locke repeatedly refers to ‘‘the Negro himself,’’ elsewhere announcing that ‘‘The Negro Takes His Place in American Art’’ (emphasis mine). ‘‘Poet laureate’’ of the Renaissance Langston Hughes, in ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’’ (1926), reinscribes the gender of this New Negro artist: he looks forward to the dawning of a ‘‘truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself’’ (Hughes, in Lewis, 92). Hughes celebrates the New Negro and ‘‘his art,’’ ‘‘his race,’’ ‘‘his heritage,’’ alluding to several black artists, most of them male (Hughes, 92). I want to turn attention to how the female New Negro (perhaps, in Locke’s lexicon, an oxymoron) is portrayed and painted in this artistically rich—and allegedly revisionary—period.4 Like Locke, the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance concern themselves with distinguishing what he calls ‘‘the fact’’ from ‘‘the fiction’’ (Locke, 9). They analogously are invested in redrawing the distorted images to which Locke points our attention: ‘‘Up to the present one may adequately describe the Negro’s ‘inner objectives’ as an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective’’ (Locke, 10). To a certain extent, the black women artists of this period in turn are responding to the damaging ways in which they are imaged in such groundbreaking works as Locke’s anthology. The focus of this study is the imaging of African American women during the Harlem Renaissance or, to use Locke’s terminology, the ‘‘Negro Renaissance.’’ In my treatment of the sexual politics of representation, I will analyze and juxtapose the ways

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in which black women are depicted by male and female writers of the period. For the most part, these portraits were printed in the movement’s most prominent literary vehicles—e.g., Crisis and Opportunity—and thus were made available to a wide audience. I will explore how black women are presented in selected works by some of the key (male) figures of the period: Jean Toomer’s Cane; Alain Locke’s New Negro; poetry by Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and others. To acknowledge a dialogue between the male artists and their female colleagues, my discussion will address literary portraits of women in a variety of woman-authored texts, especially: poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett; fiction by Nella Larsen; and nonfiction by Marita Bonner and Elise Johnson McDougald.5 Though I do not wish to suggest here that all male writers of the Harlem Renaissance portrayed black females in damaging ways—nor, for that matter, to imply that all female writers of the Harlem Renaissance were innocent of stereotyping their male counterparts—this essay nevertheless foregrounds some of the most prominent male-authored and femaleauthored images of the black woman in this Renaissance, which contrast most starkly with one another around questions of female agency. Because, as I described above, the New Negro man is so frequently described as a fearless actor on a world stage, we must ask whether and where the New Negro woman is afforded a similar literary existence. This essay asserts that it is predominantly black female writers, in contradistinction to many male writers, who gave life to the image of an active and fearless New Negro woman. Although my primary focus will be literary portraits of women, I recognize a need for us to turn our attention to iconographic images from an age that spoke so provocatively to the eyes.6 To that end, I will discuss renderings of women in the visual art of Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas (as two representative male artists) and that of Gwendolyn Bennett and Lois Mailou Jones (as representative female artists).7 Having taken as my point of departure Locke’s anthology, I will follow its editor’s lead and ‘‘carefully study’’ how the New Negro’s female counterpart is ‘‘seriously portrayed and painted’’ in this text. I will examine the various types that are figured, disfigured, and reconfigured in the artwork of the period. In so doing I will work against the outmoded conception that the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance was primarily a male artistic movement, having set

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out to identify how these women artists established for themselves a particularly female artistic agency.8 As this essay will illustrate, male writers of the Harlem Renaissance tended to portray women in ways they appropriated from earlier, white male writers. The tropes they most commonly adapted to their own uses include the Madonna, the woman-as-objet d’art, the ‘‘feminine Caliban’’ (to use Bonner’s phrase invoked in my epigraph), and the beautiful corpse. In spite of its revisionary agenda, the movement in fact harkened back to tired, jaded forms. As I will argue, women writers of this artistic movement also imaged black women in their works, and these images can be read as responses to, and rejections of, portrayals of African American women by African American men. I will show that, even in the face of the constricted, stifling ways in which their bodies were represented in this movement, black women managed to carve out a space for their own creativity. It is abundantly clear from the art of the Harlem Renaissance that an important asset of the New Negro is his pair of ‘‘fearless,’’ gazing eyes. The literature of this cultural movement resonates with references to glances and gazes. For instance, Cullen’s ‘‘To a Brown Girl,’’ published in the poet’s first book of verse (1925), speaks of a man’s ‘‘glance’’ that is ‘‘bold and free’’ (Cullen, Color, 7). A sonnet by James Edward McCall titled ‘‘The New Negro’’ captures the spirit of the Negro as gazer, beginning as it does with the image of a black man scanning the world with eyes ‘‘calm and fearless’’ (McCall, in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 34). And while McCall breathes new life into an old literary form, it is relevant to this discussion that the ‘‘modern,’’ revised art forms of the Harlem Renaissance—like the sonnet sequences of literary forebears Petrarch, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Dante Rossetti—contained women in very fixed, very limiting roles. We need only turn to the frontispiece of Locke’s anthology to identify one of the roles to which women were assigned in the art of this Renaissance: the archetypal mother. Winold Reiss’s ‘‘The Brown Madonna,’’ which greets us at the start of The New Negro, appropriates a traditional trope—the Madonna and child. The woman wears the blue of the traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary and her hair modestly frames her forehead and temples as if to mimic the wimple worn by the Virgin. Further, Reiss has framed her shape with shadows that suggest a heavenly glow radiating from her being. Reiss’s image is innovative insofar as the Virgin Mary is rendered black9 (figure 2). Yet she is not a proud, confident figure: her gaze is diverted; she humbly looks

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Fig. 2. Winold Reiss, ‘‘The Brown Madonna,’’ frontispiece to The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke.

down; she seems rather sedate. We see only one of her hands, which is engaged in the act of nurturing: the hand cradles the (presumably) male child; it most certainly does not hold a pen or an artist’s brush. Albert Rice’s poem ‘‘The Black Madonna’’ replicates this construction of women. Rice’s speaker invokes a

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Virgin ‘‘[n]ot as the white nations know [her]’’ but one ‘‘swarthy of cheek / and full-lipped as the child races are’’ (Rice, in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 177). The Virgin is described as ‘‘the Immaculate Maid,’’ a pure woman conceived without sin. So here again the image of the Madonna is revisionist in that she is Africanized—as a gesture of race pride—yet it serves to send a message to black women that the role of self-sacrificing attendant is one of the few available to her. Further, the reference to the Immaculate Conception recalls Christianity’s emphasis on the Madonna’s reliance upon a male savior for redemption. She is not so very empowered after all. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s ‘‘Motherhood’’ (1922) can be read as a response to the type of images manufactured by Winold Reiss and Albert Rice.10 Rather than unquestioningly embrace the role of nurturer, Johnson’s startling poem turns the idea of selfless motherhood on its head. The speaker expresses a rather vocal rejection of her role as mother; she is reluctant to give birth and thus expose her ‘‘little one’’ to a world in which ‘‘cruelty and sin’’ run unchecked: Don’t knock at my door, little child, I cannot let you in, . . . . . . . . You do not know the monster men Inhabiting the earth, Be still, be still, my precious child, I must not give you birth! (Johnson, in Lewis, 274)

Johnson’s speaker, then, renounces the ideal of motherhood and implies her body willingly would interfere with the birth of this child—through abortion or stillbirth—for its own good. The poem reclaims for the black woman a certain degree of agency over her body with its suggestion that childbirth is not a passive endeavor and in fact involves a choice.11 If some male writers of the Harlem Renaissance accorded black women some degree of agency—like the Madonna, she can bear and nurture children—they apparently as readily denied it. Appropriating resonant images of women from select literary forbears, these writers portrayed women as objets d’ art and as beautiful corpses—sometimes both at once—reducing them to objects of their gazes. Maureen Honey points to the interest these black male writers had in the literary conventions of the British Romantic writers, for

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the Romantics saw art and truth as connected, a viewpoint that echoed [the Harlem Renaissance artists’] own sense that the ills of modern life stemmed from a coarsening of the human spirit due to acquisitive, aggressive domination by a white ruling class. Nature offered an Edenesque alternative to the corrupted, artificial environment created by ‘‘progress.’’ (Honey 7)

Cullen, for instance, made clear the inspiration he drew from Keats’s verse (e.g., ‘‘To John Keats, Poet. At Spring Time’’). I would add that the British Romantics were largely men who imaged women in constricting roles. We need only look to Keats and Wordsworth for examples of traditional roles ascribed to women (e.g., Keats’s ‘‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’’ ‘‘Lamia,’’ and ‘‘Eve of St. Agnes’’; Wordsworth’s ‘‘Lucy’’ poems). So it follows that if Harlem Renaissance authors imitate the Romantics, they in turn mimic their literary predecessors’ peculiar habit of disseminating distorted images of women. Countee Cullen’s ‘‘A Song of Praise’’ harkens back even further to the literary conceits of the English Renaissance, specifically those employed by Shakespeare in his sonnets to his ‘‘dark lady.’’ Cullen co-opts the tropes of the Elizabethans when he notes that while his ‘‘love’’ is ‘‘dark as yours is fair, / Yet lovelier I hold her. . . .’’12 The speaker here offers up an idealized portrait of the black woman, a lady so delicate her ‘‘light’’ step ‘‘does not dent the smoothest moss / Or bend the thinnest grass’’; her feet are not firmly planted on the earth, suggesting her lack of groundedness. And, in keeping with much of the art produced by male figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the lady remains the object of the man’s gaze. In fact, the speaker invites the reader to join him in his objectifying glance: You-proud-and-to-be-pitied-one, Gaze on her and despair; Then seal your lips until the sun Discovers one as fair. (Cullen, Color, 4)

So while the speaker asserts and affirms the beauty of his dark lady, he nonetheless conceives of her as an object to be gazed upon. We might borrow from Cullen the phrase ‘‘Dark Madonna of the grave’’ to describe another popular Harlem Renaissance construction: the black woman as dead object subjected to a male gaze that objectifies and denies agency. By featuring this dead

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woman in his art, the male artist consciously or unconsciously images the black woman as an object robbed of agency. She becomes a passive entity subject to our gaze, as if to echo Edgar Allan Poe’s signature claim that the quintessential subject for art is the death of a beautiful woman. As Elisabeth Bronfen has noted in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), ‘‘death turns the woman into an object of sight— the dead feminine body comparable to an exhibited art object’’ (Bronfen, xiii). Bronfen observes that ‘‘[t]he image as substitute of a body implies that the body must disappear so that it can again be grasped and yet the distancing and exchange this involves implicates the viewer as well.’’13 So as readers and gazers we promote the objectification of the black female body. Cullen’s ‘‘A Brown Girl Dead,’’ with its attending image in Color, points the reader’s gaze to a dead black woman who also is associated with the Madonna trope, in spite of being identified, in the title, as ‘‘Girl’’: ‘‘Dark Madonna of the grave she rests; / Lord Death has found her sweet.’’ The young woman is ‘‘lai[d] . . . out in white’’ for all eyes to consume, suggesting not only Lord Death, but also the viewer, might find her ‘‘sweet’’ (Cullen, Color, 6). Being no longer alive, she lacks the power to return or deflect the hungry gazes of others. Further, the girl is described as an object at the receiving end of the action; for instance, her mother ‘‘lay[s] her out in white’’ and the only ‘‘active’’ verb associated with the girl is in fact passive: she simply ‘‘rests.’’ Bronfen’s remarks on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem ‘‘The Portrait’’ are equally true of Cullen’s piece: ‘‘Though . . . the cause of the woman’s death is a textual ellipsis, the portrait is presented as a metaphorical ‘killing’ of the woman . . . the image, by replacing body with sign[,] negates her presence’’ (Bronfen, 119). As such, works like Cullen’s border on the misogynistic in their interest in killing a woman for aesthetic pleasure and altogether negating her. The tradition of reproducing dead bodies in art is bound up with history. Philippe Arie`s in Images de l’homme devant la mort has noted that during the sixteenth century a new trope entered portrait painting, which peaked in the art and photography of nineteenth-century culture—depictions of men and women just after death, recording the features not only of the subject’s life but also of its death (Arie`s, in Bronfen, 112). James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978) pays homage to a tradition of photographing dead bodies, male and female, laid out in caskets at funeral parlors. The text gathers together

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many of Van Der Zee’s images of this Harlem ritual of honoring the deceased. While The Harlem Book of the Dead depicts both men and women equally, it is worth noting the disproportionate frequency with which women are represented as dead bodies in the art and literature of the period. For instance, an image created by Aaron Douglas for the October 1925 Opportunity cover, titled ‘‘The Mulatto,’’ represents a woman as if she were laid out for burial: her eyes are shut and her motionless hands are folded over her breast in the pose of a corpse (figure 3). She is almost of a piece with those works that project the image of ‘‘Dark Madonna of the grave.’’ To be sure, Douglas’s humble mulatta stands in striking contrast to the New Negro that graced the December cover the same year. Sterling Brown’s ‘‘Georgie Grimes’’ also invokes the figure of the Dark Madonna of the grave, and in this case the text literally and metaphorically kills the woman into art. Brown’s poem narrates the story of a man who murdered a woman—apparently his disobedient lover: ‘‘Georgie remembers hot words, lies, / The knife, and a pool of blood’’ (Brown, in Lewis, 235). He likewise recalls the nameless woman’s ‘‘staring eyes, / With their light gone out for good’’ (235). So here the male persona’s attention is fixed on the female gaze—one that he has extinguished. Her eyes can no longer look. Brown’s poem recalls Robert Browning’s ‘‘My Last Duchess’’ in its treatment of a man’s silencing of an insubordinate woman whose behavior had been the source of his discontent: Georgie consoles himself that ‘‘No livin’ woman got de right / To do no man dat way’’ (235). While it is productive to recognize, of course, the important distance between the narrator and Georgie Grimes—the speaker clearly does not celebrate this act of cold-blooded murder—the text nonetheless conjures up the image of a dead woman whose powers of vision and voice have been stripped away.14 Marita Bonner lends the name ‘‘feminine Caliban’’ to a female stereotype of the Harlem Renaissance that ostensibly possesses more agency than the Dark Madonna of the grave: a depraved, licentious woman who has surrendered to her sexual appetites and paid the price. Bonner’s ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored (1925),’’ first printed in The Crisis, laments the damage done by this construction of black women as ‘‘a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination’’ (Bonner, 5). Cullen gives to this female type the name ‘‘Black Magdalens’’:

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Fig. 3. Aaron Douglas, cover of October 1925 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life. Photo courtesy of the National Urban League.

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The chaste clean ladies pass them by And draw their skirts aside, But Magdalens have a ready laugh. They wrap their wounds in pride. (Color, 9)

This poem’s formal structure—fairly regular versification, tidy four-quatrain organization, abac rhyme scheme—serves to further contain a woman in a fixed role (here, a Mary Magdalen/ fallen woman, the polar opposite of the Virgin Mary). By now it will be clear that a recurring theme among these female types is youth. Bonner, in her essay, calls attention to the challenges attached to a subjectivity that is young, black, and female. The recurrence of youth among these types raises issues about its importance in women: being young suggests possibilities for procreation, as we have seen in the trope of the Madonna; at the same time it suggests the potential for sexual activity—a behavior that these constructions attempt to contain and suppress. We will see this most clearly in the trope of the feminine Caliban. Bruce Nugent’s meditation ‘‘Sahdji,’’ while less formal than Cullen’s verse, presents a similarly sexualized woman in its story of the ‘‘favorite wife’’ of an East African tribal chieftain. The piece is almost stream of consciousness, fragmented as it is by ellipses. That a woman is being imaged as an object of the gaze is clear from the first line, which points our attention to ‘‘a sketch,’’ drawn by the speaker, of ‘‘a little African girl . . . delightfully black’’ (Nugent, in Locke, 113). The narrator offers his own picture of ‘‘her beautiful dark body . . . rosy black.’’ Sahdji is the object of desire of all the men who encounter her: the male speaker, her aging husband, her husband’s son. The woman, then, clearly serves an aesthetic function: to please the eyes. In Locke’s The New Negro, ‘‘Sahdji’’ is accompanied by Aaron Douglas’s dramatic illustration by the same name (figure 4). Douglas’s rendering presents Sahdji as seemingly nude, bejeweled, and painted. His image collaborates in transforming the woman into an object in at least three ways: first, it features only one of Sahdji’s hands, which suggests her lack of empowerment; second, it positions an enlarged profile of a male face, off to the right, whose eyes fix Sahdji in its gaze; third, the five oval shapes touching the left side of her body, which resemble eyes, imply all eyes are on Sahdji.15 Beside her, the man’s head, which resembles the ‘‘New Negro’’ Douglas produced for the December Op-

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Fig. 4. Aaron Douglas, illustration for ‘‘Sahdji’’ for The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke.

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portunity cover, overshadows all four female figures and its mouth seems prepared to devour Sahdji. Each woman’s countenance betrays distress and alarm, as if frantically shooing the man away. Douglas’s work, informed by cubism (a distorting, disfiguring medium), collaborates, perhaps unwittingly, with Bruce Nugent’s to trap women in quarters that are as confining as they are stifling. Jean Toomer’s revolutionary Cane (1923) similarly makes use of modernist forms ultimately to contain its women. While innovative in its resistance to traditional classifications, marking as it does the literary beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance, the text nonetheless bodies forth images of women that are old, tired, and jaded. Early on in the narrative, Toomer’s speaker makes a rather poignant confession: ‘‘men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman’’ (Toomer, 16). Importantly, Toomer’s work occasionally seems to describe, even decry, this phenomenon (without recognizing its own participation in it); for example, in his portrait of Fern, discussed at length below, Toomer observes his protagonist’s listless passivity, eerie gaze, and ‘‘broken’’ voice, which suggest a despondency over the dispossession of many black women in rural life. However, certain aspects of his depiction of Fern, as well as the other women of Cane, evidence the profound extent to which he nevertheless participates in a counterproductive imaging of black women. Women are imaged as prototypical feminine Calibans in Toomer’s test. His Karintha, for instance, is objectified as a site of male desire. Immediately we are told ‘‘[m]en had always wanted her, this Karintha’’ (3). Much emphasis is placed on Karintha as object of the gaze: in one of the verse interruptions, which describes the woman’s ‘‘dusk’’-like skin, the speaker asks ‘‘O cant you see it, . . . cant you see it’’ (4). In fact, the verb ‘‘to see’’ figures prominently in ‘‘Karintha’’ but more often than not the woman finds herself at the receiving end of the visual gesture. Toomer’s Karintha, in fact, is the receiver of all the activity in this segment of Cane; she is figured as entirely inert. Although she has been a mother, even the act of child labor is discounted as if it were for her a passive occurrence: ‘‘A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles, in the forest’’ (4). She is almost etherealized; there is nothing human about this labor, which, of course, is diametrically opposed to what we see in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s ‘‘Motherhood,’’ discussed earlier. And in keeping with the lack of agency we recognize in Karintha, it is

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no surprise we never hear this woman’s voice. First, while Karintha’s voice is described to us, it is filtered through the intervening male narrator—a gesture we can read as symbolic of the channeling of the female voice in this cultural movement. Second, the fact that the voice is captured in such unpleasing terms—‘‘high-pitched, shrill, [Karintha’s voice] would put one’s ears to itching’’ (3)—indicates that Toomer’s speaker expects a woman’s voice to be as aesthetically pleasing as her appearance, rather than jarring and disruptive. Toomer’s ‘‘Fern’’—a portrait of an enigmatic, alluring mulatta, which looks back to the sexualized tragic mulatta of days past— here again the male artist provides a script that casts a passive woman in its starring role.16 Fern too is subjected to an objectifying male gaze; the speaker’s eyes unabashedly linger up and down the woman’s body: ‘‘you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta’’ (16). The speaker reads Fern as something of what we might today call a ‘‘traffic stopper’’—a woman so strikingly beautiful she stops traffic and, reminiscent of the mythic siren, leads to man’s destruction. Her link with the siren is more apparent when we hear how unholy is the connection between Fern and the men who have relations with her: When she was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it. And then, once done, they felt bound to her . . . , felt as though it would take them a lifetime to fulfill an obligation which they could find no name for. They became attached to her, and hungered after finding the barest trace of what she might desire. (16)

Fern remains a porch-bound passive object that the male speaker and the hypothetical male listener/‘‘friend’’ watch as they ride by on a train: ‘‘you’d be most like to see her resting listless—like on the railing of her porch, back propped against a post, head tilted a little forward.’’ (17). Significantly, the male is moving (in train) while the female remains stationary (on porch). Such positioning points to the difference between male as agent (doer of the action) and female as passive construction (object acted upon). The male speaker, in fact, invites the reader to join him in imaging this woman: ‘‘picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem’’ (16). Fern, of course, is not situated in Harlem but instead is planted—like Karintha—as part of the rural Georgian landscape: ‘‘Saw her on the porch, . . . eyes

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vaguely focused on the sunset. Saw her face flow into them, the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them’’ (19). This woman in a sense becomes part of the land and thus is further imaged as a passive construction, something to be settled, tamed, and appropriated like the wilderness itself, in keeping with an American literary tradition described by Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience in American Life and Letters (1975). Toomer’s construction of women looks forward to Langston Hughes’s ‘‘Nude Young Dancer,’’ which captures an exotic woman as though she were an extension of the jungle: What jungle tree have you slept under, Midnight dancer of the jazzy hour? What great forest has hung its perfume Like a sweet veil about your bower? (Hughes, in Locke, 227)

The accompanying illustration by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, in Locke’s New Negro, contributes to a reading of this woman as provocative and sexually alluring. While this ‘‘[d]ark brown girl of the swaying hips’’ would seem to be liberated in her role as a flapper—and her smile exudes confidence—there is much about her that is contained: her two hands bound together at her side, her hair tucked neatly beneath a cap, the choker encircling her throat, her smallness in relation to the (male) text that frames her. Together these details serve up a picture of a woman disempowered, a woman whose eyes are not sufficiently ‘‘bold’’ to meet the gaze of the spectator.17 What Laura Mulvey, in her groundbreaking essay ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’ (1975), says of women translates to Toomer’s Fern: They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies.18

Surely, Fern is the scenery onto which men project their desires. As for Fern’s own gaze, we are told she has ‘‘strange eyes’’: ‘‘[m]en saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern’s eyes said to them that she was easy.’’ (16). So her eyes—‘‘strange,’’ ‘‘weird’’ as they may be—are less for seeing than for being seen, i.e., ren-

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dered the object of a controlling gaze: ‘‘Anyone, of course, could see her, could see her eyes’’ (320). As in ‘‘Karintha,’’ the phrase ‘‘See her’’ is repeated like a refrain throughout Toomer’s sketch of Fern. But Fern does, in spite of the speaker, seize control of the gaze: ‘‘I held Fern in my arms. . . . Her eyes, unusually weird and open, held me’’ (19). And, what is more, her eyes are so engaging they ‘‘[h]eld God’’ (19). Yet, in spite of the power of her captivating gaze, this woman’s agency is ultimately relinquished, as the emphasis on Fern as passive object is reinstated by the end of the piece: ‘‘I saw her . . . saw her on the porch.’’19 The speaker’s continued use of active voice (I saw her) demonstrates his interest in preserving his position as aggressive agent. As Mulvey has noted, [i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. . . . In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfelt to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. (Mulvey, 19)

Like Karintha, Fern is an object silenced—subject to a male gaze—but unlike ‘‘Karintha,’’ this sketch, if for a moment, lets us hear the woman’s voice: ‘‘ ‘Doesnt it make you mad?’ She meant the row of petty gossiping people. She meant the world’’ (19). By not introducing Fern’s remark according to narrative convention (e.g., ‘‘she said’’) deflects attention from her act of speaking. Additionally, the speaker’s insistence on interpreting Fern’s words for us (‘‘she meant . . . she meant’’) betrays his wish to ascribe meaning to an otherwise indecipherable woman and thus contain her in a fixed reading. Likewise, we are privy to the speaker’s impressions of this woman’s singing voice: ‘‘. . . she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice. A child’s voice, uncertain, or an old man’s’’ (19). That her voice is depicted as ‘‘broken,’’ ‘‘uncertain,’’ resembling that of a child or an old man, further emphasizes its frailty and lack of agency. Additionally, the fact that the speaker figures Fern, like Karintha, as a singer underscores her role as siren, an enchantress who lures men to their ruin. As I will show in my next section, as readers we can usefully put these texts in conversation with one another. And while male writers of the Renaissance like Toomer

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relied heavily on older (white) tropes appropriated from timehonored tradition, female writers of the same movement responded, actively and aggressively, to the way in which they were represented in the art of the period. There is beauty In the faces of black women, Jungle beauty And mystery Dark hidden beauty In the faces of black women, Which only black men See. —Edward Silvera, ‘‘Jungle Taste’’20 Beyond the aesthetic pleasure one got from watching her, she contributed little, sitting for the most part silent, an odd dreaming look in her hypnotic eyes. —Nella Larsen, Passing21 The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze . . . —Claude McKay, ‘‘Harlem Dancer’’22

While Edward Silvera’s ‘‘Jungle Taste’’ celebrates the beauty of black women—and in this way validates them—it nonetheless fixes the black male gaze on a female body, boasting that there exists something in black women ‘‘which only black men see.’’ The women writers of the Harlem Renaissance take issue with what their male counterparts claim to ‘‘see,’’ and Nella Larsen is a case in point. The body of work produced by Larsen— some of which was recovered fairly recently—is largely occupied with the imaging of black women in art. As Cheryl Wall points out, Larsen accomplishes many projects under the guise of treating the theme of ‘‘passing.’’22 I would add to Wall’s discussion that Larsen successfully and covertly critiques the way women were visualized in the art of the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, her short story ‘‘The Wrong Man’’ (1926)—while dealing on the surface with a presumably white leisure class reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—also concerns the ten-

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sion between the female protagonist’s self-fashioning and a man’s ability to destroy it: ‘‘[Julia] had been so happy, so secure, and now this: Ralph Tyler, risen from the past to shatter the happiness which she had grasped for herself’’ (Larsen, Intimation 5).24 We can read this tale as an expression of a black woman’s desire to remake herself and the very real concern that this identity might instantly be stripped away through a man’s agency. Larsen encourages us to read Julia as a metaphorical female artist; the heroine has in fact attended art school in Chicago, under the patronage of Ralph Tyler, to study interior decorating (5). And Julia, as a stand-in for the woman artist, feels ‘‘trapped’’ (Julia admits to her husband—without disclosing the source of her anxiety—that she feels ‘‘small . . . futile . . . sort of trapped’’ [5]) similar to the way black women artists felt confined by the limits imposed on them by their status as doubly ‘‘othered,’’ i.e., black and female. So much like other works produced by artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen’s oeuvre devotes considerable attention to moments of spectatorship—specifically instances in which the female body is rendered a spectacle. We see this in ‘‘The Wrong Man,’’ particularly in the fateful final scene in which Julia reveals her secret to a man she mistakes for Ralph Tyler: ‘‘The man looked curiously at the woman sitting so motionless in the summerhouse in the rock garden. Even in the darkness she felt his gaze upon her.’’ (7, emphasis mine). Frequently we see in Larsen—as in her contemporaries—a woman rendered an object of the male gaze and here it is a gaze that paralyzes, rendering the woman ‘‘motionless.’’ And the fact that the titular ‘‘wrong man’’ remains nameless—yet fixes Julia (an artist) as the object of his gaze—underscores the idea that Larsen is concerned with a particular type of man given to objectifying and thus denying women agency. Larsen invites us to read a woman through an objectifying male gaze in the short sketch ‘‘Freedom’’ (1926). Unlike her other works, it is told through a man’s perspective. The narrator lays bare this man’s objectifying impulses: ‘‘His contemptuous mood visualized her at times. . . . He would be conscious of every detail of her appearance: her hair simply arranged, her soft dark eyes, her delicate chin propped on hands rivaling the perfection of La Gioconda’s’’ (Intimation, 15, emphasis mine). Here the woman is valued chiefly for her aesthetic merit. And what’s more, Larsen’s male gazer likens the woman’s hands to pieces of art—specifically those of da Vinci’s most famous portrait of a

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lady, the penultimate mystifying, mysterious woman-as-art.25 That Larsen adopts a male gaze to liken a woman’s hands to those of the Mona Lisa—a lady frozen into art—underscores the idea that female hands are meant, according to a masculine gaze, to be passive objects embodying ‘‘perfection,’’ and not active agents of change or creators of art. While Larsen’s Passing, unlike ‘‘Freedom,’’ is related through a point of view gendered female—that of protagonist Irene Redfield—the novel successfully exposes the debilitating imaging of black women as objects of a gaze that attempts to master and undo. In fact, I want to suggest that—through the vehicle of a black female gazer with ‘‘unseeing eyes’’—the author offers a veiled critique of a male gaze that is comparably nearsighted.26 Larsen’s dedication of Passing to Carl Van Vechten (white literary gatekeeper, writer, and chief photographer of the Renaissance) seems an appropriate gesture, considering his reputation as a literal generator and disseminator of images. As Deborah McDowell argues, Van Vechten in a sense started a trend that contemporary black male authors subsequently followed. His Nigger Heaven (1926) set the stage for a literary tradition of imaging black sexuality (McDowell, xiv).27 Thus, Van Vechten laid down a foundation of distorted images of black female sexuality and Claude McKay, in Home to Harlem (1928), picked up where he left off.28 Additionally, as McDowell notes, Arna Bontemps’s God Sends Sunday (1931) continued the trend of imaging black women as ‘‘ ‘primitive exotic’ sex objects’’ (McDowell xv). So Passing’s inscription to Van Vechten—with its ‘‘unseeing,’’ untrustworthy gazer Irene—is perhaps Larsen’s way of critiquing Van Vechten and his followers through a subtle literary device.29 Irene’s function as reader—or, more appropriately, misreader—is signaled by the novel’s opening scene, in which she literally and metaphorically acts as reader of the beautiful mulatta Clare Kendry. Irene examines a letter from Clare and interprets it as emblematic of this woman; she finds ‘‘something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing . . . a little flaunting’’ (Larsen, Passing 143). Irene associates Clare with a popular, jaded feminine trope, that of woman-as-feline: ‘‘Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry’’ (144). Throughout the course of Larsen’s narrative, we are reminded of the critical gap between what Irene ‘‘notes’’—what she ‘‘seemed to see,’’ ‘‘what Irene Redfield remembered’’—and the reality of Clare Kendry (143, 146). By inserting so many qualifiers, Larsen makes clear the vast and

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significant discrepancy between Irene’s perception and the truth of the world around her; Irene’s glance, like the objectifying male gaze, is one that does not penetrate the surface, and it follows that her reading of Clare is misguided. The gaze Irene directs at Clare recalls that of the English Renaissance poets, in its efforts to catalog and fragment a woman’s beauty; Larsen here appropriates this objectifying lens as a kind of reply to the male poets of the Harlem Renaissance who analogously adopted the habit of the Elizabethans in cataloging female beauty. (For instance, in George Leonard Allen’s poem titled ‘‘Portrait,’’ the speaker devotes a stanza each to an unnamed woman’s ‘‘eyes,’’ ‘‘cheeks,’’ and ‘‘form.’’30) Similarly, Irene focuses considerable attention on Clare’s ‘‘peculiar caressing smile,’’ ‘‘that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the ivory of her skin,’’ her ‘‘bright lips slightly parted’’ (148, 155, 161). Clare’s hypersexualized mouth is a repository for desire and is not, it seems—according to Irene’s gaze—intended for speaking. Irene’s appreciation of Clare’s eyes (she deems them ‘‘magnificent’’) indicates that she reads them as objects to be gazed upon—to be admired as precious works of art—and not as themselves active participants in the gaze (161). Rather, her features are, to Irene’s mind, ‘‘too provocative’’ for Clare’s own good (152). Through Irene’s objectifying gaze we are encouraged to read Clare as a spectacle that titillates and pleases the eye; she is ascribed considerable aesthetic value. For instance, Irene finds Clare’s weeping visually appealing: ‘‘few women, [Irene] imagined, wept as attractively as Clare’’ (196). Larsen is again careful here to temper the assessment with the operative term ‘‘imagined,’’ further suggesting that Irene’s impressions of Clare are not to be trusted. Larsen’s narrator, following Irene’s gaze, makes clear the degree to which Irene reads Clare as a spectacle: ‘‘Beyond the aesthetic pleasure one got from watching [Clare], she contributed little, sitting for the most part silent, an odd dreaming look in her hypnotic eyes’’ (209, emphasis mine). Later Irene admits to her husband that she admires Clare for her ‘‘decorative qualities’’ (216). Clare, then, is rendered—through Irene’s gaze—an object of conspicuous consumption.31 Gwendolyn Bennett and her literary sisters share with Larsen an interest in subverting this gaze that objectifies and denies agency. Bennett’s ‘‘Street Lamps in Early Spring’’ glorifies night as a refuge for black women. ‘‘Night’’ is personified as a kind of female spirit:

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Night wears a garment All velvet soft, all violet blue . . . And over her face she draws a veil As shimmering fine as floating dew . . . And here and there In the black of her hair The subtle hands of Night Move slowly with their gem-starred light.32

By draping herself in such a ‘‘veil,’’ Night assumes a means to evade the objectifying gaze; symbolically, night becomes a place to which all black women can retreat in an effort to release themselves from an eye that seeks to define them. Maureen Honey identifies this trend in the work of women artists of the Harlem Renaissance: While women looked to natural settings in general for space in which to savor the freedom from confining roles, night was sought most frequently, as it was a time when the objectifying eye was closed in sleep and the freedom to be at one with the soul could be safely enjoyed. (Honey, 16)

And if we follow Bennett’s model, we see that once the female spirit is liberated from the objectifying gazers, then her ‘‘subtle hands’’ too are set free to ‘‘[m]ove slowly with their gem-starred light.’’ The ‘‘subtle hands’’ of female illustrators are altogether absent from Locke’s list of credits. His New Negro features visual images produced exclusively by male artists (Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, Miguel Covarrubias). The women of the race are, in a sense, represented in this volume. They are depicted in what the text calls ‘‘Type Sketches of Negro Women’’ and the picture captions make no effort to hide this penchant for reading women as types. We might consider, for instance, Reiss’s ‘‘Ancestral: A Type Study,’’ ‘‘From the Tropic Isles,’’ ‘‘The Librarian,’’ and ‘‘Two Public School Teachers.’’ That Reiss renders the nameless, rather despondent woman profiled in ‘‘From the Tropic Isles’’ handless is suggestive of her lack of agency (figure 5). Significantly, these pictures cast women in traditionally ‘‘feminine’’ roles (e.g., librarian, teacher)—occupations that have been deemed fit for women. Further, the portraits of real women are those who have taken on traditional roles, e.g., educators Mary McLeod Bethune and Elise J. McDougald. Reiss’s portraits of McDougald and Bethune (the latter which renders the subject a

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Fig. 5. Winold Reiss, ‘‘From the Tropic Isles’’ for The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke.

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Mammy-esque figure) likewise withhold the woman’s hands from our view (figures 6 and 7). These women are not poets, painters, novelists; they are not female artists. Reiss, Douglas, and Covarrubias refrain from devoting their palettes to illustrations of, for instance, Jessie Fauset, Zora Hurston, or Nella Larsen. In effect, these male artists deliver a message to their viewers that the female ‘‘types’’ displayed in Locke’s book are the most appropriate models for black women. While Reiss’s portraits of women are quietly relegated to the back pages of Locke’s text, his portraits of men of the Harlem Renaissance are, by contrast, prominent and privileged. Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Charles S. Johnson, Robert Russa Moton, and W. E. B. Du Bois are all portrayed with notable dignity. All are dapperly dressed in sophisticated suits, and, significantly, we can see their hands, which are emblematic of their agency.34 Gwendolyn Bennett, a prolific literary and visual artist of the Renaissance, makes similar use of the iconographic significance of hands. Her July 1926 cover of Opportunity, which followed the first printing of Locke’s New Negro, features an attractive female jazz dancer (figure 8). The image foregrounds this woman while three silhouetted dancing ladies, framed by African motifs, are figured in the background. All four women use their arms and hands, gesturing with verve, and there is no trace of the angst—or the impending consumption of female bodies— found in Douglas’s ‘‘Sahdji.’’ Interestingly, in the rendering of the Madonna and child Bennett produced for the cover of Opportunity’s January 1926 issue, the artist positions her Virgin in almost the same pose as her jazz dancer (figure 9). The details of the two images are strikingly similar: the folds of the woman’s dress, the outstretched right hand, the slightly elevated left shoulder, the woman’s confident smile. The Magi of the January cover anticipate the three dancing figures of the July image. What’s more, Bennett depicts the three men such that their gazes are not fixed on the Madonna but instead are cast downward, in a humble gesture; the Virgin’s own eyes look out of the portrait, as if to challenge the spectator’s gaze. While one of the Virgin’s hands supports the newborn Christ child, her other hand—like that of the jazz dancer—seems to reach out in pursuit of something more. It is her right hand that she extends, symbolically the hand that gives rather than receives. By following her image of the Virgin Mary six months later with this voluptuous jazz dancer—whose hands are free and whose eyes suggest she’s entranced by her dance (itself an artistic medium)—and by re-

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Fig. 6. Winold Reiss, illustration of Mary McLeod Bethune for The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke.

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Fig. 7. Winold Reiss, illustration of Elise J. McDougald for The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke.

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Fig. 8. Gwendolyn Bennett, cover of July 1926 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life. Photo courtesy of the National Urban League.

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Fig. 9. Gwendolyn Bennett, cover of January 1926 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life. Photo courtesy of the National Urban League.

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placing the wise men of January with the dancers and beaming sunlight of July, Bennett suggests a kind of ‘‘progress’’ to be made for the black woman—an evolution to a more celebratory, sunny, liberated existence. The work of Lois Mailou Jones picks up where Bennett’s images leave off, with its deliberate reply to the renderings of black women produced by men of the Harlem Renaissance.35 Her art evidences a special capacity for nobly and honorably portraying women at work. Jones’s paintings focus on women’s hands, showing them engaged in active pursuits. Alain Locke apparently took an interest in Jones’s work while both served on the faculty at Howard University.36 ‘‘Jennie’’ (1943) has in fact been read as a result of Locke’s influence (Bearden, 384). Jones’s painting shows a young black woman cleaning fish with dignity and pride (figure 10). I would add that—if this work draws inspiration from Locke—it is fitting the artist privileges the woman’s hands as if to serve as a reminder to Locke and his entourage of the important difference and change that can be effected through female agency. Jones keeps her gaze fixed on hands as representative of agency. Her ‘‘Peasant Girl, Haiti’’ (1954), produced, like ‘‘Jennie,’’ well after the close of the Harlem Renaissance, features a young black girl in the marketplace with her wares. The girl’s hands are prominent, reflecting her status as an agent, a doer, and not merely an object. Further, her posture suggests both childbirth and sexuality while her hands—protectively poised as they are—imply control over these activities. Jones’s ‘‘Marche´, Haiti’’ (1963) shows men and women at the marketplace using their hands to carry their goods above their heads—representative of women’s part in a metaphorical uplift that suggests racial uplift. Further, the women’s eyes in this painting are visibly raised upward, as if looking forward to movement in a positive, promising direction. These black women artists, then, challenge a tradition that assigns them to types: woman as art, woman as artful, woman as artless, and not woman as artist. Through their literature and their art, they successfully, often subtly, subvert and deconstruct the detrimental images to which their sex has been bound. These women are acutely aware of the New Negro’s ‘‘unseeing’’ gaze—one that fixed them as objects without agency— and they want to reclaim their own artistic authority. Their voices echo Mae Cowdery’s questions, raised at the start of this essay: ‘‘Can you not hear us? . . . Can you not see us?’’

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Fig. 10. Lois Mailou Jones, ‘‘Jennie,’’ (1943), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Amy Jacques Garvey responds to these questions and recognizes the ‘‘New Negro Woman’’ and her capacities, possibilities, and responsibilities.37 As she understands it, this New Negro Woman is to: (1) Work on a par with men in the office and the platform; (2) Practice thrift and economy; (3) Teach constructive race doctrine to children; (4) Demand absolute respect of the race from all men; (5) Teach the young to love race first.38

All of these duties, of course, are active pursuits—tasks that require the use of women’s hands and rely on female agency. There is no room in Amy Garvey’s agenda for ‘‘feminine Calibans’’ or ‘‘Dark Madonnas of the grave.’’ Elise Johnson McDougald’s ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood’’—laced with such phrases as ‘‘fortunately,’’ ‘‘heartening,’’ and ‘‘there is hope’’—radiates a sense of promise and possibility for the ‘‘New Negro Woman,’’ notwithstanding the daunting challenges she faces: We find the Negro woman figuratively struck in the face daily by contempt from the world about her. . . . But through it all, she is courageously standing erect, developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes. . . . The wind of the race’s destiny stirs more briskly because of her striving. (McDougald, in Lewis 71, 75)

The literary and artistic daughters of these black women— among them Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold—share a devotion to advancing female artistic agency. They join Gwendolyn Bennett in their hopes that the ‘‘subtle hands of Night’’ might be released to ‘‘[m]ove slowly with their gem-starred light’’ and thus be invested with the agency and authority to do their work.

Notes 1. The literary vehicle of the National Urban League, Opportunity, along with the NAACP’s Crisis, served two major functions during the Harlem Renaissance: creative outlet for artists and source of information concerning the ‘‘New Negro.’’ I would like to thank Paula Barnes, Maryemma Graham, Tara Hart, Robert S. Levine, Shara McCallum, Jaime Osterman, Catherine Romagnolo, Mary Helen Washington, Australia Tarver, and the University of Maryland Department of English for the generous support and encouragement that

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helped bring this essay to light. I owe a special thanks to Jaime Osterman Alves, trusted friend and reader, for so graciously lending her time, encouragement, and brilliance to this essay’s many incarnations. 2. Locke edited the March 1925 edition of Survey Graphic, which took for its theme ‘‘Harlem, the Mecca of the New Negro.’’ Albert and Charles Boni expanded the text and published it in book form as The New Negro in December 1925. 3. I invoke here Martha Banta’s use of the term ‘‘imaging’’ in my consideration of the way in which African Americans have been represented as types in American art and culture. (See Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History [1987].) 4. Recent scholarship has recognized the limitations of Alain Locke’s perspective; he has, for instance, been accused of misogyny. See Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey’s enlightening collection Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001) acknowledges The New Negro’s shortcomings, citing its ‘‘degree of sexism, elitism, and political conservatism’’ (xxxvii). Interesting and, I think, enlightening, is the revelation by Patton and Honey that Locke was a staunch advocate of art for art’s sake: ‘‘In an early essay, ‘The Colonial Literature of France’ (1923), [Locke] argued that the black artist should embrace ‘art for its own sake, combined with that stark cult of veracity—the truth whether it hurts or not.’ Thus, in editing The New Negro, he sought to show that the new Renaissance writers should create ‘art for art’s sake,’ which distinguished them from the previous wave of African American writers, like Grimke and Fauset, who addressed social issues in their creative work, explicitly using it as a propaganda tool’’ (xxxv). Locke, then, obviously would have clashed with W. E. B. Du Bois on this score (cf. Du Bois’s ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’), but it is also worth noting that an insistence on art devoid of political agenda can often be to the detriment of those who are subject to oppression social, political, racial, and sexual. 5. The breadth of this project compels me to sacrifice in-depth analysis of particular texts in the interest of examining the larger picture. While a few critics have treated the women of the Harlem Renaissance—most notably Maureen Honey, Venetria K. Patton, Gloria Hull, and Cheryl Wall—there is not to date a satisfactory study of the imaging of black women in the visual and literary art of this period. And while in their teaching and scholarship Hazel Carby, Carla L. Peterson, and Mary Helen Washington have recognized the extent to which black women have been inadequately addressed by feminist criticism, my goal is to examine how a supposedly liberating cultural movement—the Harlem Renaissance—in fact contained black women in particularly limited roles. 6. We might consider, for instance, the prevalence of Carl Van Vechten’s photographs, the rise of cubism and other modernist art forms, the emergence of film as artistic medium, and the prominence of the flapper as spectacle. 7. Winold Reiss was in fact Aaron Douglas’s mentor and teacher. 8. As several critics have shown, over a hundred women writers were generating material from cultural centers in and outside Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s (Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Be-

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yond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945 [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990] xxiii). Erlene Stetson makes the important point that black women writers of this movement have been grossly neglected because ‘‘[d]escriptions of the massive oppressions that [black women] have experienced do not support the white myths of American life’’ (qtd. in Roses, xxiv). More recently, Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey in Double-Take have made it their goal to ‘‘even out the disadvantages of gender that kept black women from publishing books as widely as their male peers’’ (xx). Patton and Honey elaborate on the source of those disadvantages: ‘‘the system of patronage operating during the Harlem Renaissance privileged men. As a result, it was harder for most women to get the financial and professional support they needed to get into print’’ (xxiv). Scholars who have unearthed the work of many of these black women writers include Gloria Hull, Mary Helen Washington, Ann Allen Shockley, and, more recently, Patton and Honey. 9. The black Madonna is also one of the emblems of the Garvey movement, which sought to instill in working-class blacks a ‘‘sense of self-worth, racial dignity, and a dream of a new society in Africa’’ (Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America [New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1984] 193). Garvey’s ‘‘African Orthodox Church featured icons of a Virgin Mother who was black and a Satan who was white’’ (Giddings, 193). 10. Published in The Crisis, October 1922; the poem is elsewhere identified as ‘‘Black Woman’’ (David Levering Lewis’s The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader and Dictionary of Literary Biography). Such a dual classification underscores the inextricable link between motherhood and black women and the problematic assumptions therein. 11. Elise Johnson McDougald enhances Georgia Douglas Johnson’s realistic vision of motherhood. In ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood’’ (1925), McDougald paints a portrait of ‘‘the modern Negro mother’’ whose ‘‘burden is twofold,’’ as she works out of the home while struggling to raise children, often alone: ‘‘If the mothers of the race should ever be honored by state or federal legislation, the artist’s imagination will find a more inspiring subject in the modern Negro mother—self-directed but as loyal and tender as the much extolled, yet pitiable black mammy of slavery days.’’ (McDougald, ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood,’’ The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis [New York: Penguin, 1994] 70.) 12. Cullen, Color, 4. Cullen’s poem begs comparison to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, in which the speaker validates his dark mistress: ‘‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.’’ 13. Bronfen, 117. I want to note here that Bronfen’s valuable, sweeping study does not discuss the frequency with which black female bodies were turning up dead in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. 14. James Weldon Johnson’s ‘‘Go Down Death: A Funeral Sermon’’ also projects the image of the Dark Madonna of the grave. As we saw in Brown and Cullen, the woman (here ‘‘Sister Caroline’’) has already lost her life by the start of the poem. Notwithstanding the consolation that ‘‘She is not dead; . . . She’s only just gone home . . . she’s resting in the bosom of Jesus,’’ the woman is in fact dead, transformed into an object whose eyes are ‘‘closed,’’ eternally subjected to our gaze. (James Weldon Johnson, ‘‘Go Down Death: A Funeral Sermon,’’ The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis [New York: Penguin,1994] 284.)

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15. For another example of the feminine Caliban stereotype, see Wallace Thurman’s ‘‘Cordelia the Crude’’ (1926), a first-person narration of an encounter with a young Harlem prostitute; the text was recenty reprinted, with an accompanying illustration by Richard Bruce (Nugent) in Patton and Honey, Double-Take. I would like to thank Catherine Romagnolo for the insight she lent to my reading of Douglas’s ‘‘Sahdji.’’ 16. As Carla L. Peterson has explained in her work, an especially damaging stereotype attached to black women is the tragic mulatta, a white feminist abolitionist construction. The antebellum tragic mulatta plot is marked by the following features: the mulatta is sexualized, objectified; she is seduced; she is the daughter of her master; she is burdened with the weight of a dark secret; she inevitably dies. (See, for example, Peterson’s discussions of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, especially ‘‘ ‘Further Liftings of the Veil’: Gender, Class, and Labor in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy’’ in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. ed. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994].) 17. Cf. Hughes’s ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ which appears on the opposite page: ‘‘Were Eve’s eyes / In the first garden / Just a bit too bold? / Was Cleopatra gorgeous / In a gown of gold?’’ (Langston Hughes, ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke [New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1927] 226. 18. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 13. While Mulvey’s discussion concerns narrative film, her study is applicable to works of the Harlem Renaissance in the way in which they anticipate and borrow from film’s conventions. 19. Toomer, 19. 20. Edward Silvera, ‘‘Jungle Taste,’’ in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 214. 21. Nella Larsen, Passing, in Quicksand and Passing. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986) 209. 22. McKay, ‘‘Harlem Dancer,’’ in Lewis, 296. 23. According to Wall, Larsen’s Passing (1929) ‘‘breaks with literary conventions of passing and the tragic mulatta. . . . Using the tragic mulatta as a cover, [Larsen] set forth a vision far more complex and daring than even her most enthusiastic critics imagined’’ (Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995] 138). 24. The fact that the term ‘‘color’’ and ‘‘hue’’ are strewn about this story, which is inaugurated by the phrase ‘‘The room blazed with color,’’ suggests that ‘‘The Wrong Man’’ concerns issues attending women of color (Nella Larsen, An Intimation of Things Distant: the Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, ed. Charles R. Larson [New York: Anchor Books, 1992] 3). 25. In ‘‘Freedom,’’ Larsen seems to invoke a short story by Edith Wharton (whose work Larsen knew and admired) in her comparison to the hand of the Mona Lisa. Wharton’s ‘‘The House of the Dead Hand’’ (1904), which similarly makes use of the trope of the hand to represent women’s failed agency, describes a painting of a woman whose left hand ‘‘recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa’’ (Edith Wharton, Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, volume 1, edited by R. W. B. Lewis [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987] 513). Further, Larsen’s decision to use a male reflector echoes Wharton’s favorite choice of narrative perspective for her short stories. 26. Larsen, Passing, 218. Larsen’s work, especially Passing, suggests the author shared something of a literary kinship with Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence (1920), for instance, presents us with a similarly unreliable gazer, in

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the person of Newland Archer, whose eyes also are described as ‘‘unseeing.’’ I have argued elsewhere that Wharton uses her Archer as a device to critique the imaging of American women (‘‘Rereading Wharton’s ‘Poor Archer’: A Mr. ‘Might-have-been’ in The Age of Innocence,’’ American Literary Realism, Winter 1998.) Larsen applies an analogously myopic lens (that of Irene Redfield) to call into question the imaging of black women in art. Further, Georgia Douglas Johnson in ‘‘Let Me Not Lose My Dream’’ points to ‘‘eyes unseeing,’’ which belies an awareness of a kind of myopic perspective in the art and literature of the Renaissance. 27. Van Vechten’s novel, set in jazz-age Harlem, draws its name from the theater balcony to which African Americans were relegated: ‘‘That’s what Harlem is, . . . we sit in our places in the gallery . . . and watch the white world sitting down below us in the good seats’’ (qtd. in Benet, Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. George Perkins et al, New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 28. See, for instance, McKay’s portraits of women, namely Felice (prostitute) and Congo Rose (nightclub entertainer). McKay’s women generally are sexualized and imaged as pieces of art. In a typical scene, Jake reads a woman as ‘‘a breathing statue of burnished bronze’’; others, ‘‘[w]ith their arresting poses and gestures, their deep shining painted eyes, . . . resembled the wonderfully beautiful pictures of women of ancient Egypt’’ (Claude McKay, Home to Harlem [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987] 105). 29. I acknowledge the complex nature of Larsen’s connection to Van Vechten: she was a devoted friend and admiring mentee who made clear her debt to him for helping publish her first novel, Quicksand (1928). At the same time, it is likely she was sensitive to his depiction of the black race and black women in particular. In Passing, the figure of Hugh Wentworth, an obvious stand-in for Van Vechten, joins in on imaging Clare Kendry through an objectifying gaze—his, of course, being a specifically white male gaze; at the ‘‘Negro Welfare League’’ dance, Wentworth inquires about Clare’s origins by asking about ‘‘the blonde beauty out of the fairy-tale’’ (Larsen, Quicksand and Passing. [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986] 205). Clare, then, is read as an idealized Sleeping Beauty type, a passive trope for visual pleasure. 30. George Leonard Allen, ‘‘Portrait,’’ Opportunity, January 1927, 15. 31. Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), his study of fin-de-sie`cle American culture, coins the term ‘‘conspicuous consumption’’ to describe the habit of buying costly items that serve no function but to demonstrate the exorbitant wealth of the owner. Irene plays the role of conspicuous consumer (spectator) while positioning Clare as that which is conspicuously consumed (spectacle). 32. Opportunity, May 1926. 33. What McDougald refers to as ‘‘the grotesque Aunt Jemimas of the streetcar advertisements, [which] proclaim only an ability to serve’’ (Elise Johnson McDougald, ‘‘Task of Negro Womanhood,’’ in David Levering Lewis, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader [New York: Penguin, 1994] 69). 34. A notable exception is Reiss’s portrait of Paul Robeson. While in Robeson’s portrait (as ‘‘Emperor Jones’’), the subject’s hands are not featured, Locke’s positioning of this image, placing it in the midst of Jessie Fauset’s ‘‘A Gift of Laughter,’’ has the effect of an interruption. Robeson, with his smirklike grin and diverted eyes, has a menacing presence, giving the impression of intruding upon Fauset’s discourse—as if to metaphorically cut off her voice. In

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Reiss’s image of Cullen, neither the man’s body nor his hands are featured; it is simply a study of the subject’s head. 35. Jones enjoyed a lengthy, prolific career as a twentieth-century artist and teacher whose work has made a difference. Studying painting in 1930s Paris, Jones ‘‘made a transition from work that was modeled after the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters to work that is abstract, modern, and African-influenced’’ (Romare Bearden, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present [New York: Pantheon Books, 1993] 388). 36. Locke suggested that Jones portray her own people as well as the French landscapes inspired by her time in Paris (Romare Bearden, 384). 37. Second wife of Marcus Garvey, leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). 38. Amy Jacques Garvey, rpt. in Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 194.

Works Cited Bearden, Romare. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Bonner, Marita. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. Cullen, Countee, ed. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927. ———. Color. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1984. Honey, Maureen, ed. Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Larsen, Nella. An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen. Edited by Charles R. Larson. New York: Anchor Books, 1992. ———. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Penguin, 1994. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. 1925. Reprint, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1927. McDowell, Deborah E., introduction to Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

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Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Patton, Venetria K., and Maureen Honey. Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Roses, Lorraine E., and Ruth E. Randolph. Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Toomer, Jean. Cane. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Van Der Zee, James, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops. The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan & Morgan, 1978. Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Washington, Mary Helen. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1975. ———. ‘‘Black Women Image-Makers.’’ Black World. 13 August 1974: 10–18. ———. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987.

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Part II Identity, Sexuality, and Hybridity in Fiction and Poetry

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Dorothy West: Harlem Renaissance Writer? Paula C. Barnes

DOROTHY WEST, WHO ACHIEVED HER OWN PERSONAL RENAISSANCE in 1995 with the publication of The Wedding, her second novel, as well as a volume of collected essays and short stories, The Richer, the Poorer, has been dubbed, ‘‘the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance.’’1 With the increasing critical recognition that has come with these recent publications, there has been a gradual shift or reorientation in the placement of West in the African American literary canon. Rather than continuing to be identified as a writer of the Richard Wright or post-World War II era as suggested by critics Robert Bone, Bernard Bell, Mary Helen Washington, and Gloria Wade-Gayles, West is increasingly being classified as a Harlem Renaissance writer.2 Anthologies are also beginning to reflect this shift. Those published in the late 1990s, The New Cavalcade, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, place West chronologically in the 1940s to 1960s but acknowledge her participation in the Harlem Renaissance. However, the most recent Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature places West in the Harlem Renaissance era. West’s first short stories were indeed published during the Harlem Renaissance: ‘‘The Typewriter’’ and ‘‘Hannah Byde’’ both appeared in 1926; three others, ‘‘An Unimportant Man,’’ ‘‘Prologue to a Life,’’ and ‘‘The Funeral’’ were published before 1930. However, whether one accepts 1929 (the beginning of the Depression) or 1935 (the Harlem riot) as the end of the Harlem Renaissance, the majority of West’s literary output occurs afterward.3 And although West attained some prominence during the Harlem Renaissance years—her short story, ‘‘Typewriter,’’ placed second in the Opportunity contest along with Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘‘Muttsy,’’ her significant contributions to African American letters—the creation of the magazines Challenge, 99

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then New Challenge and her novel, The Living Is Easy, occur in 1934, 1937, and 1948 respectively.4 Does having published a few short stories between 1926 and 1935 qualify West as a Harlem Renaissance writer, or does her literary output of more than thirty short stories, sketches, reminisces, and two novels—all published between 1935 and 1995 locate her as a writer of another era? Why the interest now in classifying West as a Harlem Renaissance writer? What is the basis for claiming (or reclaiming) West as a Harlem Renaissance writer? I posit that such reclassification has been initiated because West identifies herself as a Harlem Renaissance writer. In Harlem during the era, she saw herself as part of the movement. In fact, she insists that she started the literary magazine, Challenge, because although the movement was over, the writers had not fulfilled their promise (McDowell, ‘‘Conversations,’’ 270, 272). Should West’s self-identification as a Harlem Renaissance writer serve as the basis for her (re)classification as such? Why is categorization even necessary or important? Critics addressing the issue of periodization argue that such is inadequate for classifying women and African American writers and suggest that methods other than chronology be used to determine an author’s place within African American letters (Gilbert and Gubar, xxviii; Jones, 6 of 8). Therefore, using Robert Ellrodt’s theory of ‘‘trends-of-a-period’’ (Warren, xiv), I undertake a two-tiered thematic exploration of West’s novels. Using four recurring motifs that are characteristic of the novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen—the mulatta protagonist, the middle class, the marriage plot, and family lineage—(thus the ‘‘trends-of-the-period’’), I illustrate how West utilizes these motifs in her two novels, The Living Is Easy and The Wedding. Second, in order to more fully expand the argument that the subject matter of West’s novels places her within the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance women novelists, I provide a close reading of West’s The Living Is Easy with Fauset’s Comedy: American Style.5 The close parallels in these two works serve as further evidence of West’s conscious attempt to continue her 1934 objective—to fulfill that era’s promise—by working within the Harlem Renaissance women’s literary tradition. The purpose of this two-tiered exploration may be to give credence to West as a Harlem Renaissance writer.

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I Mulatta protagonists are not unique to the Harlem Renaissance, as any perusal of early African American literature will reveal, yet, according to Barbara Christian, they dominate the novels by Black females during the Harlem Renaissance (Black Women Novelists, 41). Christian goes on to note that the ‘‘female novelists of the 1920s chose to make their heroines lightcomplexioned . . . black women with taste and refinement’’ (40); these ‘‘long-haired, fine and graceful’’ women are considered ‘‘beauties’’ according to the norms of the day’’ (44). Although there is an alternate ‘‘model’’ for the female protagonist in Lutie Johnson, the brown-skinned beauty in The Street, Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, West’s beautiful, fair-skinned, gray-eyed Cleo Judson enters the long line of Harlem Renaissance mulatta protagonists: Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane and Irene Redfield; Jessie Fauset’s Joanna Marshall, Angela Murray, Laurentine Strange, and Olivia Cary.6 It is not surprising that Cleo Judson ‘‘resemble[s] the heroines of the Harlem Renaissance’’ (Christian, Black Feminist Criticism 129); West considers these writers her contemporaries.7 However, twenty years after such brown- and black- skinned protagonists as Sula in Toni Morrison’s Sula (1974) and Jadine in Tar Baby (1981), Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Avey Johnson in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Mattie Michael in Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place (1983), and Dessa Rose in Sherley Anne Williams’s novel, Dessa Rose (1986), West returns to the mulatta protagonist in The Wedding. The light-complexioned, blonde haired, blue-eyed Shelby Cole, West’s protagonist in The Wedding, is fairer than the fairest Harlem Renaissance protagonist. The plot of The Wedding centers around Shelby’s engagement to a white man, and as her motivations for such a choice are questioned, she becomes embroiled in issues of race and color, issues which, according to Gloria Hull, ‘‘defined the Harlem Renaissance’’ (17). As ‘‘the overriding preoccupation’’ of African American women writers of the 1920s, color was one of the major factors in their characters’ selections of spouses (Hull, 17). This preoccupation is likewise present in West’s The Wedding where color is the determining factor in each of the marriages that occurs in the novel. Shelby’s marriage poses a problem because the issue is no longer one of color but of race, a problem

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that introduces West’s irony, for as its history reveals, Shelby’s choice of a spouse merely brings the family full circle. The address to color simply continues a thematic strand West introduces in The Living Is Easy. When Cleo mistakes the Duchess for a white woman, the narrator comments on the irony of trying to recognize ‘‘the insurmountable distinction between [someone] who looked white and [someone] who was white’’ (101). What is commentary in The Living Is Easy becomes an element of plot in The Wedding: the six-year-old Shelby is ‘‘lost’’ for hours because she looks but is not white. More ironically, her great-grandmother is a white woman who looks white, but is mistaken as black. Her critique notwithstanding, West’s focus remains that of color. The correlative to color is passing, and West utilizes this prominent theme of certain Harlem Renaissance novels in The Wedding.8 Its references are brief: discussing the Islanders’ misperception of the young Shelby as a white girl, an unnamed character comments, ‘‘they’re the ones who make it so easy for us to pass’’ (75); to circumvent the ‘‘race’’ problem caused by Shelby’s engagement, her sister Laurie asks, ‘‘why don’t you just pass?’’ (212). West not only introduces the notion of passing but she also presents an ironic inversion—Shelby’s white great-grandmother ‘‘passes’’ as black. Despite the inversion, West’s references to passing are akin to those of the Harlem Renaissance writers. Despite her critique on race, color and passing, West’s overall treatment of the motifs of the mulatta protagonist and passing in The Wedding remains similar to that in the novels of Fauset and Larsen.9 As Ann Rayson notes, ‘‘West’s language and situations are constructed with an uneven mix of early twentiethcentury concerns about passing, miscegenation, and the color line among blacks’’ (219). This kind of address to these motifs sixty years later suggests West’s preoccupation with that era. Barbara Christian notes that not only are the Harlem Renaissance protagonists mulattas, they are upper-middle class (Black Women Novelists, 40). Dorothy West pays homage to this tradition through the Black Brahmins of Boston in The Living Is Easy and ‘‘the old guard’’ of Martha’s Vineyard in The Wedding. Just as Fauset and Larsen critique the middle class (DuCille, 84), so does West. Cleo Judson, West’s protagonist in The Living Is Easy, is an immigrant from the South who becomes part of the middle class by virtue of her husband’s occupation and income. Yet Cleo desires entrance into the old Black Brahmin society, and this be-

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comes one of her major motivating factors. Through Cleo’s interactions and manipulation of some of its more vulnerable members, West’s readers are provided a satiric glimpse into a dying class of Bostonians whose pretensions remain even as their businesses and money dwindle. Much of the criticism on The Living Is Easy focuses on West’s use of the middle class.10 It has been hailed as ‘‘one of the first to portray the pernicious effects of middle class striving’’ (Roses and Randolph, 344), and some critics viewed West’s treatment of the middle class in a city other than New York as ‘‘a welcome departure’’ in African American letters (Wade-Gayles, 139). However, the novel is not groundbreaking in its discussion of the middle class: while its stance is more ironic and its satire more biting, it only extends the irony and satire present in the novels of Fauset and Larsen. Its contribution is that its protagonist is not born but rather seeks entrance into the class that she simultaneously snubs. During the time when African American women writers are undertaking critical examinations of the Black middle class in works such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, West in The Wedding is once again preoccupied with the upper middle class.11 Of a slightly different black middle-class milieu than the Black Brahmins, West writes of those who are not only well-established and propertied but also monied and firmly ensconced on their isolated community in Martha’s Vineyard— those for whom the living might truly be deemed as easy. Clark Coles is a well-established doctor, as are his father and two brothers. His wife, the daughter of a college president, is also college-educated, and his older daughter is a physician. The educational status of Shelby, his youngest daughter, is not revealed, but her upper middle-class financial standing is obviously not endangered by her betrothal to an aspiring jazz musician, ‘‘a nameless . . . white man . . . without office, title or a foreseeable future’’ (4). Yet West’s address to the upper middle class in The Wedding with its revelation of class stratification among Blacks moves her novel beyond those of the Harlem Renaissance. To further illustrate class distinctions, West returns to her concern with the precarious financial position of the middle class that she explores in The Living Is Easy. Addie Bannister, one of the firmly entrenched island residents, rents out her summer home to a ‘‘tenant,’’ one of recent middle-class status who wishes to

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enter the private, elite world of the Oval. Even with this plot complication, which introduces the issue of intraracial discrimination, The Wedding continues the critique of the black middle class West introduces in The Living Is Easy; thus, it offers no real new insights. As Holly Eley notes, ‘‘the existence, and the habits, of a black American middle class are less surprising’’ in the 1990s than they were when West’s first novel was published (24). The Wedding may be viewed as West’s update of the Harlem Renaissance theme of the middle class for a new era; it can therefore be identified as yet another work of ‘‘color and caste among the bourgeoisie,’’ Hugh Gloster’s categorization of the works of Fauset, Larsen, and Walter White (131). West ‘‘remains attached’’ (Rodgers 163) to writing about the black middle class—‘‘as she lived it’’ (Reviews of The Wedding). The marriage plot is the third way in which West’s novels are reminiscent of those of the Harlem Renaissance. Again, like the mulatta protagonist, the marriage plot is not unique to this period, but as duCille notes the novels of Fauset [and] Larsen . . . rewrite the revisionist, political projects of their predecessors . . . [by making marriage] the symbol of material achievement [and] as such . . . the focal point of . . . biting critiques of bourgeois black society and so-called middle class values. (87)

Dorothy West continues the Harlem Renaissance critique of black society via the marriage plot in her novels. In the marriages of Lenore Evans to Simeon Binney (which Cleo arranges only to further her own interest) and Althea Binney to Dr. Cole Hartnett in The Living Is Easy, West reveals the absurdity of marrying for social respectability and financial advancement. Lenore has the financial resources that her husbandto-be does not, and Althea’s financial standing becomes even more precarious after her marriage. Like Larsen’s Irene Redfield and Fauset’s Olivia Blanchard, Cleo Jericho marries for material and social advancement, and the Judsons become yet another example of ‘‘the seemingly perfect but internally dysfunctional bourgeois’’ family (duCille, 89). However, unlike Larsen and Fauset’s protagonists, Cleo is not fulfilled by her loveless marriage and uses it, asserts Wade-Gayles, to chart her own destiny (141): Cleo uses her husband’s money to endear herself to the old Brahmin society, move the family into a ‘‘better’’ neighborhood, and persuade her sisters to visit, then remain in her household.

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As a result, Cleo becomes the center of her own ‘‘created world’’ (Living Is Easy, 166). Through Cleo, West seems to suggest that marriage should not be a woman’s major goal in life (WadeGayles, 141). But West undermines her own critique of marriage, first through Cleo’s sisters’ marriages and then through Cleo’s realization regarding her own marriage. Although Ben, Victor, and Robert are not able to provide for their wives as well as Bart does for Cleo, their marriages were happy; the women fared better living with their husbands than with Cleo. In the Judsons’ home without their husbands, they become ghosts of themselves: Charity substitutes eating for her loneliness and becomes so overweight that she does not leave the house; Lily’s nervousness becomes accentuated to the point of neurosis, and Serena pines and grieves for her husband. None of these tragedies would have occurred, argues Mary Helen Washington, had they not left their husbands (Mothering 152). Although the novel seems to suggest that there are class differences in terms of marriage, it also suggests that marriage can be the source of a woman’s happiness if she is lower class—as with Cleo’s sisters. But West does not allow for such a simple distinction. By the novel’s end, Cleo seems to have come to an understanding of love and marriage: she finally realizes that she needs—and cares for—Bart (Washington, Mothering, 152). While West’s critique of marriage as a means for attaining social respectability and financial advancement remains unaltered, her position as marriage as a woman’s major goal in life and the source for her happiness is tempered. West’s attitude toward marriage is further softened in The Wedding, a text whose very title suggests the centrality of the marriage plot. Although the novel focuses on Shelby as she examines her reasons for betrothing herself to a white man, it is, as Susan Kenney notes, not the story of one wedding but ‘‘of many weddings and choices’’ (3). As the work portrays the implications and consequences of marrying within one’s race and caste—for reasons other than love—through six generations, West continues her critique of marriage in the vein of the Harlem Renaissance women writers. West further critiques marriage through complications arising with Luther McNeil, Shelby’s black suitor. First, Lute’s desire for Shelby stems not from love, but his desire to become a part of the Ovalite community; therefore, in a reversal of the typical Harlem Renaissance marriage plot, West presents a male who

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seeks marriage as a means for attaining social respectability. But more complicated (and ironic) is West’s depiction of a man who has been involved in three interracial marriages. Lute represents the worst in terms of motivation for both intraracial and interracial marriages; consequently, his misguided quest is unsuccessful. Because his actions are not motivated by love, they are seen as villainous (Evans, 203), and the outcome is more tragic than it is absurd. After presenting choices for and marriages from many positions on a spectrum in The Wedding and stating that ‘‘color was a false distinction; love was not,’’ West concludes that love should be the deciding factor (240). But this conclusion is too simplistic; it does not begin to resolve the complexities of middle-class marriage that West raises in her own novels or the critique she continues of the novels of Fauset and Larsen. And in its suggestion by implication—that ‘‘miscegenation is a positive goal’’ (Steinberg, 35)—the novel appears to reiterate and reinforce some of the problematic notions of marriage that are presented in the novels of the Harlem Renaissance women writers. The final element that links West’s novels to those of Larsen and Fauset is the treatment of ancestry or family lineage, a motif not traditionally identified with the Harlem Renaissance, as lineage during this era was seldom invoked to trace one’s African heritage. Critical focus on the texts as novels of passing and/or novels of the middle class assumes their absence of concern for family and connectedness, but as Kubitschek notes, the trope of passing ‘‘investigates an individual’s relationships with history,’’ both personal and familial (92). In fact, as Thadious Davis observes, one of Larsen’s persistent themes is the relationship of black characters to their heritage (‘‘Nella Larsen,’’ 188); Larsen explains it thusly in Quicksand: ‘‘Negro society . . . was as complicated and as rigid . . . as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you . . . didn’t ‘belong’ ’’ (8). Not only does Nella Larsen trace family lines in her novels—oftentimes to its white ancestry—so does Fauset: Larsen relates three generations for Helga Crane in Quicksand and three generations for Clare Kendry in Passing; Fauset outlines three generations of the protagonists’ families in The Chinaberry Tree and Plum Bun, four generations of the Carys in Comedy: American Style, and elaborately traces the Bye family tree in There Is Confusion. West continues these ‘‘genealogical forays into the past’’ in both of her novels by choosing the more

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elaborate technique of tracing generations in a manner reminiscent of Fauset (Kenney, 3 of 5). The distinguished Boston families, the ‘‘old Brahmins,’’ are not the central characters in The Living Is Easy, but because they are important to Cleo—it is their status and stature to which she aspires—they are given prominence in the text. Their social standing is not based on money or power but on their ability to trace their Boston ancestry. As a result, family lineage can be traced through three generations for the Binneys and Lenore Evans (the Duchess) and five generations for the Hartnetts. To add to the complexity (or irony), these three lines merge when Lenore becomes Mrs. Simeon Binney and Althea becomes Mrs. Cole Hartnett. The genealogical line in The Living Is Easy becomes more intricate than the Bye family’s in Fauset’s There Is Confusion, where ancestry is central to one of its plot lines. In The Wedding, West returns to the tracing of family lines; in fact, a graphic depiction of the family tree is placed before the novel’s first chapter, thereby suggesting its importance to the text. This depiction and its textual location immediately calls to mind Gloria Naylor’s 1988 novel, Mama Day, where a graphic of the Day family tree is one of three prefatory elements. At first glance, such a depiction suggests The Wedding’s connection to contemporary African American novels where family lineage is an important motif—Alex Haley’s classic, Roots (1976); Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985); however, a closer examination reveals otherwise. Of the three family lines depicted in The Wedding, two are traced back to their white ancestry. This tracing of lineage aligns West’s second novel—as it does her first—with Fauset’s There Is Confusion. Whether West parodies Fauset or continues the satire she began in The Living Is Easy, the work’s denial of African ancestry is one more way her recent novel emulates the Harlem Renaissance novels. West’s address to and revision of the motifs of the mulatta protagonist, the middle class, the marriage plot, and family lineage place her novels within ‘‘the distinct literary lineage’’ of Larsen and Fauset (Barbeito, 365). Her use of the ‘‘trends-of-the-period’’ suggests a closer affinity of her novels to those of the Harlem Renaissance than to those that are more contemporaneous. Moreover, as a number of the comparisons indicate, there appears to be an affinity between Fauset’s Comedy: American Style and West’s The Living Is Easy—close enough to postulate that West is revising Fauset.12 In doing so, West places The Liv-

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ing Is Easy within the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance women novelists.

II In ‘‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,’’ Barbara Smith states that ‘‘Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition. . . . [T]hematically, stylistically, aesthetically and conceptually Black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature’’ (174). Michael Awkward writes, ‘‘it is [a] common experience which explains, for Smith, the thematic and formal similarities between texts in the Black literary tradition’’ (3). Therefore, he argues that there is the possibility that black women writers are consciously refiguring and revising earlier canonical texts (3–4). Toni Morrison insists that such refiguring and revising need not be conscious, that the notion of tradition is best illustrated when writers claim they have not read the works of their predecessors (Awkward, introduction, note 5, p. 165). These ideas provide a framework for reading West’s The Living Is Easy in conjunction with Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, even though West states that she was not acquainted with Fauset’s novel (McDowell, ‘‘Conversations,’’ 274). Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition argues that central within the tradition of black women writers is a reworking of the racist stereotypes about black women. Emerging from the female slave narratives is the enduring image of the selfless, faithful black mother—who refuses to go North to escape the condition of bondage in order to be near her children (Linda Brent) or who fights the legal system for the freedom and/or return of her children (Lucy Delany and Sojourner Truth)—an image which supports the myth of the black matriarch. These slave mothers were denied the role of women-as-wives, which, according to ‘‘the cult of true womanhood,’’ belonged only to white women. Fauset and Larsen, working within a tradition that expected writers to counteract the denigrating images of black women in the culture, sought to expand the images and roles of black women (Ammons, ‘‘Plots,’’ 195). Not only did they address the image of the tragic mulatta but also they altered the image of the lady by making her black as well as mother and wife. Moreover, and perhaps most sig-

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nificantly, they critiqued the most sacred image of all—that of the black mother. Larsen’s novels suggest that for the black woman, the roles of wife and mother are fraught with problems.13 In Quicksand, Helga Crane is destroyed by marriage and motherhood: her uniting with Rev. Pleasant Green leads to her destruction, and having four children in frequent succession, she is figuratively smothered by motherhood. Preoccupied with maintaining the security that is derived from her marriage, it becomes important for Irene in Larsen’s Passing to see herself as a good wife and mother. She thinks that she is an ideal mate even as she is in a passionless, sexless marriage. In her own eyes, she is a devoted mother (Wall, 130); according to Anne Stavney she needs to see herself as the ‘‘enduring, sacrificing mother’’ (552). In reality, Irene’s self-perceptions are false. Her husband views her as only ‘‘the mother of his sons’’ (221), and having the luxury of affording caretakers, she hardly participates in their rearing. Moreover, Irene agrees with Clare Kendry that ‘‘being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world’’ (97). Larsen further problematizes marriage and motherhood for Clare and Gertrude Martin. Although both are passing, and only Clare’s marriage is in jeopardy for such, each refuses to have a second child out of fear of birthing a dark child. Consequently, motherhood becomes as much an emotional burden for these characters as it is for Helga Crane. Although Fauset critiques the script of the sentimental novel, she appears to remain committed to it, as her first three novels end with marriage and the ‘‘heroines on the threshold of motherhood’’ (Ammons, ‘‘Plots,’’ 156). Curiously, she abandons these traditional notions in her final novel. In what has been identified as her least successful work, Fauset shatters the image of the black woman as wife and mother through her protagonist, Olivia Blanchard Cary, who becomes the prototype for West’s Cleo Judson. Comedy: American Style’s olive-skinned Olivia Blanchard marries Dr. Christopher Cary neither for love, money nor his social class, but for his skin coloring—believing that with him, she will have white children. As a result, she ‘‘cheerfully and willingly enter[s] into both marriage and motherhood’’ (37). However, with ‘‘little love’’ for her husband and ‘‘no enthusiasm for the institution of matrimony,’’ Olivia is far from an ideal spouse (37). Her ‘‘cold . . . freezing’’ demeanor before marriage is misrepresented to Christopher Cary as a positive attribute in a wife, but even after marriage and the birth of three children, it remains a

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passionless frigidity.14 What Olivia lacks as a wife is counterbalanced as a homemaker. She initially keeps a clean but not ‘‘comfortable’’ home and operates within budget; however, she eventually abandons her conservatism for financial extravagance and thereby places a strain on the household. Baffled by his wife’s attitude and behavior—particularly in her mothering, Christopher Cary seeks to counter her actions by instilling racial pride in his children. But when his younger son commits suicide, Cary becomes so emotionally distraught that he slips into a depression, and the family teeters on the brink of financial ruin. Olivia’s self-centeredness renders her oblivious to the part that she plays in these events. Just as Olivia has no enthusiasm for matrimony, she has ‘‘no urge for the maternal life’’ (Comedy, 37). She anticipates the births of her children not because of a desire to be a mother but because she expects them to be white (Sylvander, 213). It is through them that she hopes to pass into the white world; consequently, holding her first white (yet Negro) child serves as ‘‘uncontestable proof of her white womanhood’’ (37). Because of her obsession with color, Olivia manipulates and negatively affects her children. She prevents her two oldest from bringing their obviously Negro friends to the house and sends them away to private schools to pass (she hopes) as white. Olivia forfeits her daughter’s chance for love and happiness on the very eve of her elopement with the too-dark Henry Bates; she then manipulates the distraught Teresa to enter a loveless marriage in France and pass as a white woman. Olivia also ruins her son’s Christopher’s chance for marital bliss with the famous brown-skinned dancer, Marise Davis, but he fares much better than his sister: he marries a woman who has the color requirements of his mother yet the race consciousness of his father. Olivia’s cruelest act is left for her youngest son, Oliver, who ironically is born with her father’s bronze complexion. The child she intends to raise alone—she has decided to abandon her raceconscious family—cannot confirm her ‘‘whiteness.’’ Therefore she rejects him by sending him for extended stays with his grandparents. When he is home, she resorts to having him play the part of an Oriental servant as she entertains her white friends or openly ignoring him in public. When he realizes that it is his color that leads to his mother’s rejection, Oliver commits suicide. ‘‘All of these destructive acts,’’ notes Sylvander, ‘‘are from a black mother’’ (212). After almost having destroyed her family, Olivia finally at-

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tains her dream of living as a white woman. She is alone in Paris. Having regained some emotional and financial stability, her husband insists that he does not have enough money to send for her; upset over the dowry which never arrives, her son-in-law, Aristide, forbids her from living with him and Teresa. The novel’s closing scene is a poignant one: Olivia is sitting in her window watching a woman reading and laughing with her son, ‘‘her dark head against his fair one’’ (327). Nonetheless, Olivia remains unchanged and appears to have no cognizance of or regret for her actions. Critics have traditionally focused on the protagonist’s color mania in Comedy: American Style and thereby have viewed the novel as a commentary on the black middle class’s obsession with the white race. Olivia has been labelled as ‘‘obsessive,’’ ‘‘negrophobic’’ and ‘‘having a pathological urge toward whiteness’’; her actions have been excused as ‘‘madness.’’15 Only recently, with the emergence of feminist criticism, has interest been taken in Fauset’s portrayal of the black mother.16 Perhaps few have addressed Fauset’s shattering of the stereotypical depiction of the black mother because she presents to her readers the unthinkable—a black mother whose obsession with color overshadows her love for her children. However, there is another possibility. Because Olivia is also destroyed by her own mania, Fauset allows her readers to sympathize with her (Sylvander, 215), for her obsession is not solely of her making. As Kenny Williams argues, Fauset ultimately does not blame her characters for their own weaknesses, rather she blames American society which so emphasizes the differences between the two races that these characters become victimized by it. (quoted in Sylvander, 215)

Nevertheless, to the question, ‘‘could a [Black] mother forget her suckling child?’’ Fauset’s response in Comedy: American Style is a resounding ‘‘yes.’’ Fauset calls into question the genteel novel of manners’ notion of the loving, dutiful, selfless wife and mother, but does so in a manner that allows for reader sympathy. Fifteen years later, West introduces a protagonist who shatters the images of wife and motherhood in a way that engenders neither ambiguity nor sympathy.17 This she does by creating a character who is a revision of Fauset’s Olivia Cary.18 A number of similarities between Olivia Cary and Cleo Judson are immediately apparent. Both are obsessed—Olivia with

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becoming part of the white world, Cleo with moving up in the black world (Steinberg, 25); both are manipulative and unashamedly use their husbands and children to meet their personal, selfserving interests. Both are embarrassed by one of their children—Olivia by Oliver’s dark color, Cleo by Judy’s dark color and ‘‘coarseness’’ (Weyant, 360); both have an inability to love; both are in strained marriages of their own making (Cromwell, 357). Finally, both are abandoned by their families at the end of their respective novels. Yet the protagonists’ similarities extend far beyond these superficialities, and at every point, Cleo’s actions far surpass Olivia’s. Like Olivia, Cleo Judson does not marry for love; however, it is difficult to argue that she marries neither for money or social standing. Even though Cleo initially may not have known that Bart Judson is the ‘‘banana king,’’ she is aware that he has money, for after their fateful encounter, he has a brand new bicycle, a crate of oranges, and two ‘‘hands of bananas’’ delivered to her (33). The text later reveals that Cleo thought Bart would die and leave her a ‘‘rich young widow’’ (144); thus, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Bart’s money is a motivating factor in Cleo’s decision to marry. Once Cleo is exposed to the Boston’s Black elite, she becomes preoccupied with becoming part of that society. Attaining social status may not have been a motivating factor for Cleo’s marriage; however, it is a factor in her remaining married. Whatever Cleo’s motivations—ambiguous in the text—they are far more self-centered than Olivia’s. Like Olivia, Cleo is far from an ideal spouse, and she too is compared to ice (34). Cleo’s general seemingly disdain and disrespect for her husband extend to the bedroom. While Fauset attempts an explanation for Olivia’s demeanor toward her husband by correlating her coldness with proper ladylike behavior, there is no such explanation for Cleo who appears to neither be conditioned against nor have a disdain for sex; in fact, it is during one of her moments of ‘‘body hunger’’ that the couple’s only child, Judy, is conceived (35). For Cleo, sex—or the withholding thereof—is another weapon in her artillery of manipulation. Fauset presents Olivia within the context of the antiquated sexual mores of the nineteenth century; ignoring such mores, West presents her protagonist as one who is ‘‘sexually hostile’’ (WadeGayles, 141). When compared as homemakers, both protagonists abuse their roles, yet once again, Cleo outdoes Olivia. What Olivia eventually becomes, Cleo is. In financial matters, Cleo con-

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stantly deceives Bart and recklessly spends his hard-earned money. She totally disregards his pride in providing for his family as well as his caution about their financial situation. Selfishly, she adds the responsibility of caring for her three sisters and their children to the household. Thus, while Olivia’s carelessness only leads to temporary financial ruin for her husband, Cleo’s mistreatment leads to ‘‘Bart’s psychological castration’’ (Wade-Gayles, 146); the sum of her actions is the total destruction of his manhood and sense of self as provider and protector. Again West’s is a replication of a strand from Fauset taken it to its extreme. In contrast to Olivia, Cleo appears not to have entered marriage or motherhood cheerfully or even willingly, and although her one child appears to have survived emotionally intact, her efforts at mothering are as self-centered as Olivia’s. Although Cleo insists that the motivations for her actions are so Judy can have a chance at the old Boston life—that she hires a tutor and desires to move to Brookline so Judy can receive the best education and that she moves her sisters into the household so Judy can have her own age companionship—these actions actually serve her own self-interests: it is through Cleo’s interaction with the tutor that she hopes to become accepted among the Black Brahmins; it is so she can get away from the lower class blacks that she wants to move to Brookline; it is so she can have companionship that she moves her sisters into her home. Olivia is clear about her maternal self-interest—her children will be her entrance into the white world; Cleo veils her self-interest behind the curtain of mothering. Like Olivia’s, Cleo’s mothering is problematic and abusive. Olivia takes an active role—albeit negatively—in the lives of her two older children. Cleo, on the other hand, is inattentive and unloving. Even from the novel’s opening scene, Cleo’s five-yearold daughter, Judy, appears as an appurtenance: the minimal attention she is given by her mother is reiterated in the text itself. Although the novel opens with Cleo’s hissing to Judy to ‘‘walk up,’’ the focus of this page is Cleo with her pompadour, French heels, the immaculate straps of her camisole, chemise and summer shirt, and her large patent-leather pocketbook (3). Barely seen under a leghorn straw hat, Judy is as overshadowed by her mother throughout the novel as she is in this initial scene. Cleo gives her little attention or affection and does not even take pride in her first steps (314). Olivia is far from the perfect mother with Teresa and Christopher, but she is clearly unloving and

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abusive with Oliver. Like Olivia, Cleo is abusive to her child, and that abuse is linked to race. Judy has the complexion and Negroid features of her father; consequently, Cleo constantly orders her to pinch or apply clothespins to her nose in order to make it more aquiline. This is the one of the few instances where Cleo’s behavior does not surpass Olivia’s; however, she too attempts to teach her child lessons in racial denial. Trudier Harris observes that Cleo is ‘‘never the doting mother’’ (150), and Mary Helen Washington states that she is easily identified as ‘‘the bad mother’’ (Invented Lives, 346). In degree, notwithstanding her treatment of and role in the death of her son Oliver, West’s Cleo makes Olivia appear tame—even motherly. While ‘‘manipulative’’ is an apt descriptor for both Olivia and Cleo, Olivia’s machinations impact few outside her immediate family. Cleo’s manipulation, on the other hand, extends beyond her immediate family. Abandoning her efforts at manipulating her daughter, Cleo turns instead to those whom she has always controlled—her sisters. Deceitfully wooing each of them to Boston, she eventually destroys their marriages. Moreover, by bringing Serena, the sister who lives with their father, to Boston, Cleo also becomes responsible for his death. Thus, when her machinations are placed against Olivia’s, Cleo’s are by far the worse. Olivia has one suicide, two shattered lives (Teresa’s and her own—if one accepts the notion that she destroys her own life), and two ruined marriages on her hands. Cleo, in contrast, leaves a path of destruction in her wake: her dead father, two permanently destroyed men (Robert and Bart), and four ruined marriages. In the novel’s final chapters, as the walls of her world come tumbling down (duCille, 114), Cleo Jericho seems on the verge of a transformation. In response to Serena’s having taken a job, Cleo experiences an unprecedented feeling of pride (314). She also becomes receptive to her husband. When Bart informs her that his business has failed, Cleo finally ‘‘sees’’ her tired, weary husband and offers him the money she has just duped from Lily. She even tells him that he is ‘‘the best provider in Boston’’ (344), but it is too late; Bart informs her that he is leaving to begin a new life and departs. But before this new Cleo crystallizes—the compassionate one who tells Bart to write even if he has no money to send—the old Cleo reemerges asking, ‘‘who will love me best?’’ . . . ‘‘who will put me first’’? (347) Cleo’s final thoughts are not for the broke, broken Bart, her daughter, her sis-

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ters or their children, but for herself. Standing in the foyer of the house she has connived to rent, furnish, and rule, Cleo decides, like Scarlett O’Hara, to survive for another day. Yet even this is not enough; she resolves ‘‘to make Tim love me’’ (347). Like Olivia, Cleo remains unchanged, and because she has come into a cognizance of her actions and their consequences, she is more dangerous than Olivia. Described as ‘‘monstrous,’’ Olivia’s actions are deemed beyond her control (Ammons, ‘‘Literary History,’’ footnote 12, p. 217); described as ‘‘powerful’’ and ‘‘villainous,’’ Cleo is—and clearly remains—in control (Washington, Mothering, 153). As this extended analysis suggests, West’s protagonist is very similar to Fauset’s; therefore, what has been identified as West’s ‘‘strikingly original depiction’’ of the black woman and mother is not so original (Rodgers, 166). Cleo Judson is an extension of Olivia Cary updated in a different venue, under different circumstances, for a different decade. One would, therefore, have to concur with Barbara Christian that West’s protagonist resembles the heroines of the Harlem Renaissance (Black Feminist Criticism, 129). Notwithstanding, West’s placing her protagonist in the long line of Harlem Renaissance protagonists, Cleo Judson is important. Where Fauset’s attempt at a nontraditional depiction of the Black woman fails—because the depiction is subsumed as subtext in a novel whose overriding concern is ‘‘race as a cultural construct’’ (McDowell, ‘‘Fauset,’’ 134), West’s succeeds. Whereas Olivia’s most distinctive description in the criticism remains as ‘‘the most fascinating study of color mania in America’’ (Gloster 138), Cleo is described as ‘‘a different image of the black woman,’’ one that gives ‘‘lie to many stereotypes about the fictional treatment of black women’’ (Harris, 146). The similarities between The Living Is Easy and Comedy: American Style are not limited to the depictions of the protagonists. Quoting Julia Kristeva and arguing that the texts of African-American women writers are in dialogue with each other, McDowell writes that each text ‘‘transform[s] and retains[s] narrative patterns and strategies in endless possibilities (‘‘Changing Same,’’ 107). This kind of dialogue—the transformation and retaining of narrative patterns and strategies—exists between Comedy: American Style and The Living Is Easy. A number of similarities serves to support this argument. Both authors attempt to provide insight into their protagonists at the identity formation stage in childhood. In the novel’s first chapter, Fauset informs her readers of the two childhood incidents which shape

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Olivia’s thinking—the first, her being called a ‘‘nasty little nigger’’ (4); the second, her teacher identifying her as a little Italian girl (5)—and makes it clear that these remarks kindled the fire of racial self-hatred. West’s novel imitates this narrative pattern as its second chapter reveals two childhood events that shape Cleo’s character. The first is Cleo’s realization that the person who reserved the special place in her mother’s life and heart was her husband. The second is Cleo’s fight with a young boy where she is the victor, yet her sisters pity him rather than celebrate her. Although West may have intended these incidents, as did Fauset, to serve to explain Cleo’s attitude and subsequent actions in the novel, they do not adequately do so.19 What they do illustrate, however, is West’s repetition of a narrative strategy which works in Fauset’s Comedy: American Style but not in The Living Is Easy. West’s patterning after Comedy: American Style continues with the narrative strategy of providing readers with the protagonist’s motivation for marriage. As selfish and superficial as her reason seems for marrying Dr. Christopher Cary—that she wanted to have children who were white—Olivia, at least, articulates one. In contrast, Cleo’s reasons for marrying Bart Judson are less defined. The narrator provides two options: first, that Cleo ‘‘wanted to get away,’’ and second, that after Judson informs Cleo of Miss Boorum’s nephew’s lascivious intent, she accepts his proposal ‘‘without thinking’’ (34, 35 my emphasis). But the question is asked: from what would Cleo—who, as a child, unashamedly manipulates her father and brazenly attacks a boy her age and who, as an adult, dreams murderous thoughts and decides that if Miss Boorum’s nephew makes an improper advance, she’d stab him to death with an ice pick—want to get away? Because Cleo fears no man, ‘‘want[ing] to get away’’ is not an adequate explanation for her decision to marry (34). Neither is the explanation that she does so without forethought: the scheming, manipulative Cleo is never portrayed as unthinking. Again, West appears merely to be repeating Fauset’s narrative strategy; however, once again, she is not as successful. In providing explications that do not explain, West does not satisfactorily justify her protagonist’s actions. West’s closing scene is reminiscent of Fauset’s—yet with a difference. Amid the bleak ending of Comedy: American Style there is a positive note: the lonely, isolated Olivia can destroy no one else’s life. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Cleo. In contrast to Olivia, who seems to remain ignorant of her

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actions and their consequences, Cleo sees the effects, recognizes the consequences, yet remains unchanged. In fact, as Cleo resolves to make Tim love her, and because he will probably ‘‘try to be the man of the house,’’ the closing scene leaves open the possibility of Cleo’s ruining yet another man’s life (347). If the isolation of Olivia at the ending of Comedy: American Style is indeed bleak, the ending of The Living Is Easy is even bleaker. West is successful in shattering Fauset’s image of the black wife and mother; her protagonist is truly ‘‘a different image of the black woman’’ (Harris, 146). This close reading of Comedy: American Style and The Living Is Easy illustrates comparisons that must be considered more than coincidences. With such remarkable similarities between protagonists and narrative patterns, one would have to concede that signification exists. One need not argue that West is consciously revising Fauset, but there is ample evidence that she is consciously working within the same literary and social tradition as Fauset and is therefore attuned to its issues, themes and characterizations. The similarities between these two novels, combined with West’s use of the motifs of the mulatta protagonist, middle class, marriage, and family lineage, clearly place her novels within the Harlem Renaissance tradition of Fauset and Larsen. Moreover, the similarities do not end with West’s 1948 novel. Interestingly, West abandons what is probably her greatest contribution to African American letters—her attempt to portray nontraditional black women—in her second novel. Years after the influence of feminism is seen in African American women’s writing, West’s female characters in The Wedding— Corinne, Liz and Shelby—remain reminiscent of Larsen’s and Fauset’s; they are middle-class mulatta who cling to the traditional notions of marriage, motherhood, and ancestry. Unlike other African American women writers whose works have spanned decades and undergone thematic transformations— Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Paule Marshall—West remains wedded to the characters and themes of a bygone era.

III In spite of the fact that the majority of her work was not published during the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West’s contin-

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ued identification with the writers, motifs and themes of that era may indeed justify her being classified as a Harlem Renaissance writer. The jury of critical assessment is still out and may remain so, for as Robert Bone explains, ‘‘[L]iterary history is no tidier than any other history’’ (97). But he adds, ‘‘[I]n addition to those writers who give a period its distinctive character, there are those who are ahead of their time, and those who lag behind’’ (97). West clearly fits into the latter category; as a reviewer of The Wedding argues, ‘‘West’s strength is as a witness to a longgone world’’ (Skow, 2 of 3). Therefore, even if West is never clearly classified as a Harlem Renaissance writer, at best it can be argued, as Robert Bone does in the 1950s, that ‘‘hers is primarily a Renaissance consciousness’’ (188). In the 1990s, when the Harlem Renaissance was experiencing a resurgence, so was Dorothy West. She was there; she could provide insights and reminisce about many of its prominent authors. Perhaps she was honing her skills, but her literary output did not come to full bloom until a complete decade later. Sharon Jones maintains that West is ‘‘living testimony to the relevancy and contemporaneity of the Harlem Renaissance’’ (5 of 8). In this light, West’s novels need not be seen only as a mirror into the past, but as a vision that spans the decades.

Notes 1. See the entry on Dorothy West in Current Biography Yearbook as well as Gates, Kenney, Roses, Skow, and Streitfield. In the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Gates writes ‘‘because of her involvement with Challenge and her early associations with the figures and events that gave the period its singular status and acclaim, West is now generally designated the ‘last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance’ ’’ (1359). Yet he is cautious about placing her in that era as evidenced by the rest of the paragraph: ‘‘The bulk of her writing, however, actually began to be published long after what most literary historians consider the height of the movement’’ (1359). 2. Washington does, however, acknowledge West as a member of the Harlem Renaissance. For those who identify West as a Harlem Renaissance writer, see David Levering Lewis, Cheryl Wall, and Sharon L. Jones. 3. In her DLB entry, SallyAnn Ferguson claims that West has ‘‘some forty published short stories’’ (187); Lawrence Rodgers asserts that West published more than forty short stories by 1948 (161); The Norton Anthology of African American Literature claims that West has written ‘‘more than sixty short stories’’ (1359). Even if one includes the short story published in 1935, ‘‘The Black Dress,’’ this would be a total of six short stories published during the Harlem Renaissance. If one extends the period of the Renaissance to 1960, as does Arthur Davis (he terms it the ‘‘New Negro Renaissance’’), the number of West’s

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published short stories, based upon these accounts, is only increased to twelve. If these estimates are correct, six to twelve published works between 1919 and 1960 do not represent the majority of West’s short stories. 4. Interestingly, West considers 1934, the year of Wallace Thurman’s death, as the end of the Harlem Renaissance. (See Roses, 49.) 5. I cannot argue that West is consciously revising Fauset. When Deborah McDowell questioned her about the similarities between The Living Is Easy and Comedy: American Style, West claims that she was not acquainted with the novel. The parallels, nonetheless, are striking (‘‘Conversations,’’ 274). 6. It is not important that Cleo, as well as Joanna Marshall, Angela Murray, Melissa Paul, and Olivia Cary, is neither a mulatto nor a quadroon. Like these protagonists, she meets the characteristics of the mulatta as delineated by Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists. It should also be noted that my reading of Lutie Johnson differs from Christian’s who sees her as a tragic mulatta (65). Described in the novel as ‘‘brownskinned’’ (164), ‘‘good-looking’’ (30), and having ‘‘well-shaped hips’’ (58), Lutie more aptly fits Christian’s physical description of the ‘‘loose black woman’’ (15). 7. West clearly saw herself as part of the Harlem Renaissance. See McDowell, ‘‘Conversations,’’ 270. 8. Robert Bone identifies a ‘‘school’’ of writers during the Harlem Renaissance whose ‘‘distinguishing characteristic . . . is [a] fondness for the novel of ‘passing’ ’’ (98). Included in this school are Walter White’s Flight (1926), Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), and Larsen’s Passing (1929). 9. By 1995, African American authors such as Andrea Lee and Danzy Senna have light- skinned protagonists, but none of them are described as mulatta or consider ‘‘passing.’’ While West’s utilization of these concepts may be considered satirical, her language dates her satire. In 1998, three years after The Wedding, Danzy Senna publishes her first novel, Caucasia, in which she addresses the issues of race. Her protagonist, Birdie Lee, is indeed a mulatto; however, she is not described as such. Moreover, the term is not used until near the end of the novel when Birdie views a chart in her father’s study. As three of the four mulattoes pictured are from the Harlem Renaissance era—Phillipa Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer—the term is intended to recall that period. The issue of ‘‘passing’’ is also raised. When Birdie’s parents separate, her father declares that ‘‘no daughter of mine is going to pass’’ (27). Birdie does pass yet prefers to say that she has lived ‘‘as a white girl’’ (311). It is not until she is reunited with her father that she states she has ‘‘passed’’ as white, to which he responds, ‘‘there’s no such thing as passing. . . . Race is a complete illusion’’ (391). Senna addresses some of the same issues as West, yet in a manner that more accurately reflects the tenor of the times. When one compares The Wedding to Caucasia, its issues and themes are closer to those of the Harlem Renaissance than this novel that is its contemporary. 10. According to Rodgers, West’s depiction made her the first African American to place extended satire in a middle-class setting (166). Berzon claims that, compared to other novels of its kind, The Living Is Easy ‘‘presents the most satisfying study of the black bourgeoisie’’ (178). 11. In the novels of Morrison and Marshall, there is the resolution of the tension between race and class. Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, on the other hand, illustrates how ‘‘Blacks can be middle class and very Black’’ (Marsh-Lockett).

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12. The similarities between Fauset’s and West’s novels have been noted by critics. Farah Griffin claims that West in The Living Is Easy is parodying middle class life in the tradition of Fauset; Rueschmann has compared sister relationships in Plum Bun and The Living Is Easy. Berzon states that Comedy: American Style and The Living Is Easy share the ‘‘intellectual and moral separation of author from her central character’’ (178), and McDowell also notes similarities between Comedy: American Style and The Living Is Easy (‘‘Conversations,’’ 274). Thadious Davis takes the comparisons a step further by noting similarities between Fauset’s and West’s protagonists. She writes: ‘‘like Dorothy West . . . , Fauset observes the ambitious and obsessive mother’s impact on her family’’ (introduction, xxii). 13. Ann duCille aruges that in Quicksand, Larsen reveals ‘‘the toll motherhood takes on a woman’s mental and physical health and independence’’ (87). Stavney argues that through Irene in Passing, ‘‘Larsen delineates the destructiveness of the maternal ideal’’ that dominated that era (553). 14. Interestingly, Sylvander notes that Christopher Cary’s choice of wife is the result of the misinformation provided him by what she terms the ‘‘mistaken mother.’’ She concludes that ‘‘mothers mistaken about race and mothers mistaken about sex both wreak havoc in children’s lives’’ (218). It is apparent that Fauset’s commentary on the black mother in Comedy: American Style extends beyond her character Olivia. 15. See Bone (102), Lewis (384), Bell (109) and McDowell (‘‘Fauset,’’ 135). 16. Wall describes Olivia as ‘‘most shockingly, an unloving mother’’ (81) and Ammons, who describes Olivia as ‘‘a monstrous mother,’’ asserts that the ‘‘particular portrait of the black mother that Fauset chooses to provide is terrifying’’ (‘‘New Literary History,’’ footnote 12, 217; ‘‘Plots’’ 156) 17. Mary Helen Washington in ‘‘I Sign My Mother’s Name’’ (Mothering and the Mind) provides an interesting observation on West’s address to mothers in The Living Is Easy. She states that ‘‘the novel is mother-obsessed’’: ‘‘Cleo tr[ies] to recreate her dead mother’s life’’; she ‘‘manages to people her entire house with mothers . . . [b]ut these mothers do not illuminate the text’’ (152). 18. Barbeito notes that Fauset’s depiction of the black woman as wife and mother in Comedy: American Style is taken up in West’s The Living Is Easy (370). 19. Wade-Gayles argues that Bone’s theories of the ‘‘dethroned child’’ and of Cleo’s ‘‘masculine protest’’ do not convincingly explain the source of her protest (139). She then suggests that Cleo, ‘‘bound by tradition and culture to roles that do not name her as she wishes to be named’’ (141), ‘‘challenges the existence of a ‘world’ for men and only a ‘sphere’ for woman’’ (146). Harris, in response to Wade-Gayles, states that Cleo’s ‘‘belligerence toward maleness . . . cannot be traced to any desire on Cleo’s part to do the kinds of things men traditionally do’’ (149). She concludes that West never satisfactorily provides the motivation for Cleo’s actions.

Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth. ‘‘New Literary History: Edith Wharton and Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ College Literature 14 (1987): 207–18. ———. ‘‘Plots: Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton.’’ In Conflicting Stories: Amer-

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ican Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, 140–60. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Awkward, Michael. ‘‘ ‘Mah Tongue is in Mah Friend’s Mouf’: Toward an Intertextual Reading of Afro-American Women’s Novels.’’ In Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women’s Novels, 1–14. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Barbeito, Patricia. ‘‘ ‘Making Generations’ in Jacobs, Larsen and Hurston: A Genealogy of Black Women’s Writing.’’ American Literature 70 (1998): 364–95. Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Berzon, Judith. ‘‘The Mulatto as Black Bourgeois.’’ In Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction, 178–87. New York: New York Universit Press, 1978. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Revised ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Pergamon, 1985. ———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980. Cromwell Gulliver, Adelaide. Afterword to The Living Is Easy, by Dorothy West, 349–64. New York: Feminist Press, 1992. Davis, Arthur P., J. Saunders Redding, and Joyce Ann Joyce. The New Cavalcade: African American Writing from 1760 to the Present. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1971. Davis, Thadious. Introduction to Comedy: American Style, by Jessie Fauset. New York: G.K. Hall, Reprint, 1995. ———. ‘‘Nella Larsen.’’ In Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, edited by Trudier Harris, vol. 51, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 182–92. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1987. ‘‘Dorothy West,’’ 604–8. Current Biography Yearbook 1997. duCille, Anne. The Coupling Convention. Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford, 1993. Eley, Holly. ‘‘Free to Marry.’’ Review of The Wedding, by Dorothy West. Times Literary Supplement, November 3, 1995: 24. Evans, Gaynelle. ‘‘Color Coded Hearts.’’ Review of The Wedding, by Dorothy West. Black Issues in Higher Education 13 (1996): 42–33. Ebscohost. August 5, 1999. Fauset, Jessie. The Chinaberry Tree. A Novel of American Life. New York: Stokes, 1931. Reprint, AMS, 1969. ———. Comedy: American Style. New York: Stokes, 1933. Reprint, G. K. Hall, 1995. ———. Plum Bun. A Novel without a Moral. London: Pandora, 1985. ———. There Is Confusion. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. Reprint, AMS, 1974. Ferguson, SallyAnn. ‘‘Dorothy West.’’ In Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris, vol. 76, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 187–95. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1988.

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Gates, Henry Louis, et al. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton, 1996. Gloster, Hugh. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. Griffin, Farah. ‘‘Who Set You Flowin’?’’ The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford, 1995. Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Harris, Trudier. ‘‘A Different Kind of Woman.’’ Review of The Living Is Easy, by Dorothy West. Callaloo 16 (1982): 146–51. Hill, Patricia L., et. al., eds. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hull, Gloria. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Jimson, A. Yemeni. ‘‘Dorothy West.’’ In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel Nelson, 475–81. Westport, Conn. Greenwood, 1999. Jones, Sharon L. ‘‘Reclaiming a Legacy: The Dialectic of Race, Class, and Gender in Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.’’ Hecate. EbscoHost . June 16, 1999. Kenney, Susan. ‘‘Shades of Difference.’’ Review of The Wedding, by Dorothy West. February 12, 1995. The New York Times on The Web. August 5, 1999. Kubitschek, Missy. Claiming the Heritage. African American Women Novelists and History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: 1986. Lee, Andrea. Sarah Phillips. New York: Random House, 1984. Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Penguin, 1994. Marsh-Lockett, Carol. ‘‘Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature: A Roundtable.’’ Presented at College Language Association Annual Conference. Baltimore, Md., April 7, 2000. Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983. McDowell, Deborah. ‘‘The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists.’’ In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 91–115. New York: Meridian, 1990. ———. ‘‘Conversations with Dorothy West.’’ In The Harlem Renaissance ReExamined. Edited by Victor Kramer, 265–82. New York: Arno, 1987. ———. ‘‘Jessie Fauset.’’ In Modern American Women Writers. Edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, 123–139. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1978. ———. Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. ———. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

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Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin, 1983. Petry, Ann. The Street. New York: Pyramid, 1961. Rayson, Ann. ‘‘Sexuality, Color and Class in Dorothy West’s The Wedding.’’ In Re-placing America: Conversations and Contestations. Selected Essays, edited by Ruth Hsu , Cynthia Franklin and Suzanne Kosanke, 87–105. Literary Studies East and West. Selected Essays. Vol 16. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2000. Reviews of The Wedding by Dorothy West. Amazon.com. July 29, 1999. Rodgers, Lawrence. ‘‘Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy and the Ideal of Southern Folk Community.’’ African American Review. 26 (1992): 161–72. Roses, Lorraine. ‘‘Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, July, 1984.’’ Sage 2 (1985): 47–49. Roses, Lorraine, and Ruth E. Randolph. Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Rueschmann, Eva. ‘‘Sister Bonds: Intersections of Family and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun and Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy.’’ In The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature. Edited by JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Dubler Ward, 120–32. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992. Senna, Danzy. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982. Skow, John. ‘‘The Second Time Around.’’ Time. July 24, 1995: 67. Ebscohost. June 16, 1999. Smith, Barbara. ‘‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.’’ In New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 168–85. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Smith, Rochelle, and Sharon L. Jones. The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000. Stavney, Anne. ‘‘ ‘Mothers of Tomorrow’: The New Negro Renaissance and the Politics of Maternal Representation.’’ African American Review 32 (1998): 533–61. Steinberg, Sybil. ‘‘Dorothy West: Her Own Personal Renaissance.’’ Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1995: 34–35. Streitfield, David. ‘‘Dorothy West: Renaissance Woman.’’ Washington Post. July 6, 1995: C1–2. Sylvander, Carolyn. Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1981. Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Gender in Black Women’s Fiction. Rev. ed. Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1997. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square, 1982. Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.

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Warren, Joyce W., and Margaret Dickie. Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Washington, Mary Helen. ‘‘ ‘I Sign My Mother’s Name’: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall.’’ In Mothering and the Mind: Twelve Writers and Their Silent Partners, edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley, 142–62. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984. ———. ‘‘ ‘I Sign My Mother’s Name’: Maternal Power in Dorothy West’s Novel The Living Is Easy.’’ In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860– 1960, 344–53. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1987. West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982. ———. The Wedding. New York: Anchor, 1995. Weyant, Jill. ‘‘Dorothy West.’’ In American Women Writers, edited by Lina Mainiero, vol. 4, 360–61. New York: Ungar, 1982. White, Walter. Flight. New York: Knopf, 1924. Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: Morrow, 1986.

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‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’’: Migrating Lives in the Short Fiction of Jessie Fauset Australia Tarver

JESSIE FAUSET’S WHIMSICAL, DREAMLIKE STORY, ‘‘MY HOUSE AND A

Glimpse of My Life Therein,’’ is suggestive of Phillis Wheatley’s poem, ‘‘On Imagination,’’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘A Room of One’s Own,’’ because it celebrates the power of the imagination while it insists that the space created for such purposes is personal and individual to its maker. Woolf and Fauset wrote during the Modernist Age, a period of transatlantic industrial and artistic development largely defined by masculine voices such as Henry James. While Woolf, not quite three months older than Fauset, struggled to provide a feminine space beyond Henry James’s ‘‘house of fiction,’’ constructed in Portrait of a Lady (1881), Fauset labored to portray the New Negro Woman as an agent in a turn-of-the-century, fluctuating black world. In her portrayal of a feminine consciousness, Fauset is certainly closer to Woolf than James, who is critiqued as being manifestly patriarchal, but the literary room she envisions is on the other side of the class and racial divide from Woolf’s. In ‘‘A Room of One’s Own,’’ Woolf insists that money is a necessity to challenge patriarchy; Fauset might agree, but her New Women characters ultimately seem to value race and spiritual resilience more.1 In a broader sense, in this imaginative house, Fauset introduces the reader to the literary rooms that are inhabited by the variety of African American lives in her short stories from the post-Reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset, recognized as a ‘‘mid-wife’’ (Langston Hughes’s term in The Big Sea) of the Harlem Renaissance, embraced the literary, social, and economic flux of the period in her short fiction, which, taken together, can be viewed as the initial staging for her novels. In one sense, Fauset’s literary apprenticeship resembled that of her 125

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Harlem Renaissance counterparts in that she sought and found publishing sources for her writing, sources which, like those more easily available to some black and white male writers, could give her support and encouragement as a creative writer. As some critics observe, Fauset, a part of the older group of Harlem writers, gave extensive time and attention to literary novices like Hughes, Toomer, and Cullen and is credited with helping to launch their careers. Like Georgia Douglas Johnson, Fauset also held socials in her apartment for aspiring black writers and intellectuals (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 123; Davis, 157–58; Wall 64). However, initially, except for The Crisis, she could not gain access to publishing sources for her early works. Hence, while serving as editor of The Crisis (from 1918 to 1926), she was able to help other Harlem Renaissance writers and publish some of her own stories as well. As Cheryl Wall observes, critical inclusion of women writers in Harlem Renaissance studies challenges and revises notions of the locale and time of this era. Some of these writers, says Wall, did not live in New York. Georgia Douglas Johnson held gatherings for women writers in her S Street home in Washington, D.C. Fauset, one of the S Street participants, already had published some of the short stories discussed here (at least four by 1919) by the time the Harlem Renaissance was presumed to have taken place. The difficulty of firmly locating the Harlem Renaissance within the decade from 1920 to 1930 also speaks to the foresight and versatility of Fauset, who had written a few stories before 1917—the date David Levering Lewis designated for the era in the introduction of Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994). The pre-1917 stories forecast a growing urban black population that becomes the inspiration for Fauset’s later works. Like the fictions of male writers of the era, Fauset’s stories continue, revise and extend themes associated with the Harlem Renaissance (Wall 9–11; Knopf xxxi). While not as well known or as attended to by readers and critics as her four novels, Fauset’s short stories, published in The Crisis from 1912 to 1923, have appeared in recent collections, such as Bill Mullen’s Revolutionary Tales: Short Stories by African American Women (1995) and Judith and Martin Hamer’s Centers of the Self: Stories by Black American Women from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1994). Paying homage to Fauset, Marcy Knopf entitles her collection of women’s Harlem Renaissance stories The Sleeper Wakes (1993), after the title of one of Fauset’s stories. This recent attention, however, offers

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limited support for analyzing or contextualizing the stories. They remain outside of critics’ attention to Fauset, who was publicly eclipsed even as she published her first novel.2 While there is little enough interest in Fauset, one of the few Harlem Renaissance writers to publish four novels during the period, more critics have attended to the novels, perhaps making her stories fall even farther from view. Deborah McDowell remains the sole critic who has examined two of Fauset’s stories at length, while Gayle Wald offers an analysis of ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ and Marcy Knopf briefly discusses in her introduction the three stories she includes in her anthology, The Sleeper Wakes.3 However, very useful critical bridges to the short stories can be found in both Claudia Tate’s and Ann duCille’s theories on the marriage plot in black women’s fiction. Both Tate and duCille maintain that the marriage plot is a Victorian convention, which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black women writers appropriated to reflect the economic and social advancement of post-Reconstruction blacks and to inscribe issues of sex, race, class, and patriarchy on the social scene of the day. This is the lens through which Fauset’s stories are magnified and through which the seemingly sentimental becomes politicized.4 The purpose here, then, is to present all of Fauset’s known stories to demonstrate that her varying range of interests and her focus on some Harlem Renaissance themes reinforce several levels of migration that merge, shift, and intersect, melding issues of race, gender, class, and history.5 Taken together, these stories reveal four aspects of migration: economic/career-centered journeying; social/class migration; racial/identity migration; and the acknowledgment of and transcendence from slavery. The concept of migration here builds upon Farah Jasmine Griffin’s and Lawrence R. Rodgers’s views that migration is of literary and cultural importance for African Americans, thousands of whom journeyed from the South to the North in the early twentieth century.6 With the migration trope, Fauset’s stories link the Harlem Renaissance to the African American past of both mythic and real journeying. This trope recalls myths of journeying back to Africa in the Sea Island stories of the Flying African and Ibo Landing and of Marcus Garvey’s image of journeying back to Africa during the early period of the Harlem Renaissance. Paul Cuffe (in 1815) conducted a group of free blacks to Africa and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner advocated that blacks return to Africa during the post-Reconstruction era. Fauset’s stories in-

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scribe the journeys for economic, social and spiritual survival of the ‘‘Exodusters,’’ numerous blacks who moved from the South to Kansas in 1879.7 Fauset’s stories also embody the ‘‘Great Migration’’ north, which Rodgers sees as the basis for such novels as Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902). Rodgers’s idea about migration as a search for home is particularly useful here, as he links home to identity: ‘‘Because who one is relies on possessing a sense of one’s place in the world . . . the process of migration is indelibly tied to the broader quest for identity’’ (4). Reminiscent of Fauset’s house of fiction, some of her passing subjects search for imagined identity spaces out of a failure to capture a ‘‘sense of place.’’ While history lies at the center of Fauset’s construction, her migration concept also incorporates the hybridity of identity and class, what Arna Bontemps wryly calls the ‘‘invisible migration,’’ as he explains how thousands of gens de colour ‘‘disappeared from the New Orleans census’’ when they passed for white before the Civil War.8 Fauset’s stories offer still another approach to looking at migration in that the issues of identity can be linked to the levels of movement (or plot) in the stories. Migration can be viewed as textual, geographical, physical and even social in these stories. The movement of Fauset’s characters into alternative physical and psychological spaces drives the action of some of the stories, thus creating a kind of fluid interdependence among place, text, and character. This pluralizing function of migration suggests a Bakhtinian dialogic that speaks to several contexts at once and offers a counternarrative to the masculine-centered texts of the Harlem Renaissance. Although Bakhtin addressed language structures in the novel in his essay, ‘‘Discourse in the Novel,’’ his advocacy of the ‘‘sociological stylistics’’ of the novel applies to Fauset’s interdependent levels of migration, thereby shaping the form of her story: ‘‘The internal social dialogism of novelistic discourse requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic structure, its ‘form’ and its ‘content.’ ’’9 The diversity of migrating lives in Fauset’s stories not only challenges her singular image as the genteel scion of the Harlem Renaissance, consenting only to literary discussions in French in her home, but the variety of her characters’ lives also democratizes W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ as the central pioneers laying the groundwork for the advancement of the black masses. As a great admirer of Du Bois, even before she became his literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset reflects Du Bois’s

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view of the upper one-tenth of a striving, postbellum black population of college-trained, middle-class professionals.10 Indeed, the most well known photograph of Fauset prominently features her Phi Beta Kappa key. But when juxtaposed against some of the lives depicted in her stories, Du Bois’s insistence that the talented tenth is the sole answer for black uplift is sometimes reversed. Sources for help and support come to Fauset’s middleclass strivers from a number of class levels in these stories, even children. In both ‘‘Mary Elizabeth’’ (1919) and ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ (1920), the strivers—at crucial moments in their lives— are aided by members from the working class. In ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Angelique, the main character, confident in her own generational distance from ‘‘old slavery time days,’’ naively forgets that the source of her opportunity to grow up in a safe family setting is her Aunt Sal, an ex-slave. Fauset depicts children as sources for changing or positively influencing the lives of strivers in ‘‘Sleeper’’ and ‘‘There Was One Time’’ (1917). In ‘‘Sleeper,’’ Fauset’s revision of the talented tenth theory comes into play in her depiction of Amy Kildare’s journey to self-redemption. As in ‘‘Mary Elizabeth’’ and ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Fauset draws on the lower-class character to help resurrect a socalled middle-class one. Amy’s dependence on Peter, Wynne’s butler, is vital to her survival. She suffers what, in Toni Morrison’s words, aspiring blacks fear: with Wynne’s insult and abuse, she has been ‘‘put outdoors,’’ with no one to take her in.11 Peter—unperturbed by her admission that she is not white, but ‘‘colored’’—offers his sister’s four-room house in Orange, New Jersey, moves her to Orange and volunteers to travel from New Rochelle to plant her a garden. Polite, supportive and oblivious to Amy’s lowered social status, Peter is further evidence of Fauset’s positive, working-class characters. As if to mirror Bakhtin’s construct of the heteroglossic, Deborah McDowell’s caution against a monotheoretical reading of Fauset’s novels is no less true for her stories, for, as the creative variety of ‘‘My House’’ suggests, they are the source of her early efforts to try out the varied situations and voices of the emerging black urban population. In these stories one sees Fauset experimenting with competing plots, voices and styles. Although she is criticized for using such conventions as the romance and the fairy tale, in such short stories as ‘‘There Was One Time’’ and ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes,’’ Fauset adjusts and alters these conventions to comment on the intersections of race, economics and

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patriarchal values. In her introduction to Plum Bun, McDowell comments further: In revising the conventions of women’s romance and the fairy tale, Fauset employs a specific strategy described by critics as the use of familiar and normative conventions or ‘‘horizons of expectation’’ in unfamiliar and unconventional configurations in order to point up the deficiencies of those norms. In so doing, writers alter, expand and possibly transform the reader’s expectations to allow for what was formerly unexpected and unacceptable. (McDowell, xxix)

As they form the nucleus of her novels, these stories reiterate interlocking themes of race, identity, and marriage in earlier African American novels and enact Fauset’s record of the shifting experiences of her characters’ lives.12 In her first story, ‘‘Emmy,’’ published in 1912, there is Fauset’s criticism of temporary passing, which the main character initially views as harmless to himself and to his fiance´e, Emmy. What is temporary in ‘‘Emmy’’ becomes more extended in Plum Bun, and reaches maniacal levels in the character of Olivia Cary in Comedy: American Style. The plot of ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ serialized in The Crisis in 1923, is extended in The Chinaberry Tree, and the idea of traveling racial identities, from black to white to black is begun in ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ and continued in Plum Bun. This fluidity of texts is prefigured in Fauset’s stories as she demonstrates the transformative nature of her characters’ lives. The characters in some of these stories are migrating laborers, in search of jobs, education, economic mobility, and professional opportunities, against an urban backdrop which, as historian Gordon Nielson says, caused a large percentage of blacks to ‘‘live in poverty or on its edge,’’ (58) with the only class distinctions being ‘‘respectability’’ and ‘‘superrespectability’’ (53). Others are emerging from a slave past or are reminded of its proximity. Still others travel the color line, perhaps denoting Fauset’s awareness of Charles Chesnutt’s earlier works on passing and the color line.13 There are characters whose perceptions move from a kind of shallowness to an initial self-understanding. Finally, there are those who navigate the intersections between color, class, and economics. One of the themes that undergird the struggle for economic stability among Fauset’s short story characters is the psychological frustration resulting from the limited number of job opportunities for trained blacks and the resulting constriction of their

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talent. Jacqueline Jones, Teresa Amott, and Julie Matthaei point to the nearly complete exclusion of black women from commercial or clerical jobs because white employers, white women employees, and/or customers refused to associate with black women employees. Skilled black women, then, were relegated to jobs that were far beneath their training. Jones, Amott, and Matthaei cite the case of Addie Hunter, a high school graduate (circa 1915) and a certified civil service trainee in Boston. Unable to obtain a job commensurate with her training, Hunter was forced to work in a factory, which sometimes employed black women for jobs white women refused to do (Jones, 167). During the time Fauset was at Cornell, Hunter unsuccessfully sued for a clerical position, spending most of her funds in the process. In 1916, she spoke bitterly of the uselessness of advanced training for black women trying to move up the career ladder: ‘‘For the way things stand at present, it is useless to have the requirements. Color—the reason nobody will give, the reason nobody is required to give, will always be in the way’’ (Jones, 178–79; Amott and Matthaei, 167). Fauset presents this dilemma of attempting to navigate the challenges of limited financial resources for career training in the face of racism and gender bias. In ‘‘There Was One Time,’’ (1917) Anna Fetter, the central character, desires a job with a business firm after her training in Philadelphia. She is unable to find the job she wants because of her color. Anna and her family live in relative comfort, even as she faces joblessness. But Anna and her mother are forced to ‘‘go into service,’’ (a term for domestic or restaurant work) when Mr. Fetter dies. Anna and her mother work doggedly while Anna attends night school to train as a teacher, not what she wants but the only job that seems to be available. Through one of her customers, a white trustee for a seminary for black children, she is appointed to teach mechanical drawing. Drawing is a field for which she has some talent, but she is instead assigned to teach French, a subject that she dislikes and is not as well prepared for. It is this gradual ever-increasing constriction that angers Anna. She no sooner prepares for one advancement when she is dealt another blow to her ambition and hard work. Another sobering implication of this story deals with the education of black children. Fauset suggests that, while teachers like Anna do their best, white trustee members, like the one through whom Anna gets the position, give little thought to adequate teacher preparation, thereby causing the black seminary graduate to be less prepared for the training or the job being sought.

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The framework of the fairy tale in ‘‘There Was One Time’’ recalls McDowell’s assertion above that Fauset is using the tale to critique much more serious notions about the economies of race, class, and gender. Such notions may have emanated from her own complex situation as a single working woman in Harlem who, with her elite college training, could have had a more lucrative, stable position if she had been white. In 1926, when she decided to leave The Crisis, Fauset, unble to find a job outside of one that was politically sanctioned for her race and gender, took a teaching job at Dewitt Clinton High School in New York City. Fauset continued to teach there until 1944, writing her remaining three novels in her spare time.14 She had not wanted to teach, but ironically seemed to ‘‘live’’ the economic life she wrote about ten years earlier in ‘‘There Was One Time.’’ Perhaps Fauset’s own struggle at job mobility is reflected in what Ann duCille observes about Fauset’s positive treatment of her working-class characters who experience similar struggles. ‘‘There Was One Time’’ also introduces Fauset’s interest in the kind of jobs the black northern urbanite creates for himself as he challenges the notion that migrating blacks must know their place by thinking of themselves in inferior ways that do not challenge the status quo. The man whom Anna is to marry, Richard Winter, is involved in such a search. Mirroring somewhat Fauset’s own international interests and those of the Garvey Movement, Winter, having grown up in New Jersey and British Guinea, was attracted to other foreign countries. He acquired several skills in England and France, including mechanical engineering. Winter’s objective in returning to New York is to devote his energy to racial uplift by instilling pride and hope in urban fellow blacks by influencing them to think of themselves in ways that are as valid ‘‘as any British, French or Eastern man of color’’ (276). He transforms his interest in racial evangelism into a job as a social settlement worker in New York. It is through Winter’s character that one of the few allusions to Harlem’s attractions is made in Faust’s short stories. He can be considered as embodying the dual image of Alain Locke’s New Negro and Harlem’s New Businessman, like Walter Merrit in Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928), using his talent and financial resources to help aspiring working-class migrants who are new to Harlem. Winter’s character also can be viewed as a precursor to Philip Marshall in There Is Confusion. Marshall, a DuBoisian figure, is a race man who devotes his life to racial equality.

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Fauset’s characteristic blending of work with race, class, and gender is exemplified in ‘‘Mary Elizabeth,’’ which includes the black past as well. This story portrays the migrating lives of blacks after slavery, a period that is depicted also in both postemancipation novels such as Iola Leroy (1892), where migration to search for family is central, and neoslave narratives like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1972). Body marks, remnants of songs and the communal structure of the black church help ex-slaves to find family in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy. Like the hunter in Ernest Gaines’s Autobiography, ex-slaves search continuously for family members sold away from them. Fauset’s main character, Mary Elizabeth, has been in domestic service all her life. At the time we meet her, she is working for a black middle-class couple, Sally and Roger Pierson. In one poignant scene, Mary Elizabeth eats the leftover breakfast, unmindful of the fact that it is cold and ineptly prepared by Sally’s unskilled hands. Sally’s mistaken interpretation that, in eating the breakfast, Mary Elizabeth is only being polite is brought home when she learns of Mary Elizabeth’s slave past. The fact that Mary Elizabeth’s father was sold and lost to the family for twenty-six years is a catalyst for Sally’s realization that she and her husband are only a few generations removed from Mary Elizabeth and her slave experience. Fauset seems to develop a double migration trope in ‘‘Mary Elizabeth,’’ for both a class and historical migration experience are featured, with work linking the two. Mary Elizabeth and Sally and Roger Pierson represent the evolving spectrum of the African American experience. Mary Elizabeth’s story of a family’s migration is the American ancestral history from which the middle-class Piersons have emerged. While the Piersons’ argument over a failed breakfast seems petty and frivolous compared to Mary Elizabeth’s hard life, Fauset does not malign Sally Pierson for having few domestic skills, but she makes it clear that Sally’s leisurely lifestyle is due to Mary Elizabeth’s service as a maid. It is to Sally’s credit that she realizes she and Roger could have suffered the loss of love and familial ties of Mary Elizabeth’s enslaved parents; but, because Mary Elizabeth has been strong enough to survive—working wherever she migrated— Sally and Roger are able to live more comfortably, easily passing cast-off hats and dresses to Mary Elizabeth as a token of appreciation. However, it is because of Mary Elizabeth that the Piersons reassess the value of their marriage and the gender roles that make it prosper. The Piersons conclude that it is not a wife’s

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breakfast that cements a marriage; rather, it is the willingness of both partners to help, support and guide each other. As she does her children characters in these stories, Fauset venerates her formerly enslaved characters and reserves one of her greatest tributes to them. Like Sal in ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Mary Elizabeth redefines the image of Du Bois’s talented tenth because she is a spiritual exemplar to the black middle class, which can only supply her with material goods. As a titular character, she demonstrates the resilience of ancestral strengths often associated with the slave past. Fauset’s treatment of the generational emergence from slavery includes not only a veneration of female slaves but also an exploration of how their daughters emerge from this history. This familial migration of the female line in ‘‘Emmy’’ and ‘‘Double Trouble’’ explores what the daughters do with their lives, or how they combine the past with experiences in love and/or work. Fauset complicates the daughters’ emergence by locating the mothers’ histories within the race, sex, and gender matrix. In presenting Mrs. Carrel’s mother in ‘‘Emmy’’ and Sal in ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Fauset treats offstage the enslaved woman who did not resist the sexual advances of her white master, but whose later life is made more complicated by the seduction. But Fauset varies her treatment of these women. Mrs. Carrel’s mother remains a historical figure whose story she tells to help Emmy. However, Sal is an ever-present negative reminder to her daughter, Laurentine. As if to authenticate and vitalize the maternal pasts from which Laurentine and Emmy emerge, Fauset infuses the stories of the mothers with allusions to actual history. In ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Sal and Laurentine receive consistent visits from the Courtney sisters, Laurentine’s white half-sisters, whose late father, Ralph Courtney, was Sal’s long-term lover. The physical parallels among the three sisters are made all the more striking because of Laurentine’s inclusion. Angelique, Sal’s niece, observes that the Courtney sisters ‘‘were ladies of indubitable breeding and refinement, but for all their culture and elegance they could not eclipse Laurentine whose eyes shone as serene, whose forehead rose as smooth and classical as did their own’’ (Knopf, 30). In departing, the sisters’ customary ritual is to kiss Laurentine and say, ‘‘Goodbye, Sister.’’ They ‘‘leav[e] behind them the unmistakable aura of their loyal, persistent, melancholic determination to atone for their father’s ancient wrong’’ (Knopf, 31). This incident bears a close resemblance to visits

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(and letters too) between white abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke and their formerly enslaved nephews, Francis and Archibald Grimke. Henry Grimke, Sarah and Angelina’s brother, was slave master and father to Francis and Archibald, and when the sisters discovered the connection, they acknowledged their nephews and helped them financially. The story of Emmy’s mother is similar to that of Laurentine, but, in this story, Fauset alludes to a historical tradition rather than an actual biracial family. Emmy’s mother, Mrs. Carrel, divulges her story of her mother (interestingly, unnamed), slave and lover to Mr. Pechegru, a wealthy Frenchman in New Orleans. In order to protect his slave mistress, Pechegru takes her to Haiti, then sends her to France, where Mrs. Carrel is born. Pechegru continues his support. After Mrs. Carrel is married, he returns to France to see her and provides her with his connections in the publishing world so that she can work as a translator. With her knowledge of French and French culture, Fauset probably was well aware of the tradition of concubinage, particularly in New Orleans, where white men engaged in ‘‘formalized mistress-keeping’’ (Hirsch and Logsdon 53) of black or mulatto women. Rather than presenting the sexually exploitative nature of such relationships, Fauset chooses to depict how, in subsequent generations, they can lead to work and the advancement of a black mother and child into the middle class. It is how these daughters emerge from their pasts and what they do psychologically and professionally with their slave heritages that interests Fauset. Emmy and Laurentine position themselves differently in relationship to their futures. While Emmy is more comfortable economically than Laurentine, she seems to exude more psychological and spiritual strength than Laurentine. Emmy’s strength is grounded in racial pride: even in grade school she identifies with, in her words, ‘‘the black or Negro race.’’ When asked by her white schoolmate, Mary Holburn, if she could get ‘‘some of the brown off’’ by ‘‘scrubb[ing] real hard,’’ Emmy replies, ‘‘But I don’t want to. . . . I guess my hands are as nice as yours, Mary Holborn. We’re just the same, only you’re white and I’m brown. But I don’t see any difference. Eunice Leeks’ eyes are green and yours are blue, but you can both see’’ (Fauset, ‘‘Emmy,’’ Dec. 1912, 79). Although Emmy’s response recalls the criticism against Fauset for portraying the black middle class merely as an image of the white middle class, Fauset’s construction of Emmy’s character seems to problematize middle-class assumptions about unencumbered access to

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upward mobility. Fauset implies that to have middle-class trappings is not equal to being free of the obstacles against color. In fact, suggests Fauset, the greater one’s possessions, the greater effort white society makes to keep blacks on the periphery. Mrs. Carrel has a French maid, and Emmy’s clothes are beautiful; but none of these assets defend or support Emmy against the prevailing negative attitudes about color. In school, Emmy’s teacher and some classmates work in tandem to block Emmy’s acceptance. Emmy’s teacher retorts, ‘‘I like colored people to look and act like what they are.’’ Fauset’s critique of Emmy’s white teacher is continued in a number of later African American works, from Langston Hughes’s novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), where the teacher places black students in the back of the classroom, and Louis Peterson’s play, Take a Giant Step (1954), where the teacher insults a black student by telling her class that Civil War blacks were too stupid to fight for themselves, to Rosa Guy’s novel, Ruby (1976), where West Indian students suffer racial insults from their teacher. Yet Emmy’s pride in being black aids her even in her relationship with Archie Ferrers, a mulatto who claims to love her, but fails to respect her color. Until Ferrers regains his self-respect by acknowledging Emmy’s color, Emmy chooses pride in her identity rather than the image of respectability associated with being engaged to marry. As a story about the marriage plot, ‘‘Emmy’’ has its own internal migration from the seeming romantic tale to what Claudia Tate calls ‘‘interior plotting . . . of political contingencies necessary to support the surface story’’ (8). While Wall dismisses Emmy’s character as passive, one that is reduced to a sexual object waiting to be possessed whenever the man recognizes her value (Wall, 44), Emmy emerges as a far more spiritually consistent character than Laurentine in ‘‘Double Trouble.’’ Emmy’s strong sense of her racial self can be compared to Laurentine’s view of her ability to work as a selfemployed dressmaker. Fauset reverses their roles in terms of gender, race, and work. Unlike Emmy, Laurentine hates her mixed-race heritage and wants, above all, to be married. While Emmy’s strength is spiritual, Laurentine’s is artistic. But she is indifferent to her talent, since it has not brought her a husband. She takes for granted the access to work—unencumbered by race—that Archie Ferrers struggles to achieve. There is no progression in Laurentine’s life; unlike Emmy, who, through love of her mother, is guided by the lessons of lost opportunity in her ancestral history, Laurentine is resentful of Sal and her slave

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past. She blames Sal for the color purgatory in which the town has placed her as the offspring of a black woman and white landowner. Nor does Laurentine have Emmy’s sense of self-acceptance. Although Laurentine’s character is expanded in The Chinaberry Tree, in ‘‘Double Trouble’’ she remains marooned from her past, indifferent to her talent for creating her own business and isolated from any marriage prospects that she thinks would advance and rescue her socially. Fauset intersects social, racial, and economic migration in ‘‘Emmy’’ and ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’(1920), her longest and most well-known story. At the center of this intersection, Fauset sets her critical eye on the spiritual stasis effected by the mistaken notion that passing for white offers advancement to the higher rungs of society. Indeed, she suggests that this kind of ‘‘drive by’’ identity acquisition—from black to white to black—is an unfortunate endorsement of the false idea that ‘‘human traits determine social and economic status’’ (Zack, 22). In her theory of passing, Fauset seems to agree with Philip Brian Harper: passing does not always result in an entrance to an untroubled, economically utopic world. Fauset insists that money and status are no panacea for guilt and exploitation. Harper points more toward the assumed material comforts of passing, ‘‘precluded by black identification in the U.S. context.’’ He assesses the experience of Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, (author of The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White) whose mother, Margaret, was the only exception among her siblings, who all passed for white in 1923. Harper observes that Margaret was far more successful economically than her passing siblings and Haizlip herself is privileged and accomplished. While Fauset probably would have applauded Haizlip as an example of black feminine success challenging the passing code, Harper is interested in Haizlip’s observation of the disparity between lower class and upper class as an implication of what is generally assumed the passing strategy can achieve: not ordinary ‘‘subsistence,’’ but exceptional status and material comfort (Harper, 386, 387). Fauset’s earliest treatment of passing is one from a male perspective. Fauset’s treatment is a revision of the tragic male mulatto in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), where Clarence Garie dies in a failed attempt to pass for white. Male passing in ‘‘Emmy’’ is the only one of its kind in Fauset’s fiction, but it reflects Fauset’s use of a female character who appears to be of uncertain racial origin like Amy in ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ and critiques the exploitation of black women by white

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men. In ‘‘Emmy,’’ Archie Ferrers, an engineer, manages to impress the owner of a Philadelphia engineering firm, Nicholas Fields, who offers Ferrers intensive job training if he would move into Chestnutt Hill, a neighborhood where Fields could ‘‘lay [his] hands on [Ferrers] any time.’’ Faced with a significant promotion and the request that he live in Fields’s community, Ferrers, having already asked Emmy to marry him, appeals to her for a postponement because, as he explains it, Emmy is ‘‘too dark’’ to join him and would put his passing for white in jeopardy. Fauset objectifies Ferrers’s character for the reader’s perusal. His looks—whites accept him on the assumption that he is foreign—become the means by which one can measure the relationship between appearance and social mobility and between racial self-acceptance and the problems of self-exploitation. Langston Hughes’s term for the initial stages of Archie Ferrer’s passing is ‘‘occupational passing,’’ because, as Hughes satirically puts it, ‘‘[e]very large Negro section has many residents who pass for white by day, but come home to their various Harlems at night’’ (Turner, 83).15 But Ferrers, to keep his job, is faced with the prospect of being unable to continue the identity transition Hughes describes. Ferrers is in the second stage of passing: with Fields’s offer to move into a white community, he must now face the prospect of being ‘‘white’’ twenty-four hours instead of the eight or ten hours at work, after which he could seek relief from his self-constructed mask in the privacy of his own ‘‘Harlem’’ at the end of the day. Fauset, even earlier than Nella Larsen, suggests that the passing world is a relentless and nightmarish one.16 There is no privacy for Ferrers once he assumes a white identity. He is constantly on guard against being ‘‘found out.’’ When he takes a sick day from work, Fields visits him, discovering the usually hidden photograph of Emmy. Fauset complicates the psychological pressure involved in male passing in ‘‘Emmy’’ with Emmy’s subjection to the white male’s gaze. The legacy of the gaze is connected to slavery and the use of the black female body as an object of desire, derision and exploitation. Fauset’s presentation of Emmy is fictional, but, in fact, during the Harlem Renaissance era, Fauset was not alone in viewing the black woman as someone who needed to stand strong against such a legacy. Elise Johnson McDougald, a journalist and teacher, asserted: ‘‘The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does. Yet, she has been singled out and advertised as having lower sex stan-

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dards’’ (Guy-Sheftall, 81). Nicholas Fields observes Emmy twice, once at a distance and once in the photograph belonging to Ferrers. In both instances, Fields assumes Ferrers is a part of a group of white males who consort with black women for sexual pleasure. Fields’s name for Emmy, ‘‘black Venus,’’ is not a compliment; rather, it reflects his belief that black women exist only to be the pets of white males. Observing the well-dressed Emmy, Fields assumes that Ferrers has spent all his money to clothe her. Fields assumes further that Ferrers’s agony in the photograph scene, in actuality caused by Ferrers’s own guilt in classifying Emmy as ‘‘too dark,’’ is due to Emmy’s abuse. Fields addresses Ferrers sympathetically, ‘‘That’s the way with these black women, once they get hold of a white man—bleed ’em to death’’ (139). Elaine Ginsberg links passing to white male hegemony in her observation that ‘‘origins of passing’’ rest with the white male exploitation of black slave women whose children then sought refuge in the very domain of white privilege that white males sought to protect (5). As one of those children, Ferrers suffers as an unwilling accomplice to the denigration of the black woman he claims to love and, by extension, to the belittlement of the race she represents. The application of Amy Robinson’s theory of the passing subject offers another perspective of the photograph scene, but with similar conclusions to Fauset’s. In ‘‘It Takes One to Know One: Passing and the Communities of Common Interest,’’ Robinson constructs a triangular drama of the passer, the dupe and the ‘‘in-group clairvoyant,’’ the one who knows the actual identity of the passer. In Ferrer’s case, however, while he dupes Fields, he is unsuccessful in carrying off the pretense of being white, either for the maintenance of his own psychic health or for the intelligible reader (or author), who, in this case, plays the role of the textually absent clairvoyant (1–2). Viewed through Robinson’s lens, and Fauset’s as well, Ferrers’s act of passing is based on the ‘‘false promise of the visible as an epistemological guarantee’’ (2). In Fauset’s eyes, black women who pass suffer in ways that are similar to and different from Archie Ferrers, and they experience the same or worse defamation of the kind directed at Emmy. Fauset makes this observation with Amy Boldin in ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes.’’17 Unlike Ferrers, called a ‘‘guiney’’ by a classmate accusing him of being Spanish, Amy, with less certain racial origins, is not subjected to race-based discrimination. Instead, she is assumed white, and, as in the dress shop, is celebrated by two male passersby as beautiful enough to paint.18 Nor

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is Amy’s passing as self-conscious as Ferrers’s. When she leaves her adopted family, the Boldins, in Trenton, New Jersey, Amy does so with limited preparation and without any ‘‘pangs of separation’’ (5). But her eagerness to sever ties with her loving family is not due, as in Angela Murray’s case in Plum Bun, to a determined rush to be white. Her racial crossover is not accompanied by any major psychological change. Amy is still a believer in fairy tales. There is no awareness, as Elaine Ginsberg describes, of the passing figure who feels the necessity of changing geographical location to one where his or her true identity is not known (3). In New York near Greenwich Village, Amy lives as a white woman, unconcerned about her working-class existence because she anticipates an exciting future. Her objective, like that of Shirley Haizlip’s relatives, is to achieve status and wealth. With equal unconcern, Amy marries Stuart Wynne, a wealthy, Southern businessman who, as John Bellew in Nella Larsen’s Passing, hates blacks uncompromisingly. Amy has the husband and the respectability Laurentine wants and the status Ferrers seeks through job promotions. Enshrined like a Southern belle on her husband’s Virginia estate, or, McDowell reminds us, like Nora in A Doll’s House (McDowell, ‘‘Neglected Dimension,’’ 90), Amy seemingly has achieved effortlessly the material rewards of the passing figure. As Fauset sees it, Amy is ‘‘sleeping’’ because she fails to see that passing reinforces the very white hegemony she abhors in Stuart Wynne; but she awakens to her own physical and spiritual vulnerability as the passing black female body who risks the kind of sexual exploitation and abuse reminiscent of the slave past. Fauset depicts Amy’s body as a commercial entity, used, like Helga Crane’s in Denmark, to attract wealthy white males. In their final confrontation, Wynne reminds Amy that she was on a ‘‘selling mission’’ when they married. He says accusingly, ‘‘[Y]ou forget you told me you didn’t love me when you married me. You sold yourself to me then. Haven’t I reason to suppose you are waiting for a higher bidder?’’(20). Amy’s fortunes plummet when her husband divorces her because he accepts her declaration that she has been passing for white. After a ten-month separation, Amy assumes that Wynne’s appearance at the small cottage he has allowed her to use is a sign that he wants to remarry. When he suggests that Amy be his mistress instead, she is faced with the reality that, now that she is black, Wynne reveres the myth of heightened black female sexuality, but regards her as inferior to white standards as the blacks who work on his

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estate. Fauset’s treatment is different from other passing narratives such as Charles Chesnutt’s ‘‘Her Virginia Mammy,’’ in which the pursuing white male surmises that the woman he wants to marry is black, or Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, in which the white male suitor is still determined to marry Iola years after he learns she is a former slave. Amy is the desired ‘‘other,’’ but she is also a hated object, subject to contempt and abuse. When Amy strikes him for insulting her, Wynne, no longer bound by what he believes to be the behavior codes reserved for white women, knocks Amy unconscious, shouting ‘‘nigger’’ repeatedly as she falls. Realizing that she has ‘‘sold herself for a mess of pottage,’’ as does Johnson’s ex-colored man, Amy sets to work to regain her self-respect by returning Wynne’s money used in the ten-month period after the divorce.19 Implicitly, both Amy and Archie Ferrers allow whites to define them according to socially accepted codes of success. Only when they take control of their own ethnogenesis do they move to higher spiritual levels. The sleeper who wakes, then, is an effective trope for both characters. The passing that Fauset condones is that which is away from self-centered notions of color and appearance to the value achieved from work. Fauset’s short stories express her earliest fictional depictions of the racial complications involved in work and the lengths to which characters go to maintain the working life. Mary Conde is right in her assessment that ‘‘[t]he impulse behind’’ earlier novels by black women writers like Fauset ‘‘is an emphasis on the value of work: work that is not imposed, but which is chosen freely, and for which the heroine can get the credit, financially, spiritually, or both’’ (98). The dress shop scene at the beginning of ‘‘Sleeper’’ foreshadows Amy’s future; however, in the end, Amy does not regard her employment as a dressmaker as a stage for her beauty but as a potentially successful migration to an independent life. Langston Hughes reminds us that the Harlem Renaissance was lost on the average Harlemite who was too busy trying to survive to pay attention to the machinations of black intellectuals.20 Fauset seems to suggest the same dichotomy in the working lives of Stuart Wynne’s black servants, who are more clearly focused than Amy herself. She learns that most accept the work of supporting the comfortable life she and Wynne lead because they are helping family members with their educations and careers, perhaps keeping that uppermost in their minds as they suffer the racist indignities Wynne flings at them. In her compar-

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ison of the formerly bourgeois Amy to the now politicized, awakened Amy at the end of ‘‘Sleeper,’’ Gayle Wald maintains that Amy’s future working life still has a vestige of arrogance. Wald views Amy’s final declaration to ‘‘work and help with colored people’’ as an indication that she does not see herself as part of the working-class group she intends to help; thus, she has neither solved the identity issues of passing, nor, in her aim to improve the lives of ‘‘colored people,’’ will she help to reverse the ‘‘hierarchical relations that racial uplift ideology means to dismantle’’ (45–46). Fauset’s presentation of the struggle for economic stability in these stories reflects the reality of the numbers of urban blacks working a range of jobs, mostly at the menial level. Fauset emphasizes the shifting, nebulous quality of occupations among her characters, as in her story, ‘‘Emmy,’’ where Archie Ferrers is an engineer one day and jobless the next. Because of the fluidity of their lives, Fauset’s characters are unable, except for a very few safely placed in the middle class, to transcend an economic world that trained black women at the local YWCA to be laundresses, housemaids, lady’s maids, and waitresses because, as an article in Southern Workman (1903) suggested, domestic service was the ‘‘birthright’’ of black women (Nielson, 71, 72).21 Traversing between poor, but respectable or ‘‘superrespectable’’ as thin distinctions, Fauset’s working-class characters would fit the wry, but bitter observation of George Haynes, director of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor, who wrote in a 1919 article: ‘‘It would seem that the Negro is expected to produce from his dark skin some sort of alchemy which will transmute smaller pay than white workers receive into equal standards of food, shelter and clothing’’ (Nielson, 74). By 1923, the date of ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Fauset’s last story in The Crisis, Harlem was overcrowded with black job-seekers from the South, the Caribbean, and other parts of the U.S. As literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset probably was aware of the problems and challenges of black urban life that Gilbert Osofsky records in Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: there were jobs in Harlem customarily known as ‘‘Negro Jobs’’ (136). Osofsky, quoting E. Franklin Frazier, says further, ‘‘There were two types of businesses in terms of Negro hiring policy . . . ‘[t]hose that employ[ed] Negroes in menial positions and those that employ[ed] no Negroes at all’ ’’ (136). Fauset’s characters travel not only between different class levels to avoid racially constricting job opportunities, but they also

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travel to locations that afford them possible work. Prefiguring Philip Marshall in There Is Confusion and Angela Murray in Plum Bun, Archie Ferrers in ‘‘Emmy’’ is on the verge of moving to the Philippines to practice his engineering skills. Similarly, Richard Winter in ‘‘There Was One time’’ lives, works, and moves around Europe to find other jobs. When Winter returns to the U.S., he travels between Pennsylvania and New York to set up a job helping to settle, advise, and proselytize among black Harlemites. Mary Elizabeth moves from the South to New York as a domestic; when her white employer moves to Chicago, Mary Elizabeth declines her offer and moves again, this time to a job serving a black couple, the Piersons. Associated with traveling laborers is Emile Carrel, the West Indian e´migre´ in ‘‘Emmy,’’ and his wife. As Emmy’s Haitian father, Emile is a part of Emmy’s ancestral history, and does not appear as a living character. However, he is an example of Fauset’s interest in the black diaspora and in the mobility and interrelationships among blacks in the Americas at the turn of the century. Emmy’s mother marries Emile in France. Emile’s jealousy separates them, and Mrs. Carrel moves to Plainville, New Jersey. The couple reconciles by letter, but Emile is killed in an accident before he is able to join his family. Even as a widow and mother, Mrs. Carrel—whose lifestyle as a translator of French exceeds most among these stories—is able to use her position as a traveling worker to connect Archie Ferrers with her New York employers who, in turn, have connections in the Philippines to help Ferrers find a job there. Although a minor character, Mrs. Carrel is Fauset’s most economically successful traveling worker among these stories, a status that ranks her with Sal in ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ Peter in ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes,’’ and Mary Elizabeth. This reading of Fauset’s short stories supports the revised view of her contributions to the body of African American fiction before and after the Harlem Renaissance and helps to redefine the tendency to limit the time frame of the era to the 1920s and the locale to Harlem. As an ignored Harlem figure, one who, as Jane Kuenz observes, was ‘‘the negative example of how not to represent the New Negro woman’’(89), Fauset offers more than a singular depiction of the gentility and respectability of the ‘‘good life’’ image seen in James Van Der Zee’s Harlem photographs. Taken together, her stories anticipate and complete the multilayered quality of her novels. Fauset was interested in the early twentieth-century black American world on the move nation-

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ally and internationally, and her stories reflect the dialogic thrust with which she envisioned this migration. It is the trope that connects geography, gender, race, and class to the period from post-Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset’s stories are invested with contrasting or competing layers. They are both pro- and anti-talented tenth; they convey a Bakhtinian sense of the world, one in which diverse factors are at play, inviting readers to consider the interdependence of work, life and art. All of Fauset’s stories focus on a domestic scene, even the visionary ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein.’’ But it is a politicization of the domestic—as Tate and duCille construct—linked to the characters’ social, racial, and economic migration, and perhaps even to the personal and artistic mobility of Fauset herself. Elizabeth Ammons suggests that the allegorical ‘‘My House’’ is not a romantic tour through rooms, but a dark implication of Fauset’s own journey through racial and artistic obstacles: The speaker acknowledges an insidious destructiveness about the place: The House can unfit one for the duties and real struggles of life. . . . Fauset was well educated and brilliant, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Cornell: Is this story her nightmare vision of her own life? . . . What do we make of the image of the speaker as ‘‘queen’’ in a tiny secret attic space? The house Fauset describes is beautiful, sensuous, and luxuriant, but it is also haunted by isolation, irrelevance, and incapacitation. Is this lifeless, silent house a metaphor for the creative life of a modern middle-class black woman as the contemporary west has constructed it? (15)

Cheryl Wall maintains that Fauset’s essays are stronger than ‘‘her fictional inventiveness’’ (Wall, 48). Certainly, in her short stories the weaknesses in structure and style, the reliance on the romance and fairy tale are all there. However, Fauset’s aim is clear. She charts the physical, social, economic, racial, and spiritual progression of black characters modeled, in part, from blacks who began migrating north after Reconstruction and who settled in urban communities like Harlem, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Fauset’s range of stories, from the nostalgic piece occasioned by a holiday, called ‘‘When Christmas Comes,’’ (1922) to the last one published in The Crisis, ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ is a testament to the metaphorical promise of her story, ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein.’’ This meditation or reverie announces Fauset’s possibilities as a writer. Like Phillis Wheatley’s poem, ‘‘On Imagination,’’ Fauset’s story examines

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the freedom and fluidity of an imagination given free reign, even, as Ammons implies, when limited by the west’s notions of race and gender. It is an imagination that she has built and that she invites the reader to share through her characters’ lives.

Notes 1. For discussions of Henry James’ patriarchal views see Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism; and Priscilla Walton, The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. I thank Mary Esteve for locating James’s phrase, ‘‘house of fiction,’’ in Portrait of a Lady. 2. Both Thadious Davis and Cheryl Wall point to the March 21, 1924 Civic Club dinner, ostensibly held in Fauset’s honor for the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion. But, in actuality, the dinner, organized by sociologist Charles S. Johnson, highlighted white publishers (Harper’s, Scribner’s, Boni & Liveright Publishers) who had published works by younger Harlem writers such as Toomer and Cullen. Johnson’s intent also was to provide a forum to encourage publishers to support black talent. Fauset, who spoke briefly at the dinner, was not the black talent in focus that evening. Instead she was overshadowed by Alain Locke, to whom Charles S. Johnson had given the spotlight to serve as master of ceremonies and to launch the ‘‘New Negro Movement’’ with the volume, The New Negro. See Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, 158–59; and Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 69–70. Fauset is also excluded from current anthologies which focus on ‘‘the best’’ of the group of Harlem Renaissance writers. William Andrews’s anthology, Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (1994) is an example. 3. The three stories Knopf includes are ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes,’’ ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ and ‘‘Mary Elizabeth.’’ See Deborah McDowell, ‘‘The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset,’’ in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 86–104. 4. See Ann duCille. The Coupling Convention, 4; and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 8–9. 5. Fauset’s stories are included in The Crisis as follows: ‘‘Emmy’’ 5 (Dec. 1912): 79–87, 5 (Jan. 1913): 134–42; ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’’ 8 (July 1914): 143–45; ‘‘There Was One Time’’ 13 (April 1917): 272– 77, 14 (May 1917): 11–15; ‘‘Mary Elizabeth’’ 19 (Nov. 1919): 51–56; ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes’’ 20 (Aug. 1920): 168–73, 20 (Sept.1920): 226–29, 20 (Oct. 1920): 267–74;‘‘When Christmas Comes’’ 25 (Dec. 1922): 61–63; and ‘‘Double Trouble’’ 26 (Aug. 1923): 155–59, 26 (Sept. 1923): 205–9. I am grateful to Paula Barnes for locating and providing me with copies of The Crisis stories. 6. For an extended discussion of migration, see Lawrence Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel and Farah Jasmine Griffin, ‘‘Who Set You Flowin’?’’: The African-American Migration Narrative. 7. The sea island stories are included in Malcolm Bell and Charles Joyner, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Costal Negroes; for an analysis of Garvey see E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association; Paul Cuffe is in-

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cluded in Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-toAfrica Movements, 1890–1910; see the ‘‘Exodusters’’ in Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War and Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. 8. See Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace But Here, 122. 9. See ‘‘Discourse in the Novel,’’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 300. 10. Although one would wish for more evidence, David Levering Lewis, in W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919– 1963 (49, 187–91), claims that Fauset and Du Bois were lovers before their split in 1926. 11. Morrison makes this reference in The Bluest Eye, as the narrator discusses black middle-class fears of not being able to maintain a home—a signal of class and race advancement. Middle-class aspirants differentiate between ‘‘being put out,’’ being able to go somewhere else, and ‘‘being put outdoors,’’ having no other place to go, like the Breedloves, renting blacks who are homeless and friendless. 12. Some examples are Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). 13. Known for being a pioneer of fictional color line issues, Chesnutt depicts both transient and fixed passing in The House Behind the Cedars (1900); in his collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories, ‘‘The Wife of His Youth,’’ ‘‘Her Virginia Mammy,’’ and ‘‘A Matter of Principle’’ treat color line issues dramatically or satirically. 14. Fauset’s three remaining novels were Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1932) and Comedy: American Style (1933). 15. It is interesting to note that ‘‘Emmy’’ may have shown Fauset’s early recognition that the passing theme would be useful to develop in her own works. ‘‘Emmy’’ may demonstrate Fauset’s interest in James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, also published in 1912. In a review attributed to Fauset in The Crisis, November 5, 1912, 38, Fauset maintains that the strength of the novel is its multilayered presentation of the color-line experience. Passing was one of the central Harlem Renaissance themes, and ‘‘Emmy’’ can be viewed as a predecessor. Fauset, however, did not satirize the passing experience as did Hughes (in the epistolary story, ‘‘Passing’’ and in ‘‘Who’s Passing for Who?’’); Rudolph Fisher in The Walls of Jericho (1928); or George Schuyler in Black No More (1931). In Black No More the invention of a machine that turns blacks to whites is hilariously treated, but it has unforeseen parallels in the future scientific and commercial world. A New York Times Magazine essay, ‘‘A Catalog of the Near Future,’’ (June 11, 2000, 53–103) predicts a ‘‘skin-tone revolution’’ in which blacks and whites, by taking a pill, can be any skin tone they choose. As the resident satirist of the Harlem Renaissance, Schuyler devilishly would have applauded one of the pill research incidents as an apt result of scientific experimentation to circumvent racist beliefs about skin color: a biology professor who took a melanin enhancement injection achieved the brown skin but also had priapism—a continuous penile erection. 16. Both Fauset and Larsen published their novels, Plum Bun and Passing, in 1929, but Fauset predated Larsen with a depiction of the relentless pressure of passing in ‘‘Emmy.’’

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17. Fauset continues the experience of the defamed black woman with Angela Murray in Plum Bun. 18. For Fauset’s black Southern reading audience, the dress shop is a coded racial signifier, perhaps enhancing Amy’s white skin color. In a number of precivil-rights Southern locales, blacks could not try on clothes in stores. 19. In James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the central character arrives at the conclusion that he has cheated himself of his black identity by passing and, thereby, is unable to know what rewards self-acceptance would have brought. 20. Hughes admits in his autobiography, The Big Sea, that while ‘‘some Harlemites thought the millenium had come’’ because Harlem was popular among whites who spent money there and was artistically fruitful for some blacks, ‘‘[t]he ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any’’ (228). 21. Southern Workman was a Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) periodical that focused on educational issues.

Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. Introduction to Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900– 1920, 3–20. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Amott, Teresa L., and Julie A. Matthaei. Race Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Andrews, William. Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Bakhtin, M. M. ‘‘Discourse in the Novel.’’ In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bontemps, Arna, and Jack Conroy. ‘‘Invisible Migration.’’ In Anyplace But Here, 122–34. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. ‘‘A Catalogue of the Near Future.’’ New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2000, 53–103. Chesnutt, Charles. ‘‘Her Virginia Mammy.’’ In The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories, 25–29. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. ———. The House Behind the Cedars. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Claridge, Laura and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Conde, Mary. ‘‘Passing in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen.’’ In The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 24, edited by Andrew Gurr, 94–104. Leeds, England: W. S. Maney & Son, 1994. Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen: A Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

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Du Bois, W. E. B. ‘‘The Talented Tenth.’’ In The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. DuBois, vol. 1, edited by Julius Lester, 385–403. New York: Vintage, 1971. duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Fauset, Jessie. The Chinaberry Tree and Selected Writings. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. ———. ‘‘Double Trouble.’’ The Crisis 26 (August 1923): 155–59. ———. ‘‘Double Trouble.’’ The Crisis 26 (September 1923): 205–9. ———. ‘‘Emmy.’’ The Crisis 5 (December 1912): 79–87. ———. ‘‘Emmy.’’ The Crisis 5 (January 1913): 134–42. ———. ‘‘Mary Elizabeth.’’ The Crisis 19 (November 1919): 51–56. ———. ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein.’’ The Crisis 8 (July 1914): 143–45. ———. Plum Bun. Boston: Beacon, 1990. ———. ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes.’’ The Crisis 20 (August 1920): 168–73. ———. ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes.’’ The Crisis 20 (September 1920): 226–29. ———. ‘‘The Sleeper Wakes.’’ The Crisis 20 (October 1920): 267–74. ———. There Is Confusion. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. ———. ‘‘There Was One Time.’’ The Crisis 13 (April 1917): 272–77. ———. ‘‘When Christmas Comes.’’ The Crisis 25 (December 1922): 61–63. Fisher, Rudolph. The Walls of Jericho. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Gaines, Ernest. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam, 1971. Georgia Writers’ Project. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Costal Negroes. Athens: University Georgia Press, 1986. Ginsberg, Elaine, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. ‘‘Who Set You Flowin’?’’: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Guy, Rosa. Ruby. New York: Bantam, 1979. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press, 1995. Haizlip, Shirlee Taylor. The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Hamer, Judith A., and Martin J. Hamer, eds. Centers of the Self: Stories by Black American Women, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Harper, Phillip Brian. ‘‘Passing for What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility.’’ Callaloo 21.2 (Spring 1998): 381–397. Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940. ———. ‘‘Fooling Our White Folks.’’ In Black American Literature: Essays,

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Poetry, Fiction, Drama, edited by Darwin T. Turner, 82–85. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. ———. ‘‘Passing.’’ In The Ways of White Folks, 49–53. New York: Knopf, 1934. ———. ‘‘Who’s Passing for Who?’’ The Langston Hughes Reader: The Selected Writings of Langston Hughes, 30–33. New York: George Braziller, 1958. James, Henry. Portrait of a Lady. New York: Bantam Books, 1983. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Penguin, 1990. Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1986. Kuenz, Jane. ‘‘The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset’s There is Confusion.’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (1999): 89–111. Knopf, Marcy, ed. The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000. ———. When Harlem Was in Vogue. 1981. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. McDowell, Deborah. ‘‘Introduction: Regulating Midwives.’’ In Plum Bun, by Jessie Fauset, ix–xxxiii. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. ———. ‘‘The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 86–104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. Mullen, Bill, ed. Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories, From the First Story to the Present. New York: Dell, 1995. Nielson, David Gordon. Black Ethos: Northern Urban Negro Life and Thought, 1890– 1930. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977. Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1977. Peterson, Lewis. ‘‘Take a Giant Step.’’ In Black Theater: A Twentieth-Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, edited by Lindsay Patterson, 43–91. New York: Dodd, 1971. Redkey, Edwin S. Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Robinson, Amy. ‘‘It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.’’ Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 715–36. Rodgers, Lawrence. Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Schuyler, George. Black No More. New York: New American Library, 1969. Scott, Emmett J. Negro Migration During the War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1920. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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Walton, Priscilla. The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Wheatley, Phillis. ‘‘On Imagination.’’ In The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, edited by Julian Mason, Jr., 29–31. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harvest, 1957. Zack, Naomi. Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

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Wandering Aesthetic, Wandering Consciousness: Diasporic Impulses and ‘‘Vagrant’’ Desires in Langston Hughes’s Early Poetry Nicholas M. Evans [T]here is nothing more sacred than marriage and family. Nothing. . . . Now brothers, in the Holy world you can’t switch. No, no, no . . . in the Holy world you better hide that stuff ’cause see if God made you for a woman, you can’t go with a man. . . . You know what the penalty of that is in the Holy land? Death. . . . They don’t play with that. . . . Sister get to going with another sister—Both women [are decapitated]. . . . —Louis Farrakhan; May 20, 1990; Oakland, California (qtd. in Simmons, 222)

A GROWING CONCERN IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES IS THE

interdependence of issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. To cite one of many possible critics, Judith Butler emphasizes the importance of considering ‘‘convergent set[s] of historical formations of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms’’ (182).1 These same issues are of increasing interest in studies of the Harlem Renaissance. This essay joins the critical conversation about these concerns by examining the early poetry of Langston Hughes (1902–1967). In the 1920s verse that I analyze, Hughes displays ambivalent identification with both middleclass African American identity, including its prescriptions of respectable masculinity and heterosexuality, and with homosexuality, marked at the time as bohemian and ‘‘white.’’ These poems provide a case study of an artist who affiliated himself with ideologically conflicting racial and sexual formations and who sought to reconcile them, a poet whose desires and identifications exceeded the strictures imposed by those formations. 151

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My analysis of these issues intertwines with a consideration of nationalism, defined broadly. I intend a conventional sense of nationalism with regard to American identity, but ‘‘national’’ identity can also be congruent with racial/cultural identity (as in black nationalism) and with sexual identity or orientation (as conceived by the organization Queer Nation). In the U.S., the latter two types of nationalism have had rather uneasy relations; some formations of black nationalism feature homophobia as a constituent element. Indeed, homophobia in varying degrees has been a shared characteristic of prominent forms of black nationalism ranging historically from the 1920s to the 1960s and 1990s. This particular lineage of African American social ideology also significantly influenced black arts and letters. Hence the relevance of Farrakhan’s perspective to poetry by Hughes dating from the 1920s: contemporary black nationalist views of homosexuality echo the perspectives that conditioned Hughes’s early work when he first composed and published it and that have continued to condition the work’s interpretation ever since. This essay aims to counter the delimiting effects of this legacy by simultaneously exploring alternative interpretations of Hughes’s 1920s poetry and reconceiving his identity as both black and queer. I am far from alone in raising the issue of Hughes’s sexuality, for it has figured prominently in recent Hughes criticism. Central questions include: What was the nature of his sexuality, and what bearing did and does it have on his work? Scholars like Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s renowned biographer, generally aver that the writer was heterosexual even as they downplay his sexuality’s significance. To Rampersad and the majority of commentators on Hughes, race—considered as a separable facet of identity—was the poet’s central concern. In contrast, figures such as poet Essex Hemphill and critic Gregory Woods, to whom Hughes was undeniably gay, find his sexuality crucial to understanding his work. For the most part, the debate is dominated by these polarized positions. I join others in proposing an alternative to the terms of this debate. Rather than occupying one particular identity to the exclusion of others, Hughes assumed many, sometimes in contradictory fashion. He existed between and among these positions and sought others beyond them. While he engaged in sexual relationships with both men and women, he is not easily categorizable as heterosexual or homosexual—or even bisexual—in any delimiting sense. As Eric Garber puts it, ‘‘the exact nature of

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[Hughes’s] sexuality remains uncertain’’ (326). He is perhaps best described as ‘‘queer,’’ as that term is specified by Butler’s survey of its meanings in the 1920s and 1990s. Butler’s reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) shows how queer could signify ruptures in the performance of prescribed sexual and racial identity (Butler, 176–77). Her discussion of queer’s contemporary uses emphasizes its plasticity, encompassing lesbians and gay men as well as ‘‘bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with antihomophobic politics’’ (230). Defining queering as the study of ‘‘the formation of homosexualities,’’ Butler adds parenthetically that such ‘‘a historical inquiry . . . cannot take the stability of the term for granted, despite the political pressure to do so’’ (229). It is at a queer nexus of gay, straight, and bisexual affiliation, as conditioned by 1920s discourses of sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and social class, that I locate Hughes and his early poetry. My orientation toward Hughes owes in part to David R. Jarraway’s work, which provides additional useful terminology for discussing the poet’s dynamics of subjectivity. To Jarraway, Hughes’s poetry has less to do with articulating overt, coherent, racial and sexual subject positions than with continually exploring the virtually infinite dynamics of selfhood. The critic argues that, to Hughes, blackness manifests an ‘‘inexpressible surplus’’ of experience whose meaning is never fixed but is perpetually and willfully deferred (822). In support of his claims, Jarraway cites Kimberly Benston’s account of Ellisonian black modernism: ‘‘ ‘Blackness’ is the endlessly enigmatic name for a ceaselessly elusive agency’’ (Benston, 171). Being ‘‘irreducibly heterogeneous’’ (170), the meaning of blackness does not inhere in any ultimate referent but is renewed in the rhythmic process of multiplication and substitution generated from performance to performance. . . . [Such performance is] a construct of desire, mobilized at a site of struggle against various forms of closure. (Benston, 173)

Jarraway suggests that Hughes, in his repeated poetic performances and explorations of blackness, resisted identifying himself with what the critic calls ‘‘referred’’ subjectivity—fixed, idealized racial identity—and instead celebrated the productive ambiguity and mutability of ‘‘deferred’’ subjectivity. With these efforts, even in his earliest poems, Hughes sought to escape the restrictions of dominant categories of African American identity (cf. Jarraway, 836–38).

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Jarraway approaches Hughes’s sexuality similarly. The poet’s early career coincided with the period in which the subjectivities of heterosexual and homosexual—the former prescribed for middle-class men, the latter defined as deviant from this norm— were crystallizing (Chauncey, 99–127). Rather than accepting and occupying either of these positions, Hughes resisted the roles as constituting a false binary; he did not ‘‘want to commit himself, either in his life or in his work, to one single category or label, identification or orientation, bearing or practice’’ (Jarraway, 837). If Hughes refused the binary, his critics have not; as Jarraway puts it, an insistently either/or approach underwrites ‘‘the obsessive search for the ‘truth’ of Hughes’s sexuality’’ (837– 38). From this perspective, the critical debates about the nature and significance of Hughes’s sexuality are ‘‘hopelessly beside the point’’ (838) because the participants fail to see how Hughes’s case exceeds their terms. While I agree with Jarraway’s central thesis about Hughes’s preference for deferred subjectivity, I am reluctant to dismiss other critics’ views. For they do describe selective facets of Hughes’s artistic projects, and their terms name the discourses and social formations that conditioned and constricted Hughes’s efforts to move beyond those particular facets. Jarraway concludes that Hughes sometimes achieved his aims, becoming ‘‘fully liberated from categorical containment,’’ at which moments his poetry achieved its ‘‘greatest social empowerment’’ (838). Against this celebration of deferred subjectivity, the critic belittles the inhabiting of referred subjectivity as the loss of ‘‘any further possibility of social activism or political agency’’ (831). I am not convinced that the multiplicity of lived experience ever allows us to reach either of these states; rather, they form a dialectic within which we exist. Neither am I persuaded that occupying a referred subjectivity—wherein ‘‘all the parts of our selfhood blend into one complete, coherent individual, with no more surplus, no more excess’’ (Jarraway, 830)—means losing political force. Indeed, as Rampersad and Hemphill well know, their debate about which referred sexuality to assign Hughes has great import in cultural politics. The identity politics of defining Hughes as either gay or not gay affects his positioning in narratives of African American and queer history, which in turn affects the contemporary definitions and cultural capital of these minority identities. In what follows I argue that Hughes himself sensed, consciously or not, the importance and potential power of identi-

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fying with particular constructions of referred subjectivity. Hughes did actively defer racial, sexual, and (I add) national selfhood. Yet he also indulged in strategic essentialism, allying himself with dominant, residual, and emergent formations (to use Raymond Williams’s terms) of black, heterosexual, and homosexual, and American identity. Indeed, his continual traveling between and among these subject positions contributed to the deferral of which Jarraway speaks. Hughes’s impulse to roam between different, sometimes incongruous formations of selfhood manifest a sense that identity is a matter of hybridity and indeterminacy. Such multiple, simultaneous affiliations engender his ambivalent, ‘‘wandering’’ aesthetic.2 Hughes’s varying and productively unstable literary voices in his early work gesture, at different but complementary levels, to his ‘‘vagrant’’ sexual desires and to what Paul Gilroy would call his ‘‘black Atlantic’’ orientation. Contrary to another of Jarraway’s implications, Hughes’s wandering was not always a joyful affair. While some formations of racial, sexual, and national identity complemented and even harmonized with one another, many conflicted painfully. Hughes’s poetic efforts to identify with all of them are always tentative and provisional, and usually frustrated. At a formal level, such tensions appear when some of his poems, read in dialogue, offer critiques of one another. As I have already suggested, one of the most salient identity conflicts that Hughes experienced was between black nationalism and homosexuality. While prominent 1920s discourses of African American nationalism differ in many ways from the program of the Nation of Islam, they nevertheless share crucial tenets, such as the sanctity of the heterosexual family. For Hughes, identifying openly with certain constructions of black identity carried the price of suppressing and obscuring aspects of his sexuality. My analyses of selected poems in his first volume, The Weary Blues (1926), focus on this tension, which remains palpable today. The better to inform my consideration of Hughes’s wanderings, I now turn to a more detailed survey of the critical debates about his racial and sexual identity and of the terms used therein.

Looking for Langston, Past and Present In 1989, the black British film collective, Sankofa, produced Looking for Langston, directed by Isaac Julien, which invigor-

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ated the debate about Hughes’s sexuality. While the film does not overtly assert that Hughes was homosexual, it suggests as much elliptically. It gestures toward ‘‘the Hughes most folks don’t want to know, the sensual poet obsessed with desire’’ (hooks, 193). Looking for Langston challenged the reigning critical commonplaces about Hughes’s work, and the Hughes estate sought to obstruct the film’s release and circulation (Hemphill, 181–83). Figures like Hemphill drew on the controversy surrounding it to (re)claim Hughes as a forebear of gay black writing, a representative of and early spokesperson for contemporary writers like himself. The critical consensus against which Looking for Langston and Hemphill struggle is articulated prominently by critics like Rampersad. His view of Hughes as the poet laureate of black America, expressed in numerous articles and in his two-volume biography, still voices the dominant tenor of criticism on the poet. Hughes began to acquire this reputation during the earliest stages of his career in the 1920s. A survey of the material in collections like Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (Gates and Appiah), whose contents range from 1920s reviews to 1990s essays, reveals a remarkable consistency of evaluation. Hughes is almost invariably presented as a spokesman for the black ‘‘masses’’—a proud devotee and painter of their distinctive cultural creativity, a broadcaster of their oppressed condition, an advocate of the justice they deserve. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., observes in an essay on Looking for Langston, Hughes has been portrayed as a ‘‘representative negro’’ who emerged organically from, or was even ‘‘elected popularly’’ by, an abstract African American sociocultural nation (Gates, 237). Who, more specifically, has granted him this status, and what is the nature of the black nation that he supposedly represents? Answers to such questions in 1990s criticism are informed by 1960s literary and cultural politics (cf. Benston, 167–68). Maryemma Graham notes that some ‘‘black nationalist-oriented’’ figures in the Black Arts movement celebrated much of Hughes’s writing. For them (and for Graham herself), his work ‘‘successfully fused the black folk heritage with what was considered a revolutionary consciousness’’ (Graham, 214), combining class politics with a concern for divining ‘‘the black aesthetic.’’ This race-based evaluative mode necessarily also involved depicting the poet in certain gendered and sexualized ways. Gates notes that the Black Arts and Black Power ideologies singled out ho-

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mosexuality as a principal Other: ‘‘national identity became sexualized in the 1960s, in such a way as to engender a curious subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism’’ (234). Ron Simmons shows that this connection was hardly subterranean: black nationalists from the 1960s to the 1990s generally have promoted traditional, heterosexist, masculinist visions of African American men, strong father figures who will lead black families. Farrakhan is only one of many intellectuals, religious and secular, who still denounce black homosexuals as traitorous dupes of white assimilation whose nonfamily orientation disrupts black social cohesion (Simmons, 212–15, 217–23). Rampersad’s discussion of Hughes, influenced by this orientation, is peppered with prescriptions of traditional gender and sexual roles.3 His and Hemphill’s conflicting views of the writer amount to competing claims of representative status—or, to put it another way, competing assignations of referred subjectivity. These recent debates about race and sexuality owe to the continuing influence of black nationalisms that predate Hughes’s early career. Graham hints that Hughes gained his reputation as a ‘‘poet of the people’’ in the 1920s because figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke saw his verse as dovetailing with their own political and aesthetic agendas (217). Much-celebrated works such as ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ and ‘‘I, Too [Sing America]’’ represent African Americans in noble terms harmonious with grand narratives of racial and national identity. Dominant versions of such visions of the black collective were decidedly heterosexist. In 1920s Harlem, many middle-class community leaders condemned homosexuality in terms that still sound familiar. They proclaimed that ‘‘the spread of homosexuality threatened the Negro family, the bedrock of social stability,’’ and they ‘‘virtually blamed the presence of homosexuals . . . in Harlem on bohemian whites from Greenwich Village’’ (Chauncey, 255, 260). Here, ‘‘the Negro family’’ carries all the ideological baggage that Butler finds in Larsen’s Passing. An ‘‘idealization of bourgeois family life’’ accompanied a particular notion of race itself, one that ‘‘is tied to the DuBoisian notion of uplift and denotes an idea of ‘progress’ that is not only masculinist but which, in Larsen’s story, becomes construed as upward class mobility.’’ This vision entails ‘‘moral injunctions’’ against the ‘‘sexuality that might queer the family’’ (Butler, 178). Prescriptions of sexual, gendered, and social-class identity converged in this formation of ra-

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cial identity, encouraging the formulation of its sexual Others in opposed terms of class and race (bohemian, white). Paul Gilroy identifies this racial formation, with its emphasis on the figurehead of ‘‘the male head of household,’’ as a version of black nationalism emerging in the late nineteenth century (Gilroy, 25). With homosexuality seen as contrary to manly commitment to ‘‘the race,’’ a figure like Hughes could easily feel pressured to choose between the two. He would understandably mask queer desire and its expression, choosing instead to invest openly in the more well-received discourses of African American nationalism. These considerations must attend any further discussion of queer readings of Hughes’s work. As Isaac Julien wondered in making Looking for Langston: ‘‘if you happened to be gay during the Harlem Renaissance what kind of spaces would you have existed in?’’ (Julien, 176). Moreover, what would those spaces look like, how can we find them, and in what terms can we recognize them as gay or queer? Much of the current disagreement about Hughes’s sexuality is confused by competing definitions of homosexuality. ‘‘Since Foucault,’’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, ‘‘it has been common to distinguish a modern concept of ‘homosexuality’—delineating a continuous identity—from a supposedly premodern (though persistent) concept of ‘sodomy,’ which delineated discrete acts’’ (157). Rampersad grudgingly concedes that Hughes occasionally engaged in sexual activity with other men, but he objects to the claim that Hughes thereby identified himself as homosexual. For example, Rampersad documents how, as a sailor on a 1923 voyage to Nigeria, Hughes experienced what may have been his first homosexual encounter—‘‘a swift exchange initiated by an aggressive crewman, with Hughes as the ‘male’ partner’’ (Rampersad, Life, 77).4 Despite such reports, Rampersad attacks ‘‘the later speculation, without convincing evidence, that [Hughes] was a homosexual’’ (Life, 46). In this view, since the poet did not overtly identify himself as gay—adopting social behavior that characterized a ‘‘continuous’’ homosexual selfhood in terms of the crystallizing hetero–homo binary, as figures like Bruce Nugent arguably did—he did not occupy that subject position, no matter what his sexual activities. For Hemphill and others, Hughes’s sexual encounters with other men go far toward identifying the poet’s gayness. These critics reasonably contend that Hughes never publicly labeled himself homosexual because of the admission’s social cost. Nevertheless, they say, one can find muted evidence for Hughes’s

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homosexual identification if one reads his work with appropriate lenses (Woods, 128). Anne Borden suggests such a reading of one of many Hughes works called, simply, ‘‘Poem’’ (CP, 52), which was first published in 1925 and also appears in The Weary Blues (95):5 I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began,— I loved my friend.

Rampersad laments that this work is ‘‘sometimes taken insensitively as proof of [Hughes’s] homosexual feeling’’ (Life 62), and, indeed, the poem can easily be read as a testament to homosocial brotherhood. Nevertheless, Borden reasonably emphasizes how the text’s field of signification can encompass homosexuality. Interpreting the poem in the context of works by Hemphill and other contemporary, gay, black male poets, Borden concludes that it names the speaker’s ‘‘love, sexual or otherwise,’’ for another man. Of course, if the love is sexual, it is decidedly not named, which Borden also suggests in describing the poem’s ‘‘soft blue atmosphere of melancholy tenderness, of loss’’ (341). This ‘‘blueness,’’ I would add, resides in its evocation not only of sadness but also of the attributions of profanity and indecency (as in ‘‘blue movie’’) that pervade homophobic attitudes. These attributions perhaps necessitate the friend’s leaving and impose the very silence that prevents homosexual love—not to mention the friend himself—from being named.6 The speaker thereby loses friend and love doubly, in body and in language. If the poem dramatizes how the overt naming of homosexuality is stifled, some aspects of it still evoke that naming. That the poem itself is ‘‘soft’’ recalls the recurring use of that adjective to describe gay men, as in Bruce Nugent’s 1926 multigenre text ‘‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’’ (cf. Gates, 234), with whose publication Hughes was involved. This portrayal of black maleness diverges from those of wildly aggressive masculinity (as in primitivist and some modernist discourse) and stern, selfcontrolled manliness (as middle-class respectability dictated).7 The cultural critic bell hooks proposes a related idea about Julien’s film, whose soundtrack includes readings from Nugent’s text: ‘‘Contrary to popular stereotype, in Looking for Langston

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black men appear vulnerable, shed the protective shield of hardened masculinity they are in real life expected to wear like a mask’’ (198). Equally significant in Hughes’s poem is its emphasis on ‘‘friendship,’’ which can be read homosexually. Rampersad reports how, in 1923, Hughes and Alain Locke engaged in correspondence charged with erotic overtones. Comparing their traveling experiences, Locke wrote on February 10 that ‘‘Germany was ‘psychologically my native land.’ Germans had a gift for friendship, ‘which cult I confess is my only religion, and has been ever since my early infatuation with Greek ideals of life.’ ’’ Locke ‘‘hoped to be friends with Hughes,’’ a desire that Hughes reciprocated in more than one reply. In a letter dated April 6, the poet wrote: ‘‘I do want your help, and friendship’’ (Locke and Hughes qtd. in Rampersad, Life, 68). Locke’s reference to Germany, besides underscoring his admiration for German philosophy and aesthetics, recalls that country’s turn-of-the-century ‘‘gay rights movement, the first in the world’’ (Sedgwick, 134). ‘‘Greek ideals of life’’ obviously reinforce that meaning, as did Hughes’s references to various of ‘‘Whitman’s infamously homosexual poems’’—those from the ‘‘Calamus’’ section of Leaves of Grass—in a slightly later letter (Rampersad, Life, 69). Hughes’s ‘‘Poem’’ is dedicated parenthetically ‘‘To F.S.,’’ whose identity ‘‘has not been plausibly identified’’ (CP, 626). I submit that ‘‘F.S.’’ need not refer to a person at all, but to the specific type of ‘‘Friend Ship’’ elicited in Hughes’s and Locke’s letters.8 It is the deeply embedded nature of these meanings that prompts so much disagreement about reading queerness in Hughes’s verse. The multivalence, ambiguity, and obliqueness of expression in much of his poetry makes interpretation especially challenging. That Hughes’s interpersonal self-presentation was often characterized by a similar opacity only intensifies the challenge. In the same 1923 letter that refers to Whitman’s poetry, Hughes responds to Locke’s proposal about forming ‘‘a coterie of young writers’’ consisting of the three ‘‘friends’’ Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer (Rampersad, Life, 69). Hughes supported the idea, ‘‘the founding of ‘some little Greenwich Village of our own. But would our artists have the pose of so many of the Villagers? I hate pose or pretension of any sort. . . . I prefer simple, stupid people to half-wise pretenders. (But perhaps it’s because I’m stupid myself . . .)’ ’’ (qtd. in Rampersad, Life, 69). Hughes’s reference to Greenwich Village (cf. Chauncey, 227–44) both maintains and complicates the queer

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meanings immanent in his correspondence with Locke. The poet’s expression of ambivalence about the Village’s ‘‘pose’’ and its ‘‘half-wise pretenders’’ both gestures toward and clouds the very process of discerning Hughes’s sexual orientation(s) through his writing. Suddenly, Hughes invites Locke not to see him as a half-wise confidante, but as a ‘‘simple, stupid’’ figure on whom knowing references to German and Greek friendship are lost. Have we been misreading him all along, imagining Hughes’s signals when he offered none? Whether or not the question can be answered definitively is less important than the fact that the question itself arises as a consequence of Hughes’s paradoxical rhetoric. Still, I will venture a qualified answer to the question. Rampersad argues that ‘‘Hughes’s repeated references to himself, in letters to Locke and Cullen, as ‘stupid’ ’’ constituted a strategic smokescreen behind which he hid, pretending not to understand their overtures (Life, 69). Thus, Hughes’s stance of simplicity— for which much of his writing, including ‘‘Poem [To F.S.],’’ is both celebrated and slighted (see Ford, 437–38)—embodied a pose of its own. Supposedly to ward off unwanted advances, Hughes characteristically ‘‘summoned up a show of childlike innocence so complete that even Cullen was convinced by it’’ (Life, 69). While Rampersad sees Hughes’s motivation for adopting this mask as disdain for others’ homosexuality, I see it as evidence of Hughes’s radical ambivalence about his own homosexual tendencies. A great many of those to whom Hughes displayed this excessive innocence were themselves homosexual or bisexual, suggesting that Hughes felt as strongly inhibited about identifying himself as gay to these friends as to heterosexual ones. Acting simple, or stupid, apparently served as an effective alibi, even as Hughes actively placed himself in the center of queer social networks. Thus, many of Hughes’s openly gay colleagues have magnified the uncertainty about his sexuality: both Bruce Nugent (qtd. in Smith, 214) and Carl Van Vechten (qtd. in Rampersad, Life, 133) have dubbed Hughes ‘‘asexual.’’9 In a 1929 letter to the poet, Wallace Thurman expressed related frustration about Hughes’s unreadability: ‘‘You are in the final analysis the most consarned and diabolical creature, to say nothing of being either the most egregiously simple or excessively complex person I know’’ (qtd. in Rampersad, Life, 133).10 Having gone looking for Langston, we learn that determining what to look for and how to look for it constitutes tricky work. In the final analysis, any claims about Hughes’s identity can be,

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at best, only partial and provisional. In this respect, attributions of Hughes’s representative status, whether with respect to a middle-class, heterosexist African American nation or to a black (male) queer nation, remain unstable. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien argue persuasively that the notion of representative status intertwines with faith in verisimilitude: ‘‘Representative democracy, like the classic realist text, is premissed on an implicitly mimetic theory of representation as correspondence with the ‘real’ ’’ (Julien and Mercer, 4). If Hughes’s social self-representation and literary expression remain somewhat indeterminate, then— insofar as we can know him from these bases—we cannot locate anything resembling a referred subject position for him. This perspective points to the limitations of even Hemphill’s treatment of Hughes, which consists of incorporating the poet into a usable past and portraying his work as a place ‘‘for black gays and lesbians to seek true reflection and affirmation’’ (Hemphill, 182). As bell hooks writes, ‘‘all attempts to document, in some exclusive way, Hughes’s sexual practice [enact] a potential erasure’’ (196). Hemphill’s effort to establish a coherent history for African American gay men and lesbians has crucial significance in today’s political climate, but the radically diverse significations of Hughes’s own work partially resist being drawn into it.11 Julien’s treatment of Hughes in Looking for Langston presents an alternative method of ‘‘finding’’ a poet whose texts destabilize the very process of hermeneutic discovery (cf. hooks, 194– 201). The film does not lay claim to mimesis: because the Harlem Renaissance lies irretrievably in the discontinuous past, Julien proposes, ‘‘[o]ne can only view that world or review it from an imaginary position. Once one accepts that there are a number of historical moments that one can grapple with and debate over, the rest is imaginary’’ (Julien, 178). For this reason, Julien calls the film a ‘‘meditation,’’ not a documentary (177). In Looking for Langston, Hughes, rather than occupying a fixed subject position, functions as a locus of diverse possibilities of identification. Julien elaborates on this alternative concept and portrayal of the poet’s selfhood as he discusses the film’s mode of cross-historical, audiovisual pastiche: ‘‘black gay identities,’’ he says, ‘‘are never whole in the sense that there is always a desire to make them whole, but in real life, experiences are always fragmentary and contradictory.’’ Hence the film creates a ‘‘hybrid,’’ provisional approximation of identity by combining images and sound from ‘‘different moments in history’’ (Julien, 178), including not only footage of Hughes himself (and of Julien

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as Hughes), but images of James Baldwin and Bessie Smith, historical and contemporary footage of New York, and staged reconstructions of 1920s Harlem.12 This notion that black gay identity nearly equals (but does not equal) the sum of disparate cultural parts resonates with Hughes’s own multivocal, multitonal poetry and subjectivity—or, I should say, resonates with my particular interpretive presentation of Hughes and his work. Before exploring how other specific poems in The Weary Blues manifest these dynamics, I will elaborate on the contours of my presentation. The following section details further how Hughes simultaneously felt attracted to and disillusioned by turn-of-thecentury formations of black nationalism and homosexuality, preferring instead the deferral of identity afforded by ‘‘diasporic’’ experience and ‘‘vagrant’’ desires.

Diaspora of Spirit, ‘‘Vagrancy’’ of Desire: Wandering and Wondering The transatlantic, transhistorical nature of Looking for Langston, a 1989 Afro-British film concerning 1920s Harlem, is wholly consistent with Paul Gilroy’s notion of diasporic ‘‘black Atlantic’’ culture. Gilroy’s work underscores both the importance and shortcomings of nationalism in race-based formations of identity. Opposed to prescribing any referred sense of blackness, Gilroy argues that the ‘‘consistency’’ of black experience resides in the locally varying sociopolitical manifestations of the history of slavery, which condition the virtually infinite, internationally diverse expressions of black creativity. While these expressions need not share any specific cultural traits, they generally share a process of formation and transformation. All are characterized by ‘‘creolisation, me´tissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’’ (Gilroy, 2). Thus, Gilroy’s ‘‘central organising symbol’’ consists of ‘‘ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean’’ (4). Hughes traveled on such ships as a sailor in the early 1920s and as a renowned poet later in life, and he highlighted the significance of these experiences in naming his first autobiography The Big Sea (1940). Isaac Julien’s description of his own experience—traveling, by air, ‘‘back and forth between America and England’’ to complete Looking for Langston—leads him to Gilroyesque statements: ‘‘I was also trying to engage Diaspora-type relationships in the work. I wanted to make . . . the film exist in a space somewhere

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between [England and the U.S.]—in mid-Atlantic, as it were’’ (Julien, 177). Gilroy’s, Julien’s, and Hughes’s own emphasis on fluid, relatively indeterminate geographic locations points to a critique of nationalism on which Gilroy elaborates. While he appreciates how racial nationalism counters the racist assertions that African Americans have no coherent group history or identity, Gilroy also remains wary of how nationalism oversimplifies the diversity of black experience. ‘‘Euro-American modernity,’’ with its late nineteenth-century sociocultural model of the nation, conditions the continuing aspiration to acquire a supposedly authentic, natural, and stable ‘‘rooted’’ identity . . . that is both socialised and unified by its connection with other kindred souls encountered usually, though not always, within the fortified frontiers of those discrete ethnic cultures which also happen to coincide with the contours of a sovereign nation state that guarantees their continuity. (Gilroy, 30–31)

In other words, Gilroy critiques the belief in a single, relatively homogeneous, African American culture, a racial nation whose members invariably share (or should share) a common set of characteristics. Such belief effaces the diverse experiences of all black Americans and, by extension, all peoples of African origin. To Gilroy, blackness is less a matter of possessing roots— imagery that derives from Herderian Romantic nationalism, with its emphasis on an idealized, regionally defined, unifying group ‘‘spirit’’—than of exploring numerous, diverse routes of identification. As Gilroy puts it, ‘‘diaspora multiplicity is a chaotic, living, disorganic formation. If it can be called a tradition at all, it is a tradition of ceaseless motion—a changing same that strives continually towards a state of self-realisation that continually retreats beyond its grasp’’ (Gilroy, 122). This characterization draws on Raymond Williams’s notion of the structure of feeling. Employing terms from chemistry, Williams writes that ‘‘structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’’ (Williams, 133–34). Examples of the latter type of formations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were sociopolitical modernity and Romantic cultural nationalism. In contrast to such formations, a structure of feeling

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explores provisional, alternative modes of relations that ‘‘never [constitute] mere flux,’’ but comprise a ‘‘structured formation . . . at the very edge of semantic availability’’ (Williams, 134). To Gilroy, then, black Atlantic cultural expressions move from one structure of feeling to another, neither assuming the ‘‘mere flux’’ of total antiessentialism nor condensing into the relatively fixed state of a recognizable formation. This concept resonates markedly with Julien’s comments, cited earlier, about ‘‘black gay identities’’ consisting of ‘‘fragmentary and contradictory’’ experiences but always pursuing a wholeness just beyond their reach (Julien, 178). It also recalls Benston’s formulation of Ellisonian black modernism and Jarraway’s use of it in describing deferred subjectivity. In my analysis, Hughes’s 1920s poetry explores structures of feeling that move between and among versions of black nationalism and constructions of various sexualities, as expressed through the emergent forms of and discourses associated with literary modernism. The type of subjectivity and cultural creation articulated by Gilroy possesses significant political potential. He argues that the productively unstable hybridity of black Atlantic expressions, which always include Western and non-Western elements, manifest a critical attitude toward modern sociopolitical nationalism and its prescribed construction of discrete individualism. That is to say, black Atlantic expressions embody and engender an empowering condition of Du Boisian double consciousness, an immanent awareness of the benefits and limitations of Western modernity and of alternatives to it. Two basic strategies emerge from this double consciousness. The first, which follows what Gilroy calls the ‘‘politics of fulfillment,’’ demands ‘‘that bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric’’—or that persisting, enforced, social inequality be expunged to ensure that minority citizens enjoy the full benefits of Western modernity (Gilroy 37). Hughes, like Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and other contemporaries, sometimes employed the discourses of African American and U.S. nationalism in the service of the politics of fulfillment. The second strategy, following the ‘‘politics of transfiguration,’’ ‘‘emphasises the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association with the racial community of interpretation and between that group and its erstwhile oppressors’’ (37). In expressing reservations about nationalism, Hughes (again like Du Bois and Johnson) gestures toward transfiguring African American identity as well as the relations between black and

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nonblack Americans. Hughes’s transformative impulses involve resisting homophobia and heterosexism in all communities, especially middle-class African American ones. Looking for Langston ‘‘struggl[es] with any kind of sexual tensions or sexual ambivalences that Hughes may have had toward the black family or black straight society’’ (Julien 176). Hughes’s own poetic work offers critiques not only of Western modernity and U.S. nationalism with respect to race, but also of those two and of African American nationalism with respect to sexuality and gender. His transfigurative strategies appear most directly in his poetic imaginings of alternative, more inclusive sociocultural spaces. While Looking for Langston offers one means of demonstrating how the implications of Hughes’s deferred sexuality resonate with those of his black Atlantic orientation, Jonathan Dollimore’s work provides a more detailed complement. Dollimore constructs a dialectic of turn-of-the-century homosexual subjectivity and expression at whose poles he places Oscar Wilde and Andre´ Gide. Both of these figures, he argues, experienced their desire and sexuality in terms of being ‘‘demoralized’’— ‘‘ ‘demoralize’ in the sense of liberate from moral constraint rather than dispirit; or rather to dispirit precisely in the sense of to liberate from a morality anchored in the very notion of spirit’’ (4). Dollimore contends that Wilde placed this sense of liberation at the core of his antiessentialist artistic project: [for Wilde,] deviant desire, rather than creating a new integrity of self, actually decentres or disperses the self, and the liberation is experienced as being, in part, just that. . . . In Wilde’s writings a noncentred or vagrant desire is both the impetus for a subversive inversion [of the ordering binaries of society], and what is released by it. (Dollimore, 14)

If Wilde promoted maintaining the productive instability of a ‘‘demoralized’’ condition, Gide’s experience of that condition inspired anxiety that prompted him to pursue a new, coherent, homosexual self. After his encounters with Wilde’s work (and Wilde himself), Gide wrote in his journal that he ‘‘had more varied emotions, but had forgotten how to bring order to them.’’ In letters, he described this liberated vagrancy of desire and selfdislocation as an internal ‘‘emptiness’’: ‘‘Please forgive my silence: since Wilde, I hardly exist anymore’’ (qtd. in Dollimore, 4). For Gide, embracing his own sexual ‘‘deviance’’ involved a sense of modern alienation that could be resolved through con-

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structing a new, referred subjectivity. His strategy was to incorporate his liberated homosexual desire into a reconstituted, essentialist, public identity, an incorporation that took form as a proud ‘‘discovery’’ of an ‘‘authentic self’’ that had been repressed and obscured by sociocultural prescriptions (Dollimore, 13). Belief in this ‘‘new and deeper self . . . supports an oppositional stand not just on the question of deviant sexual desire, but on a whole range of other issues as well, cultural and political’’ (17). Here is the type of modern homosexual identity that Sedgwick calls ‘‘continuous,’’ the type that Rampersad disallows for and that Hemphill attributes to Hughes. Yet we have already seen how Hughes’s literary and interpersonal self-presentation confounds either absolute disallowal or attribution. Based on his writings, Hughes seems rather to vacillate between the various experiences of ‘‘vagrant’’ desire that Dollimore surveys. In some instances, Hughes indulges in the mode of inverting binaries that characterizes Wilde’s work. In others, he expresses anxiety about the ‘‘emptiness’’ that Gide articulated—what Dollimore further specifies as ‘‘the precondition for admitting transgressive desire’’ (17). Even if, as Rampersad insists, Hughes never did openly identify himself as homosexual in the continuous sense, his expressions of anxiety nevertheless intimate frustrated movement toward such identification. The frustration manifested, or even derived from, Hughes’s competing desire to possess the seemingly incompatible identities of blackness rooted in Africa and the U.S. Such frustration ran both ways. In The Weary Blues, Hughes’s poetic identification with black men is decidedly muted; the poet’s alienation from prescriptions for racialized masculinity and manliness engendered instead his repeated identification with images of black women and girls. Thus, Hughes’s first book of poetry dramatizes both his sense of a dispersal of selfhood and his ambivalent struggle to identify with relatively well-established racial and national discourses and subject positions. Hughes’s vagrant desires and diasporic impulses motivate his poetic wandering between and among these experiential sites. Given that one of the poet’s earliest homosexual encounters occurred when he was a sailor, at sea, the ‘‘Friend Ship’’ in ‘‘Poem [To F.S.]’’ may very well underscore the interdependence of these two motivations. My looking for Langston, then, has led me to find in his work a combination of traveling and stationing, a continual process of searching for new, provisional identifications. As bell hooks

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hints (193), Hughes himself articulated a decidedly optimistic version of this process in his 1954 tribute to an apt precursor, ‘‘Old Walt’’ (CP, 446): Old Walt Whitman Went finding and seeking, Finding less than sought Seeking more than found, Every detail minding Of the seeking and the finding. Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.

A more ambivalent (and therefore perhaps more appropriate) formulation of a similar idea rests in the title of Hughes’s second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956). Wondering encompasses pleasant astonishment with newness or difference, but also doubt and uncertainty. The tension between these valences lies deep within the immanent poetic conversations of The Weary Blues.

Seeking (and Finding?) ‘‘Our Land’’ By May 1925, when Knopf accepted the manuscript for The Weary Blues, the twenty-three-year-old Hughes had already experienced what Carl Van Vechten, in the volume’s introduction, calls a ‘‘rambling . . . existence,’’ a ‘‘disorderly and delightfully fantastic career’’ (Van Vechten, 9). Hughes had lived in Lawrence, Kansas; Chicago; Cleveland, where he attended high school mainly with children of eastern European immigrants; New York; and Washington, D.C. He had also twice visited his estranged father in Toluca, Mexico; had attended Columbia University for a year; and, as a sailor, had traveled to and sometimes temporarily resided in France (where he worked in a Parisian jazz club), Spain, Italy, Holland, Senegal, Nigeria, the Congo, and the countries now known as Ghana and Angola. While some of the poems in The Weary Blues (especially those in the section called ‘‘Water-Front Streets’’) underscore Hughes’s geographic wandering, my interpretation of a few selected poems in the

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book focuses principally on discerning the related but less overt manifestations of his wandering desires.13 Hughes’s first volume is divided into seven sections. Besides ‘‘Water-Front Streets,’’ these include ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ ‘‘Dream Variations,’’ ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ ‘‘Black Pierrot,’’ ‘‘Shadows in the Sun,’’ and ‘‘Our Land.’’ Although the concerns emphasized by my analytical framework cut across the poems in all of these sections, I am drawn to the prominence of nationalism in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ and ‘‘Our Land,’’ the opening and closing sections, respectively. I have already suggested that a number of the better-known poems in The Weary Blues emphasize Hughes’s investment in African American and U.S. nationalism. These texts include ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’’ (CP, 23; WB, 51); ‘‘I, Too [Sing America]’’ (CP, 46), which, under the title ‘‘Epilogue,’’ concludes the ‘‘Our Land’’ section and the volume itself (WB, 109); and ‘‘Negro’’ (CP, 24), which, immediately preceding ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ opens the volume as ‘‘Proem’’ (WB, 19). Such poems, which invoke both the politics of fulfillment and the politics of transfiguration with respect to U.S. race relations, are perhaps more celebrated because of the ideologies that have dominated Hughes criticism since the 1920s. Other, lesser-known works in the volume’s opening and closing sections significantly complicate Hughes’s investment in these discourses, dramatizing how the poet obliquely represented his transient and multiple identifications. One poem that problematizes Hughes’s alliance with African American nationalism is ‘‘Summer Night’’ (CP, 59; WB, 103), in ‘‘Our Land.’’ This work opens with references to the rich activity of Harlem nightlife that, by 1925, Hughes was already wellknown for celebrating. Yet here, rather than exuding vitality and good humor, the boisterous noise of African American culture subsides: The sounds Of the Harlem night Drop one by one into stillness. The last player-piano is closed. The last victrola ceases with the ‘‘Jazz Boy Blues.’’ The last crying baby sleeps And the night becomes Still as a whispering heartbeat.

These lines intimate the solitary speaker’s sense of difference and distance from the bustling families of the black community.

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His loneliness increases as the sounds reduce to a murmur. That these feelings relate to ‘‘vagrant’’ desire becomes clear in the remainder of the first stanza, where the speaker’s sense of self emerges as a lacking: I toss Without rest in the darkness, Weary as the tired night, My soul Empty as the silence, Empty with a vague, Aching emptiness, Desiring, Needing someone, Something.

Here, the poem’s speaker experiences the type of self-fragmentation, the feeling of emptiness, that initially accompanied Gide’s ‘‘demoralization.’’ Desires unleashed in the privacy of the night prompt an impulse to roam, an impulse whose repression produces the speaker’s constricted, unrestful tossing and turning. If the speaker’s wandering desire prompts the dispersal of—and his alienation from—black identity, then, contrariwise, a persisting attraction to African American cultural expressiveness obstructs the development of his demoralized self. The grammatical structure of these lines, all ten of which comprise a single run-on sentence, further evinces the rambling yet constrained state of the speaker’s consciousness. Again like Gide, the speaker is silent. Although this ‘‘jazz boy’’ has the blues, he cannot articulate his frustrated desires, not even in the primal fashion of the ‘‘last crying baby.’’ The tense dilemma of the poem’s ‘‘I’’ suggests that asserting and expressing subjectivity, at least for one experiencing vagrant desire, is no easy matter. The search for identity is deferred, projected onto the vague ‘‘someone, / Something.’’ The race-based symbology of this internal conflict expands in the second, final stanza: I toss without rest In the darkness Until the new dawn, Wan and pale, Descends like a white mist Into the court-yard.

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If Until in line 22 marks the moment when the speaker’s consciousness shifts, the dawn’s whiteness grants him restful contentment. Its descending mist envelops and soothes him. In so doing, the dawn overtakes the speaker as the main grammatical subject. It obscures him, suggesting that concealment is part of what eases his anxiety. My evocation of closeting here is intentional, for I read the reassuring image of whiteness as homosexually charged. After all, as I noted earlier, many middle-class Harlemites overtly attributed black homosexuality to the influence of ‘‘bohemian whites from Greenwich Village’’ (Chauncey, 260). In addition, in many of Hughes’s poems, the day is metonymic of the white world. The speaker’s embrace of the dawn’s mist, then, obliquely expresses his movement toward identifying with whiteness-as-homosexuality, the unnameable ‘‘Something’’ for which he longs. From this perspective, the poem represents the struggle of consciousness required for a 1920s queer black man to negotiate both the African American world of Harlem and the bohemian white world—the two principal loci of the Harlem Renaissance. Like Hughes’s 1923 correspondence with Locke, ‘‘Summer Night’’ as a whole can be read as manifesting what Sedgwick calls an ‘‘open secret’’ or ‘‘glass closet.’’ Like a button that Sedgwick owns, the poem says—in a pained voice—‘‘I KNOW YOU KNOW.’’ This reading assumes that the poem’s representational codes, or gay ‘‘minority rhetoric’’ (Sedgwick 164), can be interpreted as I have argued. However, there is another, related reading that complicates the first. The very fact that the speaker’s concluding identification with homosexuality is so difficult to discern—that his movement toward it is also misty, dispersed, and opaque—suggests that the image of the dawn, and the abstractness of the entire poem, also comprise an alibi. Since, at the poem’s conclusion, the speaking ‘‘I’’ has disappeared, he cannot say ‘‘I KNOW YOU KNOW.’’ We are left with as many questions as answers. Sedgwick provides a framework for better understanding both the questions and possible answers. One of her arguments focuses on the centrality of ‘‘sentimentality’’ in twentieth-century anxieties about male homosexuality. In ‘‘the period from the 1880s through the first World War,’’ she contends, the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who . . . physically dramatizes, embodies for an audience that both desires and cathartically

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identifies with him, a struggle of masculine identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine. (146)

The prominence of this ‘‘femininely’’ emotional man, desire for whom provoked sexual anxiety among male audiences, coincided with the period in which the modern, supposedly distinct concepts of homosexual and heterosexual were in the process of condensing. Viewing the speaker of ‘‘Summer Night’’ as this kind of sentimental figure supports the interpretation I have offered thus far. While we cannot assert that the poem’s ‘‘I’’ is exclusively male, it is precisely because this referent is among the most charged possibilities that it irrepressibly emerges. At the same time, the speaker’s ambiguous gendering also marks him as a sentimental figure: ‘‘The gender-equivocal first person, or the impossible first person—such as the first person of someone dead or in process of dying—are common and, at least to me, peculiarly potent sentimental markers’’ (Sedgwick, 143). One thinks here not only of ‘‘Summer Night’’ but also of ‘‘Suicide’s Note’’ (one of numerous Hughes poems by or about a suicide), which also invokes the homosexually charged trope of narcissism (CP, 55; WB, 87). What, then, is the significance of the disappearing ‘‘I’’ in ‘‘Summer Night’’? Beginning at the turn of the century, when ‘‘the discourse related to male homosexuality itself became for the first time extremely public and highly ramified through medical, psychiatric, penal, literary, and other social institutions,’’ the emerging rhetoric of homosexuals about homosexuality ‘‘had [the] oddly oblique shape’’ of an ‘‘occluded intersection between [the] minority rhetoric of the ‘open secret’ or glass closet and a subsumptive public rhetoric of the ‘empty secret’ ’’ (Sedgwick, 164). The empty secret encompasses ‘‘the cluster of aperc¸us and intuitions that seems so distinctively to signify ‘modernism’ (at least, male high modernism),’’ in which abstract artistic structure splits from and takes precedence over thematic content— though not just any content. ‘‘[T]his rhetoric of male modernism serves a purpose of universalizing, naturalizing, and thus substantively voiding—depriving of content—elements of a specifically and historically male homosexual rhetoric’’ (Sedgwick, 165). We can read ‘‘Summer Night’’ at the intersection of the ‘‘open’’ and ‘‘empty’’ secrets: the poem evokes a code that can certainly be interpreted by a knowing minority, yet it occludes that very code with its disappearing ‘‘I,’’ inspiring doubt about the code’s very presence. From the ‘‘empty secret’’ perspective,

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there is no secret to get, because what the poem really ‘‘says’’ is of no matter (its potentially homosexual code is repressed); it could be about ennui redeemed by hope, for example. From this perspective, the more ambiguous the expression, the better, such that the obliquity of the short, second stanza is particularly valuable. If, then, the poem vacillates between hinting at a specific, charged meaning and ‘‘saying nothing,’’ it recalls Hughes’s manner of rhetorical and interpersonal self-presentation— alternately wise and ‘‘simple.’’ Perhaps because ‘‘Summer Night’’ dramatizes all of these tensions, Hughes never published the work in another volume after it appeared in The Weary Blues— something he did quite often with many other poems, including ‘‘Suicide’s Note.’’ While this relatively modest printing history probably explains critics’ almost total inattention to ‘‘Summer Night,’’ the poem’s expression of alienation from the African American community may also have contributed to the disinterest of black nationalist-oriented critics in particular. The rhetoric of the empty secret is, of course, predominantly homophobic. Hughes’s invocation of it suggests his somewhat active self-closeting and even self-denial. Yet if one is to rely on the symbology of ‘‘Summer Night,’’ particularly the association of whiteness with homosexuality, a wide array of Hughes’s works accrue valences of the open secret. For example, the poet is well-known for ‘‘his repeated use of the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto’ . . . caught disastrously between the black and the white worlds’’ (Rampersad, Life, 3), a theme that appears in ‘‘Cross’’ (CP, 58; WB, 52). This trope offers a transfigurative vision of U.S. race relations and racial identity, and simultaneously it can gesture toward queer sexuality. Some 1920s and 1930s moralists ‘‘relied on [notions of] racial difference— specifically the ideology of ‘miscegenation’—to conceptualize sexual attraction between people of the same gender’’ (Mumford, 399).14 Hughes might have relied on this multivalence, turning it to his own purposes. Other texts in The Weary Blues that employ similar contrasts of color imagery include ‘‘Dream Variation’’ (CP, 40; WB, 43) and—when read intertextually—two poems about the French pantomime figure, ‘‘Pierrot’’ (CP, 95; WB, 67) and ‘‘A Black Pierrot’’ (CP, 31; WB, 61). Although critics sometimes read this verse in racial terms, seldom do they consider how intersections between race and sexuality can inform poems such as ‘‘Dream Variation,’’ in which the speaker expresses a wish to identify with both whiteness and blackness, day and night.

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From a strict ‘‘race pride’’ perspective, the expression of multiple color-based identifications seems nonsensical, which hints at the politically transfigurative potential of Hughes’s verse with respect to African American nationalism. Hughes would seem to be imagining alternative spaces in which the facets of his selfhood that are divided by social prescription can be reconciled. This strategy appears, immanently, in many poems that overtly identify with blackness. For example, in ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ (CP, 28; WB, 105), which, like ‘‘Summer Night,’’ is located in the ‘‘Our Land’’ section, Hughes promotes a specifically feminized version of ‘‘primitive’’ African identity. In a sensual scene, ‘‘[t]he slow beating of the tom-toms . . . / Stirs your blood’’: Dance! A night-veiled girl Whirls softly into a Circle of light. Whirls softly . . . slowly, Like a wisp of smoke around the fire— And the tom-toms beat, And the tom-toms beat, And the low beating of the tom-toms Stirs your blood.

The ‘‘night-veiled girl’’ is the poem’s only human agent, suggesting that, at least in the ‘‘Our Land’’ section, Hughes’s investment in blackness is embodied principally by a woman or female adolescent. This proposition coheres with Jarraway’s claims about the general importance of black women in Hughes’s poetry: their embodiment of racially specific yet still indeterminate identity, particularly through their association with ‘‘the insistent rhythms and repetitions’’ of black music. Partly due to male high modernist discourse about women symbolizing the ‘‘mysterious, unknown, and uncontrollable’’ (Jarraway, 827), such women summarize for Hughes deferred subjectivity itself. They are ‘‘generalized figure[s] that can only be alluded to or gestured toward, never directly identified’’; their frequent portrayal as ‘‘whirling’’ in dance ‘‘promises a permanently variable and varying state’’ (829–30). This racial gendering also has sexual significance. It evokes a dominant nineteenth-century discourse about same-sex relations that has persisted since—that of sexual ‘‘inversion,’’ which defines sexual roles solely with respect to gender (cf. Sedgwick, 157–58). According to this perspective, a male invert assumes

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the ‘‘female’’ role in sexual encounters and in terms of behavioral self-presentation. George Chauncey demonstrates the salience of inversion discourse to 1920s Harlem with respect to ‘‘fairy’’ and ‘‘sissy’’ figures and to drag balls like those at Hamilton Lodge (Chauncey, 248–63), at least one of which Hughes attended (Big Sea, 273–74). Thus, the dancing girl, with whom the poem’s speaker closely associates, serves as a mediator between black and protohomosexual identity: her connotations encompass both male inversion and a vague African essence. This confluence is also expressed in images associated with the dancer that recall those describing the speaker in ‘‘Summer Night’’ and the friend in ‘‘Poem [To F.S.]’’: the girl’s whirling movement between darkness and light, her insubstantial wispiness, the ‘‘softness’’ of her motion. While all of this evidence supports a queer reading of the poem, it is important to note that the speaker of ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ does not identify wholly with the dancing woman or, by extension, with ‘‘primitive’’ Africans. The woman embodies displaced selfpresentation, due both to her gender and to the modernist primitivism through which she is figured, or represented. The poem’s speaker, an unknown witness to the dance, remains at a slight distance from it; the fact that the drum beating ‘‘stirs your blood’’ might or might not involve self-referentiality, obscuring the degree or kind of the speaker’s investment. Nevertheless, the speaker’s voyeurism implies at least a strong desire to identify with all that the woman suggests.15 The dancing girl’s ‘‘primitive’’ status augments her sexual connotations in a way that often goes unrecognized in studies of Hughes’s use of primitivism, which tend to focus on its racial salience. David Chinitz persuasively argues that, in early works like The Weary Blues, Hughes engaged in primitivism— essentially recapitulating popularized versions of high modernist ideas—in order to validate African and African American culture (61–64). The poet’s goal was to invert ‘‘traditional hierarchies’’ of race and aesthetics (64). Chinitz, Michael North, and others show the pitfalls of such a stance, but nevertheless I propose that it was valuable to Hughes in at least one other way. The dancing girl’s primitivity evokes the kind of sexual demoralization of which Dollimore speaks. Kevin J. Mumford demonstrates that, in 1920s Harlem speakeasies catering to same-gender clientele, a modern formation of homosexuality was emerging as an alternative to inversion. This formation divorced gender categories from sexual object-choice,

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explaining the latter through Freudian concepts such as ‘‘polymorphous perversity’’ (Mumford, 406). The latter concept closely resembles, and perhaps derived from or codeveloped with, the idea of ‘‘vagrant’’ desire central to Wilde’s and Gide’s experiences and discourse. Mumford finds it crucial that some of the earliest documentation of this emerging identity in the U.S. (in reports by moralists) locates it in Harlem, for the convergence ‘‘reveals the extent to which Freudianism in America relied on a particular racialized conception of the id. . . . [P]sychological concepts like internal drives and sex instinct were associated with the primitive’’ (406). Thus, albeit problematically, the ‘‘primal’’ sensuality of the drums and the dancing girl provided Hughes with race-based imagery that also allowed him to promote sexual liberation—that is, to construct an imagined space that lacks a repressive, ‘‘civilized’’ superego. This association between racialized primitivism and freeing ‘‘vagrant’’ desire helps to account for the sizable number of poems in The Weary Blues that privilege the primitive over and against the civilized, such as ‘‘Lament for Dark Peoples’’ (CP, 39; WB, 100), ‘‘Poem [For the portrait of an African boy]’’ (CP, 32; WB, 102), and ‘‘Disillusion’’ (CP, 60; WB, 104)—all of which are located in the ‘‘Our Land’’ section—as well as a number of works in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ section. The ‘‘Poem [For the portrait of an African boy],’’ for example, values ‘‘All the tom-toms of the jungles [that] beat in my blood’’ over ‘‘cold’’ civilization. While this primitivist poetry could evoke the liberation of desire for readers attuned to its queer minority rhetoric, many of Hughes’s contemporaries failed to notice (or comment upon) such valences. It was in this way that primitivism—expunged of connotations of ‘‘animal’’ aggression and violence—could still contribute to, and serve as a cover for, ‘‘straight’’ black nationalism. The primitivism of Hughes’s early poems promotes an ahistorical, pro-African essentialism—as in the French view of noble savagery evoked by the title of ‘‘Danse Africaine.’’ This discourse could be interpreted as harmonizing with what George M. Fredrickson calls romantic racialism (Fredrickson, 101–2, 327–28), which grounded a supposedly crude, black racial ‘‘spirit’’ in the historicopolitical geography of the Southern U.S. The latter discourse informed the African-American nationalisms of Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Locke, among others. From this perspective, ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ could be read as celebrating the timeless beauty of black women and black music, both in Africa and the U.S.

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Approbation for Hughes’s primitivism expressed in these terms appears in numerous reviews of The Weary Blues, and some of these reviews conflate the poems’ ‘‘liberated’’ subject matter with their use of poetic language. For example, Jessie Fauset wrote that Hughes’s ‘‘poems are warm, exotic and shot through with color. Never is he preoccupied with form,’’ which gives his work ‘‘the perfection of spontaneity’’ (Fauset, 6). Dubose Heyward effectively underscores Fauset’s indirect reference to modernist free verse by comparing Hughes to the imagist Amy Lowell (Heyward, 43), one of Pound’s early collaborators.16 Another work in the ‘‘Our Land’’ section that champions primitivism—in both its productively sexual and its black nationalist senses—is the eponymous ‘‘Our Land’’ (CP, 32–33; WB, 99). If ‘‘Dream Variation’’ imagines an alternative space in which the tensions between manly heterosexual blackness and ‘‘white’’ homosexuality are resolved, and if ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ dramatizes a related search for race-based imagery that accommodates vagrant sexuality, then the poem ‘‘Our Land’’ calls for the creation of an implicitly black queer nation. The work’s piquancy resides in the ambiguity of what group is designated by the plural, first-person possessive. Given my analysis of ‘‘Summer Night,’’ I propose (at least for the moment) that it be read in terms of homosexual minority rhetoric: We should have a land of sun, Of gorgeous sun, And a land of fragrant water Where the twilight Is a soft bandanna handkerchief Of rose and gold, And not this land where life is cold.

This first stanza evokes, combines, and extends imagery from ‘‘Poem [To F.S.],’’ ‘‘Summer Night,’’ ‘‘Danse Africaine,’’ and ‘‘Poem [For the portrait of an African boy].’’ Far superior to cold civilization is the idealized equatorial setting that offers not only luxurious ‘‘white’’ days but also ‘‘soft’’ twilights, whose magisterial liminality between day and black night constitutes the richest beauty of all.17 This implied synthesis of race and sexuality accrues regionally specific connotations of romanticracialist authenticity, rooted in Africa and/or the Southern U.S., through the image of the bandanna. Thus far, ‘‘Our Land’’ wishfully imagines a harmonious union of homosexuality with Afri-

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can American nationalism. The first-person, plural subject comprises a coherent community. The only image in the first two stanzas that disrupts this vision lies in the seventh line, where the speaker recalls his or her material location in ‘‘this land where life is cold.’’ In the general terms of the primitive–civilized binary that governs much of Hughes’s primitivist verse, this image designates white modern civilization. At first glance, this interpretation leaves intact the racial and sexual specificity of ‘‘our land.’’ At second glance, it troubles that vision, since many black middle-class leaders openly promoted the virtues of such ‘‘civilization’’ in their own more restrictive formations of black nationalism. The implication here of class-based ideological divisions among African Americans expands in the poem’s final two stanzas, where the previously imagined community is dispelled: Ah, we should have a land of joy, Of love and joy and wine and song, And not this land where joy is wrong. Oh, sweet, away! Ah, my beloved one, away!

It is more immediately evident that many members of the black middle class inhabit ‘‘this land where joy is wrong,’’ especially if ‘‘joy’’ is read as homosexually charged (cf. Woods, 136). Recognition of this social division apparently dispels the idealized vision, reminding the poem’s speaker of the current world’s shortcomings and leading him to bid his companion to depart. Presumably both of them resume their isolated, fragmented wandering toward unknown destinations, among which they always seek and hope to find their land. In this respect, ‘‘Our Land’’ dramatizes the conflict between the desire to root in nationalist formations of identity (American, African American, and even homosexual) and the need to disavow such formations and continue to roam in new routes of identification. The fact that this necessity derives from the exclusion of those with ‘‘vagrant’’ desires manifests a bitter critique of U.S. and African American nationalist formations—of their insufficiency to accommodate alternative subject positions like those of black homosexuals. Hughes counterbalances the pessimism of the poem ‘‘Our Land,’’ which opens the section of the same name, with the opti-

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mism about African American and U.S. nationalism expressed in ‘‘I, Too [Sing America],’’ which concludes that section and The Weary Blues as a whole. His persisting efforts to associate with such formations of identity also appear in poems in the volume’s first section, ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ such as ‘‘Jazzonia’’ (CP, 34; WB, 25) and ‘‘Harlem Night Club’’ (CP, 90; WB, 32). Both works are set in an African American cabaret. ‘‘Jazzonia’’ associates that site with a timeless race pride, while ‘‘Harlem Night Club’’ finds in it a transfiguration of U.S. race relations. Yet the speakers of both texts also displace themselves in the same manner as in ‘‘Danse Africaine,’’ underscoring again a qualified, ambivalent investment in such rooted identities. Most critics read Hughes’s jazz poems as expressions of black cultural nationalism. My own essay on Hughes’s 1940s jazz verse (‘‘Langston’’) cites commentary to this effect by Rampersad, Richard K. Barksdale, and R. Baxter Miller. Onwuchekwa Jemie’s monograph on Hughes’s work joins this corpus. ‘‘Jazzonia’’ is particularly amenable to this interpretive perspective. The poem’s title, with its double suffix -onia, evokes ideas of land and group identity: ‘‘Jazzonia’’ suggests a nation of jazz people. I cite the poem in full: Oh, silver tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul! In a Harlem cabaret Six long-headed jazzers play. A dancing girl whose eyes are bold Lifts high a dress of silken gold. Oh, singing tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul! Were Eve’s eyes In the first garden Just a bit too bold? Was Cleopatra gorgeous In a gown of gold? Oh, shining tree! Oh, silver rivers of the soul! In a whirling cabaret Six long-headed jazzers play.

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Here, the jazz cabaret embodies a black cultural nation with ancient roots. The dancing girl in Harlem, evoking her equally ‘‘whirling’’ counterpart in ‘‘Danse Africaine,’’ is united across time and space with Eve and Cleopatra, granting her both the Romantic purity of prelapsarian Eden and the greatness of a powerful Egyptian queen. The poem’s refrain—the first, third, and fifth stanzas—reinforce this transmigrational association with references to the rivers and tree of ‘‘the first garden.’’ The refrain’s alternation with the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas, which depict the Harlem scene and its antecedents, intertwine the two sets of images in call-and-response fashion. The alternation also echoes the verse–chorus structure of a jazz performance, and each of the refrain stanzas, as if partly improvised, varies the statement of the others. The ‘‘long-headed’’ features of the jazz musicians themselves imply that their creative expression communicates accumulated racial wisdom. The centrality of female figures in the text can also cohere with a nationalist vision. Women are often metonyms for nations. As my student Christian Clark suggested when I taught this poem in Spring 1996, ‘‘Jazzonia’’ can simultaneously be the dancing girl’s name. However, the poem’s similarities to ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ simultaneously suggest its divergence from the nationalism of the black middle class and from the particular gender roles it prescribes. Indeed, according to Jarraway, the specific kind of black woman figured here—the ‘‘Harlem girl’’—is Hughes’s favorite locus of deferred subjectivity (829). Hughes’s preference no doubt related to the black bourgeoisie’s excoriation of ‘‘the sexually irresponsible woman,’’ who—like homosexuals—they saw as a sign of ‘‘dangerous social disintegration’’ (Chauncey, 253). For this reason, the cabaret in ‘‘Jazzonia’’ surpasses its African precursor in ‘‘Danse Africaine’’ with respect to liberating desire. The Harlem dancer who provocatively ‘‘[l]ifts high a dress of silken gold’’ evokes unrestricted sexuality far more emphatically than does the African girl, and the poem presents jazz’s ‘‘primitive’’ intensity of feeling as outpacing the beating of African drums. Mumford writes that, in emerging 1920s discourse about sexuality, Harlem speakeasies and cabarets became marked as sites where ‘‘there were no prohibitions or inhibitions.’’ This reputation related in part to the longstanding sense of jazz as copulation, a meaning that remained especially prominent ‘‘in the parlance of [working-class] African Americans, prostitutes, and homosexuals’’ (Mumford, 406, 408). Thus, while on the surface ‘‘Jazzonia’’ celebrates African/Afri-

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can American cultural nationalism, covertly—that is, read in terms of a homosexual minority rhetoric—it criticizes the heterosexist bias of dominant, middle-class versions of that formation and offers a queer, yet still black, alternative to it. The image of the jazz ensemble’s all-male collective, which cohabits the second stanza with the dancer and which concludes the poem, intimates the existence of a coherent male homosexual community. Its members, living in a glass closet, ‘‘play’’ as much as they want. The poem’s speaker, while not directly selfidentified with either the dancer or the ‘‘jazzers,’’ nevertheless fixates on both of them and invests in their commingled valences. In this doubly conscious fashion, ‘‘Jazzonia’’ perhaps comes closest to uniting what Hughes apparently saw, in the mid1920s, as the unreconcileable identifications of race and vagrant sexuality. The land of jazz may very well constitute ‘‘Our Land.’’ As Mia Carter indicated to me in personal communication, the title and language of ‘‘Jazzonia’’ evoke the equatorial setting of this other poem, the ‘‘tropicality and fecundity’’ of Amazonia, ‘‘a land teeming with life.’’ Certain Harlem cabarets may have offered the only ‘‘real’’ places in which Hughes felt his visions could materialize. Even as I analyze ‘‘Jazzonia’’ and ‘‘Our Land’’ in this fashion, I want to emphasize that many other readings are possible. There can be many other inhabitants of the poems’ ‘‘imagined communities,’’ to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase. The indeterminacy of the first-person plural in ‘‘Our Land’’ can encompass any number of groups, ranging from working-class African Americans or black ‘‘folk’’—who ostensibly shared a ‘‘primitive’’ investment in liberated desire—to all U.S. minorities, or all Americans, or all humans. The poem can be seen as a modernist call for nationwide freedom from repressive Victorian conventions. Similarly, the cabaret patrons in ‘‘Jazzonia’’ could include white slummers, suggesting a transfiguration of U.S. race relations through free love, implying a reconception of what Priscilla Wald calls the national kinship narrative (cf. Wald, 199–202, 209–10). The ambiguities of Hughes’s verse—its seemingly planned susceptibility to various readings (especially, here, nationalist ones)—both manifest tentative identifications and potentially serve as alibis, obscuring diasporic impulses and vagrant desires. ‘‘Harlem Night Club,’’ read in dialogue with ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ would seem to reinforce the land of jazz’s signification of an in-

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terracially amalgamated America. The poem’s opening stanza promotes a message of carpe diem that, at the time, was often associated with ‘‘primitive’’ life: Sleek black boys in a cabaret. Jazz-band, jazz-band,— Play, plAY, PLAY! Tomorrow. . . . who knows? Dance today!

If the image of the black male collective directly invokes the ‘‘jazzers’’ of ‘‘Jazzonia,’’ the second and third stanzas partially mute connotations of homosexuality in a celebration of ‘‘vagrant’’ interracial heterosexism: White girls’ eyes Call gay black boys. Black boys’ lips Grin jungle joys. Dark brown girls In blond men’s arms. Jazz-band, jazz-band,— Sing Eve’s charms!

Here, it is a United States whose liberated desires overcome Jim Crow and fulfill the promises of liberal democracy that achieves the prelapsarian purity of Eden. This representation exhibits the trope of jazz writing that Michael Jarrett calls the satura, in which the music, ‘‘conceptualized as a conglomeration of diverse elements,’’ co-signifies ‘‘an illicit sexual union’’; jazz ‘‘is the ‘lusty offspring of cross-cultural fertilization’ ’’ (Jarrett, 343). If it were expunged of its ‘‘primitive’’ sexuality, this vision of jazz’s power would closely resemble that of another New Negro writer, Joel A. Rogers (‘‘Jazz at Home’’). However, even in this ‘‘straight’’ reading of ‘‘Harlem Night Club,’’ hints of doubt appear in the final stanzas about the viability of a fulfilled and transfigured nation. White ones, brown ones, What do you know About tomorrow Where all paths go?

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Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,— Play, plAY, PLAY! Tomorrow. . . . is darkness. Joy today!

If the fourth stanza emphasizes that the future is unwritten, the fifth one laments that idealized imagined communities remain just that—imagined. The nightclub becomes recognized as a liminal site that enables temporary experimentation but provides little staying power. The speaker’s excitement about the potentialities of the cabaret, which seems genuine in the first stanza, sounds forced in the fifth because of the sobering, pessimistic realization in the penultimate line. ‘‘Joy today’’ will be followed by its enemies (here figured as the ‘‘darkness’’ that traditionally attends evil), the bourgeois moralists—black and white—who oppose, and fear, sexual/gendered demoralization. The circumspect tone of this poem’s conclusion presumably extends, by association, to ‘‘Jazzonia.’’ This tone reinforces the doubt about finding a black (male) queer nation with which ‘‘Our Land’’ ends. Hughes probably stationed so many of his poems in jazz cabarets because, in the available sociocultural geography, they provided the best conditions for expressing racial pride and for experiencing aspects of liberated desire. Some of the nightclubs near the section of Harlem called ‘‘The Jungle’’ welcomed and even catered to a gay clientele (Chauncey, 252; Garber, 323–24). Nevertheless, because overt expressions of ‘‘vagrant’’ desire remained heavily policed in Harlem as well (Chauncey, 249–50), even black cabarets could not comprise a final destination. Further wandering was needed.

‘‘Proletarian’’ Poetry and Beyond Hughes’s second volume of verse, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), gives indications of his further artistic travels. A brief, suggestive consideration of this text and its differences with The Weary Blues concludes the essay. This analysis also returns to the issue of Hughes’s dominant critical reputation as a ‘‘people’s poet’’ and emphasizes how even this role can resonate with queer sexuality. Between January 1926, when The Weary Blues was published, and October of that year, when Hughes submitted the manu-

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script for Fine Clothes to Knopf, his work transformed markedly. In one respect, the poetry changed in terms of content matter. The verse about international rambling and ancient, mythical Africans disappeared in the face of an almost exclusive focus on urban, working-class African American life. Fine Clothes thus contributed significantly to the consolidation of Hughes’s reputation as a ‘‘people’s poet,’’ giving that role a more specific class inflection. In another respect, the later poetry exemplifies a subtle but crucial shift in modes of racial representation. Increasingly eschewing primitivist portraits of cabaret life (Chinitz, 66), Hughes began to lean decidedly toward artistically presenting a relationship between black expressive culture and race- and class-based social politics. This move manifested the poet’s growing exposure to and affinity for Boasian anthropology and related ideas in philosophical pragmatism. As Rampersad notes, it also reveals how Hughes began to consider himself as much a follower of as a leader of the black ‘‘folk’’ (‘‘Hughes’s Fine,’’ 58). Many more of his Fine Clothes poems directly emulate the twelve-bar blues form, showing that he acknowledged the political nature of popular black music and that he attempted to increase the artistic scope and range of its power. Biographical details help to explain Hughes’s transformed orientation. As he wrote poems for and assembled his second volume, Hughes lived and worked for some months in a poor black neighborhood in Washington, D.C.; he began attending the allblack, single-sex Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; and his involvement with younger New Negro intellectuals increased, especially in the summer, when he collaborated with Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and others on the ill-fated journal Fire!! (Rampersad, ‘‘Hughes’s Fine,’’ 58–59). The Fire!! episode gives one example of Hughes’s changing aesthetic and political orientations. The journal self-consciously rebelled against more established African American institutions, such as the NAACP organ The Crisis and its editor, Du Bois. Beginning in early 1926, in his speech and essay ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art,’’ Du Bois recrystallized the project of exclusively promoting ‘‘the better sort’’ of African American art—that which mainly represented the experience of the educated, ‘‘civilized’’ middle class. This perspective, a version of which also informed Countee Cullen’s unenthusiastic review of The Weary Blues in February 1926, contributed to the reformulation of Hughes’s artistic approach. As he indicated in his April contribution to an ongoing forum in The Crisis (‘‘Negro in Art,’’ 278), in his June manifesto

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‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ and in Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes began definitively to locate authentic blackness among ‘‘the low-down folks, the so-called common element’’ (‘‘Negro Artist,’’ 693). The anthropology of Franz Boas and the philosophical pragmatism that influenced Hughes and other New Negro writers inspired critiques of Romantic black cultural nationalism (Hutchinson, 33–77) and enabled the poet to represent his subject in terms other than those of essentialized primitivism. Some poems in The Weary Blues already hint at such critiques.18 Fine Clothes to the Jew’s almost exclusive focus on a relatively specific social group suggests a more circumscribed range of wandering than that of its predecessor. Its seeking and finding is limited to the U.S. South, North, and migrations in between. This firmer rooting in a modified black nationalism coincided with a somewhat more constrained textual exploration of vagrant sexual desire. At most, a handful of the poems in Fine Clothes offer an ‘‘I’’ resembling that of ‘‘Summer Night’’ or a ‘‘we’’ like that in ‘‘Our Land.’’ More common are the voices of disembodied, shrouded participant-observers such as those of ‘‘Jazzonia’’ and ‘‘Harlem Night Club,’’ and more common still are Hughes’s tour-de-force adoptions of working-class personae. Significantly, the poet downplayed the mode of poetic expression that most poignantly invited considerations of his frustrated desires. This move seems to reinforce the idea that Hughes perceived a commitment to blackness as incompatible with exploring homosexual tendencies. However, it is also possible to read Hughes’s focus on African American itinerant workers and their culture as yet another synthesis of his racial and sexual concerns. After all, since the black ‘‘folk’’ (rural and urban) were perceived as being more accepting of vagrant desires, allying with them may have again provided Hughes with racial cover under which to continue exploring his sexuality. According to Rampersad, Fine Clothes manifests an aesthetic and political stance that emphasizes ‘‘artistic and sexual freedom, a love of the black masses, a refusal to idealize black life, and a revolt against bourgeois hypocrisy’’ (Rampersad, ‘‘Hughes’s Fine,’’ 59). If Hughes intended a wider sense of ‘‘sexual freedom’’ than Rampersad allows, he need not have employed the same imagery from The Weary Blues—namely that of whiteness that can signify gayness—to rebel against bourgeois prescriptions for selfhood. Representations of the urban, black ‘‘folk’’ provided a potent, strategic replacement.

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Evidence for this thesis lies in Hughes’s increasing emphasis on the intense musicality of black working-class culture. In ‘‘The Negro Artist,’’ Hughes evaluates this culture via a modified version of primitivism (Chinitz, 66–67): ‘‘their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy,’’ and ‘‘jazz is their child’’ (‘‘Negro Artist,’’ 693). Desire is expressed powerfully in the poems in Fine Clothes that emulate the ‘‘low-down’’ structure, style, and ‘‘vernacular’’ dialect of blues songs. Isaac Julien, explaining why Looking for Langston includes footage of Bessie Smith singing, states that ‘‘blues songs were some of the first spaces where one could actually hear black gay desire’’ (Julien, 179). Black male blues singers of the 1920s did perform songs like ‘‘Sissy Man Blues,’’ which expressed same-sex desire (Chauncey, 250–51; Garber, 320), and blues songs in general discussed sexuality in figurative but unmistakable terms (Carby, 245–48). Unsurprisingly, Hughes’s poetic renderings of the rebellious bawdiness of black working-class street life, which do not evoke homosexuality explicitly, induced vociferous condemnations of Fine Clothes to the Jew by the African American middle-class press (Rampersad, Life, 140; Chinitz, 66). Another way that Hughes embedded his desires appears in Fine Clothes’ representation of the migrant workers’ fragmented social experience. In numerous blues and nonblues poems, Hughes prominently features the lonely wandering of wage laborers, their intense need for companionship, and the tenuous nature of the liaisons that they do have. Although all of the relationships in these poems are overtly heterosexual, the characters’ situations clearly resonate with the lonely, frustrated experience of closeted homosexuals. Moreover, many works focus on the abusiveness of the characters’ relationships. These poems include those to which bell hooks refers: ‘‘Much of [Hughes’s] work speaks about erotic longing, tormenting desire, unfulfillment, romantic abandonment, relationships between black men and women that don’t work, that end in pain, bitterness, that leave folks overwhelmed by sorrow, deep in despair, longing for death’’ (hooks, 193). More specifically, a substantial amount of the verse in Fine Clothes about tortured relationships highlights the men’s tendency to beat the women. Here we have a revision of Hughes’s ‘‘invert’’ identification with the ‘‘Harlem girl’’ figure: Often in his poems the speaker is a lovesick anguished black woman. Comfortable with this fictive transvestism, Hughes appro-

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priates female voices, making them synonymous with sexual vulnerability. Who is this black woman who longs, who opens herself to love and is betrayed, always hurt, never satisfied? Hughes’s poems paint graphic portraits of . . . sexual sado-masochism. The eroticism he speaks again and again in his poems is bound, caught in a litany of loss, abandonment, and broken promises: desire is a wound. (hooks, 194)

Thus, while Fine Clothes to the Jew overtly offers a quasi-anthropological assessment of the lives of African American migrant workers, covertly—especially through the voices of female personae—it still expresses Hughes’s feelings about his ‘‘vagrant’’ desires. However, as hooks’s discussion suggests, the expression in his second volume is more intensely pained than in The Weary Blues. The pressure to submerge his homosexual tendencies in the name of blackness apparently augmented his frustration about his loss, engendering bitter resentment. The self-directed anger manifest here would seem to indicate that Hughes remained profoundly dissatisfied with the tentative de´tente between race and sexuality forged in Fine Clothes to the Jew. Unsurprisingly, he continued to seek and find alternative modes of expressing the various facets of his ongoing experience. The same wandering characterized Hughes’s exploration of discourses through which to represent that experience. His quasi-anthropological, poetic portraits of African American workers in the late 1920s intimate a class-based structure of feeling in which ‘‘vernacular’’ creative expressions like jazz and the blues serve as cultural therapy, counteracting the alienating aspects of Western modernity (such as wage labor). As Hughes put it, jazz is ‘‘the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work’’ (‘‘Negro Artist,’’ 694). This structure of feeling emphasizes a relationship between culture and society that draws on the Arnoldian notion of redeeming material civilization with fine art, the same notion that governed Du Bois’s and James Weldon Johnson’s artistic elevation of the spirituals and ragtime (Evans, Writing). Simultaneously, Hughes’s structure of feeling crucially modifies the racial/ aesthetic elitism of Arnoldian projects with its relativist, Boasian approach that is also immanently queered. Even as the nuances of this orientation were developing, they were redirected, at least temporarily, at the onset of the Depression. In the early 1930s, Hughes joined many other writers in promoting the tenets of internationalist Marxism. His relatively

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novel perspectives on black culture and identity fused into and became dominated by this already ‘‘precipitated’’ class-based discourse. During this period, his poetic representation of sexuality was even more subdued. Thus, while Hughes continued to explore alternative routes in his numerous, later artistic projects, the period bracketed by his first major publication and the Depression offers a set of historical moments in which crucial aspects of his career emerged and developed. Hughes’s poetic explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality have implications not only for contemporary readers and critics interested in the interdependence of these facets of subjectivity. They also indirectly challenge the dominant modes of literary criticism on Hughes and the formations of black nationalism that influence them. Rather than remain comfortably rooted in these modes, Hughes critics would do well to follow the poet’s own example and remain open to the fuller range of meanings and audiences that his work can have. Hughes’s style of wandering, of seeking and finding, can be to everyone’s benefit.

Notes See also my book Writing Jazz. The essay is deeply indebted to Mia Carter, who initially prompted me to consider the salience of Hughes’s sexuality visa`-vis race and nationalism. 1. See also, for example, the fall/winter 1997 issue of Social Text, especially the Introduction (Harper et al). 2. This central concept of ‘‘wandering’’ derived from Natasha Sinutko’s unpublished essay ‘‘ ‘Melanctha’: Gertrude Stein in Passing,’’ which highlights the symbolic significance of racialized, gendered, and sexualized ‘‘wandering’’ in Stein’s text. The concept helps to clarify what I mean by the vexed term hybridity. This term is perhaps especially problematic in discussing homosexuality; Robert Young contends that hybridity is fundamentally a heterosexual concept. However, Young also freights the term with considerable power in referring to Homi Bhabha’s sense of a ‘‘restless, uneasy, interstitial hybridity: a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms’’ (Young, 25). I choose to emphasize the latter meanings in spite of the term’s limitations. To me, hybridity conveys less the intermixture of cultural elements and more the condition of being between cultural moorings. Hence my metaphor of movement, which resonates with the historical legacy of diaspora. 3. Insisting that Hughes remained disinterested in homosexual relationships, Rampersad asserts: ‘‘Sooner or later [in 1922–1923, when Hughes was about twenty], the world would have asked Hughes to assert some basic conjugal ability—to be a man, in other words, and complete his growth either by taking a wife and starting a family of his own or by giving clear evidence, in the form of recognized liaisons, of the desire to do so’’ (Life, 66). Of course,

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Hughes never did marry or start a family. That Rampersad equates this type of manliness with blackness itself is evident in his devaluation of Hughes’s lyrical poetry that is ‘‘untouched by race.’’ He says this verse is characterized by ‘‘passivity [that] reflects the negative aspect of Hughes’s impulse to delay the onset of manhood, or the related consequences of his having been brought up without a strong male example, in the care of a proud but essentially defeated woman such as his grandmother’’ (Life, 44–45). The rhetoric here, suggesting that single-mother households produce effeminate men, recapitulates exactly the homophobic discourse that Simmons analyzes (Simmons, 212–13). 4. Rampersad’s allegation that Hughes’s partner was ‘‘aggressive’’ seems an attempt to obscure Hughes’s willful participation in the encounter. In addition, specifying that Hughes took the ‘‘male’’ role could express Rampersad’s dissociation of Hughes from the nineteenth-century sexual category of the invert, or feminized man—a category to which I will return. On another matter, it is possible that Hughes engaged sexually with a close companion in high school. Through 1920, when he turned eighteen, Hughes ‘‘had shown little interest in girls’’; ‘‘he was far more often in the company of Sartur Andrzejewski—whose main ambition, as the [school] Annual put it, was to remain ‘a bachelor’ ’’ (Rampersad, Life, 36). 5. I abbreviate The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes as CP and The Weary Blues as WB. 6. Paradoxically, such repression could increase the pleasure toward which the poem gestures and that it engenders. ‘‘Transgressive sexual practice is rooted in mystery, the flirtation between secrecy and disclosure. Repression and containment, though painful, may also intensify desire’’ (hooks, 197). 7. In distinguishing between ‘‘masculinity’’ and ‘‘manliness’’ in this way, I am following the work of Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization. 8. In offering queer readings of Countee Cullen’s poetry, Alden Reimonenq shows that ‘‘friendship’’ had similarly charged meanings in Cullen’s personal correspondence with Locke in 1923 (144, 148). 9. Of course, in making such statements, Nugent and Van Vechten could have been acting ‘‘simple’’ themselves. 10. Marylynne Diggs proposes that such behavioral unreadability in self(re)presentation relates to the growing pathologization of homosexuality in the early twentieth century. Certain discourses figured gayness as ‘‘an undetectable, hidden taint’’ of inbred degeneracy, manifesting something that ‘‘you could discover about yourself and something you must keep secret from others.’’ Thus, the discourse ensured constant ‘‘self-surveillance’’ (Diggs, 8). This phenomenon closely resembles what Sedgwick calls ‘‘homosexual panic’’ (Diggs, 14; Sedgwick, 20–21). Hughes’s behavior suggests that, as he wondered about his potential homosexuality and tentatively associated himself with it, he worried about the consequences of being marked with a pathologized taint. Acting ‘‘simple’’ defended him from such marking, deferring that referred identity indefinitely. See my analysis of the ‘‘empty secret’’ in Hughes’s poem ‘‘Summer Night’’ later in this essay. 11. Hemphill implies that Hughes’s verse possesses the same post-Stonewall expressiveness as Hemphill’s own poetry. Gregory Woods proposes a more tenable thesis—that, in the work of Cullen, Hughes, and Claude McKay, ‘‘we should not expect, nor be disappointed by the lack of, the kind of openness we now reasonably demand of gay writers.’’ Nevertheless, Woods still echoes Hemphill in suggesting that Hughes managed to create a literary voice whose

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‘‘relax[ed]’’ campiness distinguished him from the more anguished Cullen and McKay (Woods, 139). While some of Hughes’s campiness might be evident in his later work (especially The Big Sea), his willful vagueness about his sexuality throughout his career still manifested some degree of his feelings of shame. 12. For a related interpretation of Looking for Langston, see Mun˜oz. 13. Woods persuasively shows that numerous poems in the ‘‘Water-Front Streets’’ section—including ‘‘Port Town’’ (CP, 97; WB, 74), ‘‘Young Sailor’’ (CP, 62; WB, 77), and the eponymous ‘‘Water-Front Streets’’ (CP, 96; WB, 71)—can be read as expressing homosexual desire (129–31, 136). 14. Diggs and Woods also underscore the important intersection between discourses of miscegenation and homosexuality. Diggs argues that ‘‘homosexual and mixed-race identity’’ were pathologized in comparable ways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1). Woods notes that, in the same historical period, the theme of ‘‘forbidden love’’ coresonated with ‘‘the miscegenation taboo’’ and with homo- or bisexual relationships (134). 15. Aspects of this analysis of female figures in Hughes’s verse can apply to poetry by Claude McKay, who ‘‘was active in Parisian gay circles and pursued relationships with both sexes’’ (Garber, 327). McKay, too, penned a number of works featuring black women and girls. One of the most notable in this context is the 1917 sonnet ‘‘The Harlem Dancer.’’ 16. As North shows, many celebrated modernists argued that ‘‘the free language of the modern artist’’ was, ‘‘by virtue of its deviation from [’standard’ English], black.’’ Such ‘‘black’’ language was supposedly ‘‘natural, primitive, life-affirming, and impatient of restraint’’ (North, 27). 17. According to Woods, Cullen’s poem ‘‘From the Dark Tower’’ employs a similar image—the ‘‘ ‘twilight world’ of homosexuality’’—as it opposes ‘‘both racism and homophobia’’ (134). 18. Some poems in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ section of the volume offer a relatively overt, even self-conscious, critique of primitivist discourse. For example, ‘‘Young Singer’’ (CP, 35; WB, 28) questions the arcadian imagery in which Hughes often couches his tributes to ‘‘primitive’’ women. As Steven Tracy argues, in this work ‘‘the poet seems to undercut his own impressions of exoticism’’ (Tracy, 218).

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Benston, Kimberly W. ‘‘Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry.’’ In Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond, 164–85. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Borden, Anne. ‘‘Heroic ‘Hussies’ and ‘Brilliant Queers’: Genderracial Resistance in the Works of Langston Hughes.’’ African American Review 28 (1994): 333–45.

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Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Carby, Hazel V. ‘‘ ‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.’’ In Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, 238–49. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chinitz, David. ‘‘Rejuvenation Through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz.’’ American Literary History 9 (1997): 60–78. Cullen, Countee. ‘‘Poet on Poet.’’ Review of The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes. 1926. Gates and Appiah, 3–5. Diggs, Marylynne. ‘‘Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity.’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2–3 (1993): 1–19. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Du Bois, W. E. B. ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art.’’ The Crisis 32 (1926): 290–97. ———. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. In Three Negro Classics, 209–389. New York: Avon, 1965. Evans, Nicholas M. ‘‘Langston Hughes as Bop Ethnographer in ‘Trumpet Player: 52nd Street.’ ’’ The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 24.1–2 (1994): 119–35. ———. Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s. New York: Garland, 2000. Fauset, Jessie. Review of The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes. 1926. Gates and Appiah, 6–7. Ford, Karen Jackson. ‘‘Do Right to Write Right: Langston Hughes’s Aesthetics of Simplicity.’’ Twentieth Century Literature 38 (1992): 436–56. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. 1971. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Garber, Eric. ‘‘A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem.’’ In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., 318–31. New York: New American Library, 1989. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ‘‘The Black Man’s Burden.’’ In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner, 230–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Graham, Maryemma. ‘‘The Practice of a Social Art.’’ In Gates and Appiah, 213–35. Harper, Phillip Brian, Anne McClintock, Jose´ Esteban Mun˜oz, and Trish Rosen. ‘‘Introduction.’’ Social Text 52–53 (1997): 1–4.

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Hemphill, Essex, ed. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Boston: Alyson, 1991. Heyward, DuBose. ‘‘The Jazz Band’s Sob.’’ Review of The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes. 1926. In Critical Essays on Langston Hughes, edited by Edward J. Mullen, 42–44. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. ———. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Knopf, 1927. ———. I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart, 1956. ———. ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.’’ The Nation 122 (1926): 692–94. ———. The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Jarraway, David R. ‘‘Montage of an Otherness Deferred: Dreaming Subjectivity in Langston Hughes.’’ American Literature 68 (1996): 819–47. Jarrett, Michael. ‘‘Four Choruses on the Tropes of Jazz Writing.’’ American Literary History 6 (1994): 336–53. Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Vintage, 1989. Julien, Isaac. ‘‘Looking for Langston: An Interview with Isaac Julien.’’ In Hemphill, 174–80. Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. ‘‘Introduction: De Margin and De Centre.’’ Screen 29.4 (1988): 2–10. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Looking for Langston. Directed by Isaac Julien. Sankofa, 1989. McKay, Claude. Selected Poems of Claude McKay. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981. Mumford, Kevin J. ‘‘Homosex Changes: Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay.’’ American Quarterly 48 (1996): 395–414. Mun˜oz, Jose´ E. ‘‘Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston.’’ In Race and the Subject of Masculinities, edited by Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, 337–58. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ‘‘The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed, A Symposium.’’ The Crisis 31 (1926): 278–80; 32 (1926): 35–36, 71–73, 193–94, 238–39; 33 (1926): 28–29. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew.’’ 1986. In Gates and Appiah, 53–68. ———. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Reimonenq, Alden. ‘‘Countee Cullen’s Uranian ‘Soul Windows.’ ’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2–3 (1993): 143–65. Rogers, J. A. ‘‘Jazz at Home.’’ In Locke, 216–24. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Simmons, Ron. ‘‘Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals.’’ In Hemphill, 211–28. Sinutko, Natasha. ‘‘ ‘Melanctha’: Gertrude Stein in Passing.’’ Unpublished. Smith, Charles Michael. ‘‘Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In In the Life: Black Gay Anthology, edited by Joseph Beam, 209–20. Boston: Alyson, 1986. Tracy, Steven. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Van Vechten, Carl. ‘‘Introducing Langston Hughes to the Reader.’’ In The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes, 9–13. New York: Knopf, 1926. Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Woods, Gregory. ‘‘Gay Re-Readings of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2–3 (1993): 127–42. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Decadence, Sexuality, and the Bohemian Vision of Wallace Thurman Granville Ganter

DESPITE HIS DYNAMIC OUTPUT AS AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC OF THE

Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman has not often inspired critical admiration. Several generations of scholars have lamented the alcoholic excess of his lifestyle and the indecent content of his writing. From the beginning of his career, Thurman’s disinclination to celebrate his black heritage caused considerable anxiety among leaders of the New Negro movement. In his review of Thurman’s first novel, The Blacker the Berry, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed his regret at Thurman’s apparently ‘‘selfdespising’’ racial outlook and complained that Thurman seemed to ‘‘deride blackness’’ (250). Although later critics have acknowledged Thurman’s energy and promise, Du Bois’s verdict is still echoed today.1 The moralistic tones of the case against Thurman tend to invoke puritanical assumptions about sex and race, which continue to have powerful influence in the twenty-first century. Because assessments of the Harlem Renaissance have been often shaped by parochial—and laudable—beliefs that members of different races, classes, and sexual orientations should celebrate their communities as a matter of pride, the bohemian aspirations of Thurman’s role in the Renaissance have been underappreciated, if not outright rejected. Although Thurman broke many social taboos during his short brilliant career, one of his most challenging characteristics was his acerbic intractability. Thurman was neither a picture of heterosexual virility nor was he exclusively gay. Combined with his lukewarm interest in promoting his black identity, Thurman has not found a comfortable place amid the progressive identity politics of post1960s literary scholarship. In contrast to fey Richard Bruce Nugent, who has been welcomed by contemporary gay scholars, Thurman remains a wallflower, neither self-consciously black 194

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enough, nor gay enough to serve as a Renaissance poster boy, although his literary output dwarfs Nugent’s. As George Hutchinson has argued persuasively, several recent generations of scholars have balked at the complex interracial and interethnic politics of the Renaissance for lack of an adequate American discourse about hybrid identity (6–26). As a result, writers like Thurman, who actively sought to challenge the nationalist, racial, and sexual isolationisms of his day (and regrettably, ours), have yet to be appreciated for their iconoclasm. As many of his literary peers recognized, Thurman looked to Europe for aesthetic inspiration, not just America. Culturally stifled while growing up in Salt Lake City and Boise, Thurman apprenticed himself as a young writer to European artists of the Decadent movement. Identifying with figures such as Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, and Gorky, Thurman imagined himself as part of an international avant-garde devoted to exploring the creative possibilities of the modern, the artificial, and the prohibited. In 1928, he wrote to a friend that he saw his generation as ‘‘Columbuses . . . discovering things about themselves and about their environment which it seems to them their elders have been at pains to hide’’ (Van Notten, 141–42). One of Thurman’s patrons, Alain Locke, recognized the decadent, Frenchified spirit of the 1890s behind Thurman’s work, but he didn’t think it black enough, or decent enough, to advance the political goals of the Renaissance (Locke, 563). In particular, Thurman’s omnivorous sexuality, an important facet of many writers associated with the decadisme in Europe, has not yet received a sympathetic examination. By most accounts, Thurman was bisexual, if not homosexual. He also had white and black lovers of different sexual orientations. There is no shortage of pathological explanation for Thurman’s behavior. Dorothy West, a younger contemporary of Thurman’s, suggests he was a homosexual tortured by simultaneous desires to be a full-blooded ‘‘male’’ and a father (West, 80). While West seems unable to conceive that healthy bisexual or homosexual people could want to have children, most of Thurman’s peers were also perplexed about his sexual behavior. Recently, however, scholars interested in the homoerotic aspects of Harlem life have begun to explore the ways in which queer sexuality inflected the literature of the period, both in terms of content (homosexual characters and themes) and style (writing techniques that seem characteristic of queer sensibilities).2 Thurman may have been queer in the strictly homosexual

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sense of the term. He engaged in homosexual behavior. However, Thurman’s sexual conduct was also queer in the sense that he didn’t operate by the norms of strictly homosexual or heterosexual culture. Whether Thurman was hetero- or homosexual is difficult to say. He was, however, indisputably bisexual. Thurman’s resistance to easy characterization, usually invoked as a pathological impediment to his personal development or genius as a writer, is a key to his work. Thurman was an explorer. And as I shall argue, Thurman’s bohemian sexuality may be seen as a metaphor for the breadth of his imaginative vision as a writer and artist. As Dorothy West remarks, Thurman often claimed he wanted to do everything once before he died (81). In his literary criticism, Thurman asserted that the artist’s duty was to be polymorphously open to all forms of human experience. He felt that the genius of literary artists was documented in their openness to the unusual. Bisexuality was another facet of Thurman’s polymorphous imaginative sensibility. For Thurman, writers’ imaginative queerness lay in their cosmopolitan ability to pass comfortably into another identity, be it sexual, racial, or cultural. Thurman sought to materialize this transgressive imaginative sensibility in both his fiction and nonfiction. The intimate relationship between Thurman’s sexuality and his art is apparent in a letter he wrote to a friend and literary collaborator, William Rapp, in 1929. Thurman was going though a divorce at the time and his wife, Louise Thompson, had accused him of homosexuality. He wrote to Rapp to explain a story that Thompson had circulated among his friends concerning a homosexual proposition Thurman accepted when he first came to New York City. Although the letter’s exculpatory remarks can be read as divorce propaganda, both its content and its stylistic shift from third to first-person narrative bear a striking resemblance to Thurman’s short story, ‘‘Cordelia the Crude.’’ In his letter to Rapp, Thurman writes, In 1925 a young colored lad anxious to make a literary career came to New York. He had little stake which was soon gone. He found no job. He owed room rent and was hungry (not offered in extenuation of what is to follow but merely a statement of the facts.) One night he got a job as relief elevator operator, just for one night. He worked. The next night he returned hoping to work again. Failing he returned homeward. At 135th St. he got off the subway, and feeling nature’s call went into the toilet. There was a man standing in there. The

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man spoke. He did more than speak, making me know what his game was. I laughed. He offered me two dollars. I accepted. Two plainclothesman, hidden in the porter’s mop closet rushed out and took the two of us to jail. Night court. I was fined twenty-five dollars or three days. The man got six months. He was a Fifth [A]venue hair dresser. He had been picked up before, and always of course as the aggressor. I gave a fake name and address, then sent a special delivery letter to the only friend I had in New York. He borrowed money, gave it to a minister friend who came down and got me out after I had spent 48 hours in jail. Only two people thus knew it. The minister took great interest in me. And to my surprise I discovered that he too belonged to the male sisterhood and was demanding his pound of flesh to keep silence. I cursed him out, told him he could print it in the papers if he dared and saw him no more. Meanwhile of course he had told his scandal. By some quirk of fate it reached Louise just at the time she was fighting me for a money settlement. She told Ernst. He verified the story, and they threatened to make charges t[h]at I was homosexual, and knowing this and that I was incapable of keeping up my marital relationship [and] had no business marrying. All of which Louise knew was a lie. The incident was true, but there was certainly no evidence therein I was a homosexual and Louise also knew that tho there had been sexual incompatibility it had been her fault not mine.3 Tues May 7 [1929]

One of the most significant aspects of the letter is that Thurman refuses to have his sexuality defined by someone else. Thurman confesses to engaging in an act of homosexual prostitution but denies that it is ‘‘evidence therein’’ of his homosexuality. Like James Baldwin, he admits to homosexual practices but not necessarily to being identified as a homosexual (Ross, 505). Rather, he describes himself as a young man who is unusually open to new experience. He laughs at the thought of bargaining sexual favors for cash. The homosexual element of the situation doesn’t seem to faze him, either. Upon hearing the terms of the proposition, Thurman inscrutably writes, ‘‘I accepted.’’ Whether motivated by physical desire, financial need, youthful curiosity, constitutional perversity, or some combination of incentives, Thurman doesn’t explicitly say. Throughout the letter, however, he seems concerned about his reputation and anxious to prove that he had heterosexual desires as well. Although the letter could be interpreted as evidence of Thurman’s closeted homosexuality (and most Thurman scholars have tended to summarize the letter’s contents in this way), it is also explicit documentation of Thurman’s sexual polyvalence.

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In literary terms, the letter is also significant because it suggests the close relationship between Thurman’s life and fiction. Later in the letter, he asks Rapp if his story sounds like a novel. The question is not merely rhetorical. Three years earlier, in his short story, ‘‘Cordelia the Crude,’’ he had told a similar tale. Both Thurman’s letter and short story begin with a tone of objective realism, apparently adopted from Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which shows the matter-of-fact transformation of an urban inge´nue. As in his letter, Thurman’s story begins with little in the way of judgment of its protagonist, describing Cordelia Jones from an objective, third-person point of view as a restless girl who desires to escape the restrictions of her homelife. She goes to a theater where she is dimly aware that women are being propositioned by young men. Halfway through the story, the narrative shifts to the first person when a young man takes up the story as he meets Cordelia in the theater. Cordelia takes the man to a flophouse but the narrator suddenly loses his nerve, shoves two dollars in her hand, and flees. At the end of the story, the narrator meets Cordelia again at a rent party where it is apparent she has become a prostitute. The similarities of Thurman’s autobiographical letter to the story are probably explained by Thurman and Rapp’s collaboration on the play, Harlem, which was an adaptation of Thurman’s story ‘‘Cordelia,’’ and which had just debuted a few months earlier.4 One of the curious things about the resemblance among the three narratives (Thurman’s letter, ‘‘Cordelia,’’ and the play, Harlem) is that Thurman wrote the fictions first. In his letter to Rapp, his life conforms to his art. What makes this connection doubly interesting, however, is that Thurman initially wrote the autobiographical fictions from a woman’s viewpoint. Thurman’s use of a female protagonist to represent his own experience in ‘‘Cordelia’’ and Harlem is particularly significant because the protagonist of his first novel, The Blacker the Berry, is also a woman. There are several explanations why Thurman was drawn to female protagonists in his early work. On one level, Thurman seems to have wanted to write a black Sister Carrie or Madame Bovary, both of which focused on the plight of women to illustrate the curious modern collision of urban reality with sentimental fiction. In The Blacker the Berry, Emma Lou Morgan’s first name evokes Flaubert’s tragic protagonist, Emma Bovary, whose discomfort with provincial life, brought on by reading too many fanciful romances, leads her to stray from her marriage. Chasing a desire ‘‘to live and to die’’ in Paris,

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and unable to find spiritual redemption, she eventually drinks poison. Emma Lou’s life experience also suggests the plot of the first half of Sister Carrie, where Carrie ingloriously becomes the mistress of a salesman while wandering the streets of Chicago looking for respectable work. Second, it seems likely that Thurman’s ill-fated heroine was a direct reply to Jessie Fauset’s hardworking character, Joanna Marshall, in There Is Confusion (1924). If Thurman felt that Fauset’s brand of realism had erred by attempting to normalize the victories and defeats of black middle-class experience, Thurman’s Emma Lou Morgan was a study in what might happen to an earnest Fauset character in the hands of an unkind god. Finally, on a third level, Dorothy West speculates that a female protagonist allowed Thurman to distance himself from his novel’s autobiographical material (79).5 At the same time that Thurman attempts to separate himself from Morgan’s experiences, however, he also identifies with them. As Thurman declared in both his fiction and nonfiction, the imaginative burden of artists is to investigate the broadest domains of human thought and feeling. Thurman’s use of female protagonists is both a deliberate test of his artistic powers and an attempt to envision the world from another person’s point of view. Thurman’s identification with women’s experience is suggested in part by his reference to homosexuals in Infants of the Spring as ‘‘uranians’’ (114). The term, coined by the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, refers to homosexuals as people with women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies, or the reverse. In a series of pamphlets written between 1864 and 1870, Ulrichs proposed that the human embryo could develop a female soul at the same time its physical development took a male path, or vice versa (Symonds, 162). This theory explained why some women seemed to have a masculine temperament and some men a feminine one. Although Ulrichs sketched a complicated taxonomy of human sexuality from this premise, he referred to people who experienced hybrid development in the egg, Urnings or Uranians, from the term ‘‘uranos’’ in Plato’s Symposium, meaning ‘‘heavenly.’’6 Uranianism was a popular theory among turn-ofthe-century homosexuals because it did not explain gay or lesbian sexuality in degrading language. Thurman’s use of the term uranian is also revealing in light of Edward Carpenter’s claim that uranians made great artists.7 Along with John Addington Symonds, Carpenter was a key English popularizer of Uranian theory. Carpenter’s book, The Inter-

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mediate Sex (1906) argued that uranians were often society’s great artists and teachers because their hybrid nature made them much more sensitive to the entire spectrum of human emotions. As many of Thurman’s peers remarked, Thurman seemed to be a sort of intermediate person. Rather than a liability, Thurman used his uranian ethos as an asset. Thurman’s choice of female protagonists may indicate his belief that he could feel as women felt, and that a female persona heightened the sense of marginality he wished to explore in his characters. As a journalist, Thurman had long voiced his belief that fiction writers were obliged to reach beyond the boundaries of their own personal lives in choosing characters for their art. In a book review of I. A. R. Wylie’s Black Harvest, Thurman applauded the white female author for successfully portraying the psychology of the male mulatto protagonist, Jung Siegfried. Although Thurman regretted that more blacks had not chosen to write about their own experience, his review steadfastly upheld the right of literary artists to cross all sexual and cultural boundaries in the pursuit of their craft. Thurman’s defense of a writer’s act of imaginatively passing into the experience of a different person gives an additional significance to the concept of racial passing in his work. Part of Thurman’s defense of authorial freedom was rooted in a specific debate carried on in the columns of the Crisis between February and November 1926 about how black Americans should be represented in fiction.8 Rejecting the propagandist philosophy of Du Bois’s program of racial uplift, Thurman’s literary journal Fire!! took an avant-garde approach toward fostering social equality. Rather than describe black culture as it ought to be, Thurman felt it should be described as it really is (Van Notten, 118–19). For Thurman, documenting Harlem life meant describing rent parties, discrimination among blacks, unusual sexual choices, and in some cases, people’s dissatisfaction with their own skin color. In the middle of the Crisis debates, May 1926, Thurman chided Walter White for the moralistic conclusion of his novel Flight where White’s passing protagonist, Mimi, decides to give up passing and return to black culture (154). Not only did White miss the opportunity to explore the tragic potential of his main character, Thurman argued, but such behavior was not always the truth. As if in response to White, a black artist in Thurman’s later novel, Infants of the Spring, declares that ‘‘thousands of Negroes cross the line every year and I assure you that few, if any, ever feel that fictional urge to rejoin their own kind. That

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sort of nostalgia is confined to novels’’ (162). Another of Thurman’s characters in Infants, Aline, later decides to pass for white, moves downtown, and never comes back. Thurman’s strong views on the issue of passing rankled his race-pride patrons, and they also explain why he has been largely eschewed by queer-friendly literary scholars interested in identity politics. For example, while Amy Robinson’s study of the linkage between racial and sexual passing in Harlem Renaissance literature is ostensibly committed to working toward a more inclusive society, her essay is ironically obsessed with simplistically categorizing people as homosexual, white, or black. She argues that both types of passes (passing for white; passing for straight) are best understood as practices of reading and performance rather than indications of ontological essence. The title of her essay, ‘‘It Takes One to Know One,’’ refers to a triangular relationship between the passer, the hetero/white community, and the homosexual/black insiders, where a successful pass requires the consent of the underprivileged group, which has the eyes to see such a performance take place and to take pleasure in that silent knowledge. On one hand, Robinson’s performative schema of identity is an attempt to move away from homophobic and racist ideologies which mark often hetero- or white-normativity. However, by invoking reductive communities of interest (black is Black and homo is Homo), Robinson reproduces two grave problems of identity politics. First, she extrapolates the experience of some members of subordinated groups who share some kinds of primary interest in their own community for the community’s identity as a whole. This logic of representation is highly necessary for the success of political movements. As a literary credo, however, it tends to promote a conformist ethos, which is precisely what Thurman objected to as a writer concerning the variety of sexual and racial differences. And second, her emphasis on properly reading performance celebrates a climate of scrutiny and surveillance no less intrusive than the oppressive ideologies she is ostensibly trying to dismantle (723, 733). To her credit, Robinson concedes the dangers of her thesis toward the end of the essay when she admits that the pleasures of detecting a pass have always been ‘‘qualified’’ at best (736). She does not, however, elaborate on the important aesthetic yield of her dramaturgical analysis: the question is not simply whether one has been detected, it’s whether the performance of passing was any good. For Thurman himself, the main question with passing was not

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moral (i.e.: should it be done? what would it mean for our community’s integrity?)—it was aesthetic: was it done well? As an artist, Thurman believed that the desire to play with alternative identity was one’s ticket to pass the bounds of social conformity and proceed into the creative world of the mind, an artistic activity as rewarding for the writer as for the drag queen. Unfortunately, many critics of The Blacker the Berry have found Thurman’s portrait of Emma Lou Morgan unsatisfying (Williams; Perry). Even one of Thurman’s closest friends, Richard Bruce Nugent, asked Thurman why ‘‘he had made himself into a woman in the novel’’ (Van Notten, 224). Nugent told him that he did not know enough about women to be successful. According to Eleonore Van Notten, Thurman’s biographer, ‘‘Thurman’s reaction was an ineffectual attempt to evade the question. He replied that few people were aware of the autobiographical links between himself and Morgan’’ (224). Reviewing The Blacker the Berry for examples of authentic female-ness creates its own dubious value system, but Thurman works hard to convey the details of a dark-skinned woman’s experience, focusing on her restricted employment opportunities and her heroic attempt to stay looking pert on the interview trail (Blacker, 64–65). In many scenes he also draws attention to Morgan’s sense of social claustrophobia and physical confinement (76–84). Interestingly, Thurman evokes a sense of enclosure which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have associated with novels authored by women, and which also figures prominently in the conclusion of Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand.9 Assuming that Nugent was right, and that Thurman’s characterization of Morgan draws extensively upon Thurman’s own dark-skinned experience, Thurman is both envisioning his life in terms of women’s literary history as well as contributing his own ethos to that tradition. Thurman even frankly addresses Morgan’s awakening sexual desire as she spies men on the street corner: ‘‘She began to admire their well formed bodies and gloried in the way their trousers fit their shapely limbs, and in the way they walked, bringing their heels down so firmly and noisily on the pavement’’ (121). When Morgan first falls in love, Thurman spends two pages describing her attraction to her lover’s physique and her appetite for the touch of his tongue (50–51). It’s difficult to say whether these images of desire are feminine or gay. In either case, however, the feelings are closeted, either from the perspective of

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Thurman’s autobiographical reticence, or Morgan’s reluctance to acknowledge her ‘‘clashing’’ sexual desires (51). Thurman’s portrait of Morgan’s suppressed desire on the street may be related to the kind of queer sensibility Joseph Boone has described in his study of gay urban modernism, Libidinal Currents. Examining the relationship between literary form and homosexual content in Bruce Nugent’s Harlem Renaissance short story ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade,’’ Boone argues that there is a fusion of urban space, sexual desire, and modernist syntax in Nugent’s work. The text itself begins to manifest the life world of gay Harlem or Greenwich Village, the narrative taking on tropological elements of ‘‘cruising’’: taking abrupt turns, pausing, circling, and coyly showing off (205–32). Thurman’s novel makes similar thematic use of the city around Morgan, but, as a dark-complexioned female, her subaltern desires are thwarted by social prohibitions of a different sort. Morgan’s employment and housing opportunities are dependent upon keeping up proper appearances, a sense of confinement that is the inverse of Nugent’s uncloseted desire, and simultaneously a reflection of Thurman’s desire to control his own public image. In his second novel, Infants of the Spring, Thurman’s primary characters are male but his concern with the imaginative passing of the artist is even more explicit. Aside from being a record of the social climate of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants is Thurman’s diagnosis of the art the period produced. As many scholars have remarked, Paul Arbian represents one of the more talented figures of the novel, but the novel is also filled with several different examples of bad artists. One of the novel’s characters is Bull, whose central trait is a primitive virility. Although no one expects Bull to have any talents above the waist, he surprises the clan at Niggeratti Manor by showing off his portfolio of women’s portraits. His sketches are ‘‘painstaking, vigorous, and cleancut,’’ [b]ut Bull’s women were not women at all. They were huge amazons with pugilistic biceps, prominent muscular bulges and broad shoulders. The only thing feminine about them were the frilled red dresses in which they were all attired. (40)

As an artist, Bull’s problem is that he can’t see beyond his own masculinity. Thurman credits Bull with better talents than Pelham Gaylord, whose aesthetic shortcomings are expressed in his twofold abuse of his subjects: not only does Pelham symboli-

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cally abuse the young girl who lives upstairs by drawing a misshapen portrait of her, but he later violates her physically and is accused of rape. But even though Bull is technically capable (both as a lover and a draughtsman), he lacks the ability to imagine something that isn’t himself—what Keats once described in a letter as Shakespeare’s ‘‘Negative Capability’’ (862). Bull’s sexual and artistic talents are too egotistical. For example, when Bull muscles in on one of Raymond’s girlfriends, Lucille, Raymond is shocked that she could be attracted to such a ‘‘cave man’’ (Infants, 116). For Thurman, good artists and lovers share a sensitivity to others’ experience. The most talented artist in Infants of the Spring is the openly bisexual Paul Arbian, a dramatization of Thurman’s real-life friend and alter ego, Richard Bruce Nugent.10 Like Nugent, Paul’s wide-ranging sexual tastes are reflected in his multiple talents as painter, performer, and writer. When asked to explain the paintings of brightly colored penises that decorate his walls, Paul responds: That’s easy. I’m a genius. I’ve never had a drawing lesson in my life and I never intend to take one. I think that Oscar Wilde is the greatest man that ever lived. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes is the greatest character in literature, and Baudelaire, the greatest poet. I also like Blake, Dowson, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe and Whitman. (11)

When his companion answers, ‘‘That’s not telling me anything about your drawings,’’ Paul replies, ‘‘Unless you’re dumber than I think, I’ve told you all you need to know.’’ While the artistic genealogy Paul cites is conspicuously gay, he is also declaring that he prefers artists who question the boundaries of the acceptable. Identifying with Blake’s attack on the mind-forged manacles that bind human desire, with the grotesque limit experiences of Poe, and with the visionary utopianism of Whitman, Paul situates himself within an artistic legacy famous for its iconoclasm as much as its technical expertise. Paul’s invocation of the unholy trinity of Wilde, Huysmans, and Baudelaire points to a specifically decadent modernism based on the exploration of the supranatural or abnormal world. Baudelaire describes decadence as a perverse aesthetic of going against-the-grain: ‘‘To apply to pleasure, to the sensation of being alive, the idea of the hyperacuity of the senses, that Poe applied to pain. To effect a creation through the pure logic of contrarity. The path is already marked in the opposite direction

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(‘a rebours’)’’ (qtd. in Weir, 85). Paul Arbian thrives on this decadent aesthetic of contrarity. As Paul’s friend, Raymond, remarks, the mere decoration of Paul’s room, painted in shocking red and black, is doubly perverse. On one level, the colors are a garish choice, very much like the colors with which Huysmans’s Des Esseintes decorates his own home in A Rebours (variously translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature). On another level, Paul’s gaudy taste deliberately mocks bigoted expectations that blacks will ‘‘go in for loud colors’’ because his flamboyance both flaunts his racial identification and burlesques it at the same time (Infants, 1). Like Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, the denizens of Thurman’s Niggeratti Manor take pleasure in what they ostensibly should not. The crucial point, however, is not that Thurman’s decadents are truly corrupt; they simply appear to be so from the perspective of staid Victorian morality. The purpose of their unorthodox pleasures is not depravity for depravity’s sake, but the discovery of new forms of art, which, after all, is a fundamentally romantic quest. Decadents strive for rarified forms of beauty that others can not yet see. The experience, as Wilde puts it, is like awakening to a dream. After Dorian Gray reads A Rebours, he feels that ‘‘Things which he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed’’ (qtd in Baldick, 5). The scene in which Paul recounts his romantic dream explicitly links these visions of decadent aestheticism with sexual enlightenment. In the dream, (apparently modeled on Nugent’s ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade’’), Paul declares that he became aware of a presence. An ivory body exuding some exotic perfume. Beauty dimmed my eyes. The physical nearness of that invisible presence called to me, lured me closer. . . . I reached out and clutched a silken forelock. Involuntarily my eyes closed and I was conscious of being sucked into it until there was a complete merging. For one brief moment I experienced supreme ecstasy. (45)

Paul shocks the more conservative members of Niggeratti Manor with this story because he can’t remember whether his lover was male or female, and he doesn’t seem to care. The specific sex is of no importance to him; all that matters is the pleasure of merging. When they ask him which sex he prefers, he replies: ‘‘I really don’t know. After all there are no sexes, only sex majorities, and the primary function of the sex act is enjoy-

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ment. Therefore, I enjoyed one experience as much as the other’’ (25). Paul’s sexual freedom, however, also has a specifically racial significance. As none of the novel’s characters seems to notice, Paul’s story also describes an interracial union: his dream lover is ivory white. The dream appears to anticipate the consummation of the interracial affair between Raymond and Steve Jorgenson, Raymond’s Scandinavian bedmate, both of whom also pursue heterosexual affairs. And as in real life, where Thurman had a long term love affair with Harold Jan Stefansson and yet married Louise Thompson, the fluid sexuality of Thurman’s artistic protagonists gestures toward an idealized sphere of affiliation that transcends the political and social prejudices of race and sex. The contrast between Paul’s sexual utopia where artists, sexes, and races merge, and the segregated realities of American life is brilliantly demonstrated in another dream sequence toward the end of the novel. Distressed by the flight of his lover, Stephen, and the imprisonment of Pelham, Raymond collapses in the street. He drifts into a soothing, womblike dream of kisses, undulating waves, and billows, very similar to the erotic utopia dreamed by Paul Arbian. As his consciousness returns, he hears a voice callously mutter, ‘‘How’s the coon?’’ A female voice responds, ‘‘He’s coming out of it. Must be epileptic’’ (129). This passage grimly suggests that Raymond’s interracial ideals may remain out of reach in the near future. The last laugh, however, evoked in the dark-humored, dramatic irony of the scene, belongs to the decadent artist, Thurman. As in James Baldwin’s novel, Another Country, which proposes that the interracial and bisexual affairs of its bohemian characters take place in a literal and metaphoric other country, Thurman’s novel puts his artists in stark relief to the world around them. Thurman’s urbane awareness of the disjunction between bohemian idealism and racial prejudice in America is similar to the work of Maxim Gorky, who Thurman invokes in one of the novel’s two epigraphs. There are two sides of Gorky that appear in Thurman’s work. The first is the polemical author of Mother (1906), the champion of Russia’s rural poor and the principles of socialist realism. In Mother, Gorky’s characters often represent, and speak for, ideas. Some of the dialogues in Thurman’s Infants manifest Gorky’s soapbox tendencies. The second Gorky, less well known, is a stylist of striking imagery and economy. Inspired by the originality and ‘‘weird creativity’’ of the Russian

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Decadents and Symbolists (Dewey, vii), Gorky’s descriptions of his rural upbringing are spellbinding and grotesque, such as the blood foaming from his foundling brother’s mouth after an accident, or the fascination with which he watches his grandparents’ house burn in My Childhood.11 Gorky drew on such autobiographical memories in his 1925 novel, variously translated as Decadence or the Artamonov Business. Available to Thurman in English translation by 1927, the novel chronicles three generations of the Artamonov family textile business leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. Like Thurman’s Infants, Gorky’s novel becomes more and more cynical toward the end, reflecting Gorky’s growing disillusionment with the communist ideals of 1917. At its conclusion, Gorky seems to celebrate neither the triumph of the revolutionaries nor the achievements of the industrialists—the blood of the parents seems to have been shed in vain. Similarly, Paul’s suicide at the end of Infants doesn’t fulfill his promise as a writer, nor does it provide the Negro Renaissance with a masterwork. All that is left is Paul’s blood-soaked drawing of the spectacle of Niggeratti manor, crumbling at its foundations and ablaze with the white searchlights of America’s expectations. It’s not known whether Thurman read Decadence, but Infants of the Spring also has clear similarities to Gorky’s portraits of himself as a bohemian student. In both My Universities and Fragments from My Diary Gorky focuses his narratives around the eccentric tramps, writers, and peasants who inspired him. Encounters with these bizarre characters constitute the plot of Gorky’s autobiographies. As Thurman reminds us in the epigraph to Infants, Gorky identifies with people ‘‘not quite achieved, who are not very wise, a little mad, ‘possessed.’ ’’ It is such people ‘‘on the lunatic fringe,’’ Infants’ central character Raymond asserts, ‘‘who take the lead in instituting new points of view, in exploring slightly known territory’’ (123). In both these authors’ work, the value of eccentricity is the attempt to assay the unknown, and it results as often in inspirational failure as in practical success. Thus, in Thurman’s work (and in the decadent writers he admired), failure can carry the positive value of having gone to the limit. Modern scholars of the Harlem Renaissance complain that Infants hasn’t much of a plot and ends with an uninstructive nihilism (Perry). Robert Bone goes so far as to claim, ‘‘it was the canker of Bohemianism, in Thurman’s eyes, which threatened to nip the new Negro movement in the bud’’ (93). These

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assessments tend to misrepresent both Thurman’s literary pedigree, as well as his sexual and artistic aspirations. First, Victorian measurements of plot development and self-culture are inappropriate measures of Thurman’s decadent and modernist sensibility. Paul’s suicide must be pathetic and nihilistic— anything less would be a concession to the moralistic literature Thurman was at pains to criticize. Second, as the novel emphasizes several times, the genuinely bohemian characters are the only ones whose work promises to amount to anything: Raymond declares that ‘‘it’s going to be Pauls we need, not Pelhams’’ (31). Ultimately, the destruction of Paul’s magnum opus in a deluge of blood and bathwater is an eloquent tribute to Huysmans’ decadent romanticism, not its rejection. In Thurman’s eyes, the problem with the Renaissance was not that artists like Paul died young or that their work didn’t last—it was the inability of their followers to live up to the promise of those vanguard talents. Thurman’s transgressive sexuality thus provides a framework for understanding his fascination with liminality and passing in a context that doesn’t ritually condemn him for self- loathing or racial sedition. Rather, it allows us to begin to see that the sense of indeterminacy that Langston Hughes so memorably described in his portrait of Thurman in The Big Sea (‘‘a strange kind of fellow, who liked to drink gin, but didn’t like drinking gin, who liked being a Negro, but felt a great handicap; who adored bohemianism but thought it wrong to be a bohemian’’) is what makes Thurman’s work so rewarding and challenging (377). Second, acknowledging the European and decadent aspects of Thurman’s work puts him in literary company where his value as a writer is not judged solely by his politically correct contribution to the advancement of black American racial dignity. Thurman may not have been a race leader that the NAACP would have approved of, but his work continues to be read both popularly and in the academy. Finally, Thurman’s decadence highlights the shortcomings of approaching his work from a rigidly national framework. Given the content of his work and his mentors, it is important to situate him in a transforming, international bohemian literary movement, stretching from the Romantics, to the Decadents and the Beats, and to rap music. This is a crucial point for getting beyond nationalist discussions of the Harlem Renaissance, or Thurman’s place in it, as failures. As George Hutchinson argues, by imagining American culture as both white and black (and

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among other things, not necessarily wholesome), we can begin to see the lasting contributions of the Harlem Renaissance without faulting it for failing to rapidly overturn the effects of centuries of racial discrimination. Perhaps, by returning to writers like Wallace Thurman, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance is just unfolding.

Notes 1. For censure of Thurman, see Bone, 92–94; Perry, 89–93; Bell, 145–49; Davis, 108–13; and Walden, 205–10. Wilson Moses, in his recovery of ‘‘tasteful’’ black intellectualism of early twentieth-century Washington DC, Boston, and Atlanta, argues that the bohemianism Thurman represented was merely a new-age minstrel show of black exoticism for white audiences (73; 64). For a more appreciative assessment, see Huggins, Gaither, and especially Amritjit Singh’s foreword to Infants of the Spring, which focuses on the importance of love and affection in Thurman’s work. Singh’s chapter on ‘‘Race and Sex’’ in his The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance, though mentioning Thurman only briefly, is very important for its treatment of the positive aspects of human sexuality. 2. Resistance to acknowledging the gay aspects of the Harlem Renaissance is discussed in a special issue of The Journal of Homosexuality 26.2/3 (1993), edited by Emmanuel Nelson, also published in book form, Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color. See also the special issue of Callaloo 23.1 (Winter 2000). Germane to gay readings of Harlem Renaissance writers are essays by Diggs, Woods, and Reimonenq. See also Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Garber, and Cobb. Eleonore Van Notten discusses Thurman’s homosexuality but includes little on Thurman’s lover, Harold Jan Stefansson (236–37; 261–62). Joseph Boone’s recent Libidinal Currents, helpful for drawing connections between urban space and modernist texts in general, attempts to identify a specifically urban queer literary syntax based on Bruce Nugent’s story in Fire!!, ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade.’’ 3. The letter continues: ‘‘She had to have an operation in Salt Lake . . . remember . . . in order to make an entry possible, and because by that time I had lost all sexual feeling for her and tho there was consummation of the sexual act I was blackmailed thusly. The alibi being that she had been so upset by this vile disclosure that it had ruined her life. And such is my tale of woe. Doesn’t it sound like a novel? You can understand now what a mental state I was in during those last few weeks in New York, and why I had to get away. And you can also imagine with what relish a certain group of Negroes in Harlem received and relayed the news that I was a homo. No evidence is needed of course beyond the initial rumor. Such is life.’’ For more on Thurman’s relationship to Thompson, and her insistence that Thurman never admitted to her that he was homosexual (Van Notten, 201–11). 4. The play Harlem ends with Cordelia, her gambling lover killed, brazenly continuing her wild life in Harlem. If there is a close relationship between Thurman and Cordelia, Thurman declined to script her with an unkind fate. The play opened on February 20, 1929, and ran for 109 performances be-

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tween 1929 and 1930 (Burns Mantle, 1928–29, 472–73; 1929–30, 426–27). Apparently, Thompson and Thurman’s divorce was in the making the night of the play’s opening, when Thompson didn’t accompany Thurman to the performance (Klotman, 266). 5. Eleonore Van Notten, among the best scholars of Thurman’s work to date, agrees with West (224). Van Notten points to Thurman’s likely appropriation of H. L. Mencken’s idea of the urbane artist-iconoclast who criticizes society from a detached point of view (107–18). For Mencken’s effect on black writers of the period in general, see Scruggs. 6. According to Symonds’s chapter on Ulrichs in A Problem in Modern Ethics, Ulrichs’s developmental model of the embryo explained several different kinds of temperament: the Dioning is heterosexual; the Manning is an effeminate male; the Weibling is one who prefers adult homosexual lovers; the Zwischen-Urning likes young boys; the Uranodioning is bisexual; the Uraniaster participates in homosexual behavior by chance or circumstance; and the Virilisirt is a homosexual who marries. Thurman might resemble several of these types, but I argue that his polymorphous behavior resists these kinds of categorization. 7. As Ulrichs intended, Symonds and Carpenter appropriated his work as a means of defending homosexuals from prosecution under the English Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 on physiological grounds (Summers, 19; Bergman, 19, 99–102). Associated with these writers, Timothy D’Arch Smith has identified an English literary group which he calls the ‘‘Uranian poets,’’ which existed from the 1880s to the 1930s. See also Dowling on the Uranian poets in the context of the cult of Hellenism at Oxford. The group’s literature is mainly characterized by portraits of man-boy love, an appropriation of the Uranian concept not necessarily shared by Symonds and Carpenter, whose use of the term generally applies to liaisons between people of the same age. Steven Watson reports that in Greenwich village parlance, homosexuals were known as ‘‘intermediate sexes’’ or ‘‘uranians’’ (144). 8. For more on the details of this debate, allegedly started by Carl Van Vechten as a publicity stunt to increase sales of his forthcoming Nigger Heaven, see Kellner, 53–54, and Van Notten, 47–49. 9. The conclusion of The Blacker the Berry seems closely related to Quicksand: both suggest a kind of failure. Just as Helga settles for the humble rewards of religion, sex, and home, Emma’s final act of self-reliance, her refusal to accept life with Alva, is described as a ‘‘Pyrrhic Victory.’’ Both heroines experience the tragic recognition that even the most noble human actions cannot provide unalloyed satisfaction. 10. Nugent and Thurman were very close until 1929, after which the friendship seems to have broken over questions of personal status, finances, and mutual accusations of plagiarism. Because Nugent lived until 1987, there exist several taped interviews bearing on his relationship with Thurman, held by Dr. Thomas Wirth (Van Notten, 64). Van Notten incorporates much of this valuable information in her book. In many of the excerpts Van Notten provides, Nugent seems anxious to distinguish his own contributions to the Renaissance. See also Charles Smith’s ‘‘Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance.’’ 11. Presiding appropriately enough over Thurman’s mordant satire in Infants, Maxim Gorky took his pen name from his dead brother and father, Maxim, and his last name from the Russian word meaning, ‘‘bitter.’’ For critical biographies of Gorky, see Dan Levin, and especially F. M. Borras.

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Works Cited Baldick, Robert, trans and intro. Against Nature [A Rebours], by Joris Karl Huysmans. New 21 York: Penguin, 1959. Baldwin, James. Another Country. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1993. Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1987. Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Borras, F. M. Maxim Gorky: The Writer, An Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Burns Mantle, Robert, ed. Best Plays of 1928–1929 and a Yearbook of the Drama in America. New York: Dodd, Mead. ———. Best Plays of 1929–1930 and a Yearbook of the Drama in America. New York: Dodd, Mead. Carpenter, Edward. ‘‘The Intermediate Sex.’’ 1906. In Selected Writings. Volume 1: Sex. Intro., edited by Noel Greig, 185–204. London: GMP, Ltd, 1984. Cobb, Michael L. ‘‘Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers.’’ Callaloo 23.1 (Winter 2000): 328–51. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981. Dewey, Veronica, trans. Decadence by Maxim Gorky. 1927. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Diggs, Marylynne. ‘‘Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity.’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2/3 (1993): 1–19. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Du Bois, W. E. B. Review of The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman. The Crisis (July 1929): 249–50. Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur. ‘‘The Mark of Sexual Preference in the Interpretation of Texts: Preface to a Homosexual Reading.’’ Journal of Homosexuality 25 (1992): 65–88. Gaither, Renoir W. ‘‘The Moment of Revision: A Reappraisal of Wallace Thurman’s Aesthetics in The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring.’’ CLA Journal 37.1 (September 1993): 81–93. Garber, Eric. ‘‘A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem.’’ In Hidden From History, edited by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vincinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 318–31. New York: New American Library, 1989. Gilbert, Sandra N., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gorky, Maxim. The Autobiography of Maxim Gorky: My Childhood: In the World: My Universities, translated by Isidor Schneider. New York: Citadel, 1949. ———. Decadence, translated by Veronica Dewey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. [1927]. ———. Fragments from My Diary. London: Philip Allan and Co, 1924. Henderson, Gwendolyn Mae. ‘‘Portrait of Wallace Thurman.’’ In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, 1972. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Hughes, Langston. The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1958. Hutchinson, George B. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995. Huysmans, Joris Karl. A Rebours. 1884. New York: Dover, 1969. Keats, John. Letter to George and Thomas Keats. December 21, 1817. In Norton Anthology of English Literature, fifth edition, vol 2, edited by M. H. Abrams, 862–63. New York: Norton, 1986. Kellner, Bruce. ‘‘Keep A-Inchin’A long’’: Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten about Black Arts and Letters. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979. Klotman, Phyllis R. ‘‘Wallace Thurman.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 51, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious Davis, 260–73. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987. Levin, Dan. Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky. London: Frederick Muller, 1965. Levin, James. The Gay Novel: The Male Homosexual Image in America. New York: Garland, 1991. Locke, Alain. Review of Fire!! Survey Graphic (September 15, 1927): 563. Moses, Wilson J. ‘‘The Lost World of the Negro, 1895–1919: Black Literary and Intellectual Life Before the Renaissance.’’ Black American Literature Forum 21 (1987): 63–75. Nugent, Richard Bruce. ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade, A Novel, Part L’’ Fire!! 1.1 (November 1926): 33–40. Perry, Margaret. Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976. Reimonenq, Alden. ‘‘Countee Cullen’s ‘Soul Windows.’ ’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2/3 (1993): 143–64. Robinson, Amy. ‘‘It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.’’ Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994):715–36. Ross, Marlon B. ‘‘Some Glances at the Black Fag: Race, Same-Sex Desire, and Cultural Belonging.’’ In African American Literary Theory, edited by Winston Napier, 498–522. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Reprint: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 3 (1994): 191–219.

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Scruggs, Charles. The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Singh, Amritjit. Foreward to Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. ———. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Smith, Charles Michael. ‘‘Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, edited by Joseph Beam, 209– 20. Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 1986. Smith, Timothy D’Arch. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘‘Uranian’’ Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Summers, Claude. Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990. Symonds, John Addington. A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) Studies in Sexual Inversion, Embodying A Study in Greek Ethics and A Study in Modern Ethics. Privately Printed, 1928. Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. New York: MacCaulay, 1929. ———. ‘‘Cordelia the Crude.’’ Fire!! I (November 1926): 5–7. ———. Infants of the Spring. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ———. Letter. June I [1929]. James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beineke Library, Yale University. ———. Letter to William Jourdan Rapp. May 7 [1929] James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beineke Library, Yale University. ———. Review of Black Harvest, by I. A. R. Wylie. The Messenger 8 (May 1926): 154. ———. Review of Flight, by Walter White. The Messenger 8 (May 1926): 154. Thurman, Wallace, and William Jourdan Rapp. Harlem. James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beineke Library, Yale University. Van Notten, Eleonore. Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance. Amsterdam Rodolpi, 1994. Walden, Daniel. ‘‘ ‘The Canker Galls,’ or, The Short Promising Life of Wallace Thurman.’’ The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined, edited by Victor A. Kramer, 201–10. New York: AMS, 1987. Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. West, Dorothy. ‘‘The Elephant’s Dance.’’ Black World (November 1970): 77–85. Williams, John A. Afterward to Infants of the Spring. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Woods, Gregory. ‘‘Gay Re-Readings of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.’’ Journal of Homosexuality 26.2/3 (1993): 127–42.

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No Heaven in Harlem: Countee Cullen and His Diasporic Doubles David Jarraway

TO THE PRESENT DAY, THE LIFE AND WORK OF ONE OF THE GREAT LU-

minaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen (1903– 1946), continues to spark controversy. With respect to Cullen’s work, Houston Baker, for instance, observes that it only took Cullen’s first book of poems, Color (published in 1925), to establish ‘‘the poet’s place as a leading figure’’ of the New Negro movement, and reminds us that it was Cullen ‘‘who was called by contemporaries the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance’’ (Poetics 57, 52; see also Douglas, 340). For George Hutchinson, however, ‘‘Cullen was never the ‘dominant’ presence in Opportunity’’ when he was brought on board that important black publication in 1926, ‘‘let alone in the Harlem Renaissance.’’ Cullen was too ‘‘respectable,’’ too ‘‘middle-class,’’ and above all, too ‘‘concerned’’ about ‘‘displaying the ‘embarrassing’ aspects of the race to white people’’ (188, 189). As Darryl Pinckney mordantly sums up the case, ‘‘The sadness of [Cullen’s] career lies in his inability to claim as his own the tradition he admired . . . hand[ing] it back, like a poor relation careful to show his patient good manners’’ (18). Respectability and good manners thus act as a further flashpoint with respect to the life informing Cullen’s work. Commenting on ‘‘the issue of homosexuality,’’ arguably central to both respectability and good manners, editor of The Collected Writings, Gerald Early, asserts that there is ‘‘no evidence that Cullen was engaged in any homosexual relations with any other figures of the Renaissance,’’ despite some scholars who ‘‘have read letters and poems that seem suggestive in this regard but have offered nothing conclusive’’ (19). To the contrary, Alden Reimonenq argues for ‘‘Cullen’s jubilation over finding his homosexual self’’ and ‘‘acceptance of his gay identity’’ well before publishing his first book of poetry (144). Reimonenq shows in 214

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considerable detail that the poet, in fact, engaged in eight separate homosexual relationships throughout his lifetime, the final one lasting until Cullen’s death in 1946.1 Given the heated argument over two controversies concerning this writer’s literary reputation, it may appear overly burdensome to add still a third: Cullen’s questionable status as a Harlem Renaissance ‘‘poet.’’ Yet, it is true that his last major work was not a book of poetry at all (to add to the three collections already in print), but instead, a novel: One Way to Heaven (1932). How, then, ought we to deal with the important achievement of a noted black author wracked with such puzzling polarities? The position I propose to adopt in this essay—dealing specifically with Cullen’s poetry in the second part, then with his novel in the third—is generally to resist all attempts to separate the real writer—out into his final racial identity, his ultimate sexual orientation—into, in a word, his one, true, absolutely authentic sense of self. If an ostensibly ‘‘black gay poet’’ chose to climax his work by writing a novel, or to round out his life by taking a second wife—if such a personage tells us anything at all, it’s just that he could never easily be classified or catalogued or categorized as merely one thing, but is perhaps better viewed as a ‘‘category crisis’’ (Marjorie Garber 16).2 To invoke the famous dictum of his former father-in-law in The Souls of Black Folk, though in ways that W. E. B. Du Bois may have been unaware in this case, Cullen was an exemplary instance of the black subject’s ‘‘peculiar sensation [of] double-consciousness,’’ this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity [so that] One ever feels his twoness—an American, a negro. (16)

In foregrounding the sense of ‘‘twoness’’ in Cullen’s life and work, the Harlem identity that doubles both as poet and novelist, straight and gay, American and Negro (among others) suggested by my subtitle, I, therefore, want to exploit the considerable irony that the oneness that Cullen’s novel, One Way to Heaven, draws upon, indeed, that Cullen’s entire writing career underscores, when both are revolved too facilely from a single, unified, teleological perspective, as noted in the heated controversies previously. More importantly, however, as my playful main title willfully suggests, I want to expand upon in Cullen a certain ‘‘principle of difference or negativity’’ that Law-

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rence Grossberg seizes upon in the cultural criticism of Stuart Hall, and that, in its startling parallel, ocular imagery, takes us to the very heart of Du Bois’s theory of the subject’s ‘‘doubleconsciousness’’ described above. ‘‘As Hall says,’’ to cite Grossberg on this principle of negative difference, ‘‘identity is a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself’’ (96, emphasis added). For a highly equivocal writer like Cullen, whose own sense of identity in various contexts was never quite capable of eluding its opposite, no ‘‘heaven,’’ as I shall endeavor to show, could possibly exist. For that heavenly sense of a pure unific sense of oneness would be sure to void any of identity’s attempts to constitute itself through a differential contact with the other. Stuart Hall thus invites us to see how the simplicity of ‘‘oneness’’ actually serves to mask an extraordinary degree of complexity, remarking further elsewhere ‘‘how necessary ‘the Other’ is to our own sense of identity . . . [like] the two sides of the same coin’’ (‘‘Race,’’ 16).3 To the degree that ‘‘us’’ (self, identity) would appear inconceivable now apart from its codependent relation to ‘‘them’’ (other, difference)—two sides of the same coin, as it were—to this extent are we perhaps afforded the best insight into the double-consciousness through which Cullen is more likely predisposed to approach the complexity of issues such as race, sexuality, and literary tradition outlined previously. And to this extent, too, are we startled to discover just how forward looking his artistic vision actually is. On the subject of race, for instance, only recently have we truly begun to come to terms with the argument ‘‘that white American culture simply cannot be imagined apart from black American culture,’’ as Eric Sundquist contends in his formidable To Wake the Nations, where ‘‘the necessary contradiction that the two traditions can be seen as both one and separate’’ forms a ‘‘spiraling dialectic’’ spanning several hundred pages of close black-and-white textual analysis (4, 22, 182).4 Accordingly, if Cullen’s receptivity to otherness by virtue of his doubling discourse allows his vision to be as forward looking, it’s only because as a black man he is so relentlessly minded at the same time of the white literary traditions that he sees clearly behind him: of Keats and Housman, and of Millay and Robinson to cite his most cherished canonical idols (Tuttleton, 131). As the product of a ‘‘diasporic consciousness’’ characteristic of most of the displanted Harlem Renaissance writers, his identity is thus ‘‘always an open, complex, unfin-

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ished game, always under construction’’—an identity that can only ‘‘move into the future through a symbolic detour through the past’’ (Hall, ‘‘Culture,’’ 362).5 Cullen’s irony of oneness, then, affords a fresh opportunity for deepening our appreciation of his artistic practice that, for many readers, in view of certain of his theoretical statements taken in isolation, can appear bloodlessly assimilationist. His infamous pronouncement in 1925, for example, that ‘‘I am not a Negro poet!’’ (qtd. in Early, 38), from a double-consciousness perspective, can perhaps be read more insightfully as an attempt to resist the essentialism of the kind of identity politics in which assimilation itself is ultimately grounded. His resistance is made even clearer in his introduction to the black poetry anthology, Caroling Dusk, published two years later: Negro poetry, it seems to me, in the sense that we speak of Russian, French, or Chinese poetry, must emanate from some country other than this, in some language other than our own. Moreover, the attempt to corral the outbursts of the ebony muse into some definite mold to which all poetry by Negroes will conform seems altogether futile and aside from the facts. (Early, 39)

If the ‘‘ebony muse’’ existed at all, its sustaining principle was not an essentializing conformity but rather a mongrelizing othering (see Douglas, 49, 402–3, 449). And such othering, Cullen scandalously observes, ought never to discount the ‘‘heretical’’ possibility ‘‘that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings towards an African inheritance’’ hermetically sealed within ‘‘the needless distinction of a separate . . . Negro verse’’ (39–40). ‘‘[Cullen] was not flattering the literary establishment,’’ Ann Douglas affirms with respect to this declaration, ‘‘so much as he was insisting on his own status as an American and acknowledging the realities of American art, black or white, and of the Western literary tradition more generally’’ (340). That ‘‘American’’ traditionalism and ‘‘Negro poets,’’ like the proverbial lion and lamb, might conceivably lie down together in Cullen’s poetics points historically to a longstanding tension in U.S. culture that, according to Arjun Appadurai, American social thought over time has valiantly struggled to accommodate: ‘‘the tension between the centripetal pull of Americanness and the centrifugal pull of diasporic diversity in American life,’’ or

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more generally, ‘‘a sense that plurality is the American genius and that there is an Americanness that somehow contains and transcends plurality’’ (425, 423). As we are about to see, this tension figures enormously throughout Cullen’s work, and is perhaps the most significant manifestation of his double-consciousness. In theory, he seems often overwhelmed by it, almost to the point of paralysed circumspection in exhortations like ‘‘Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions’’ and ‘‘Every phase of Negro life should not be the white man’s concern’’ (qtd. in Early, 44). In the highly repressed ‘‘Americanism’’ of the following, it’s even possible to imagine the specter of a gay man cowering behind that of a Negro poet: Every house worthy of the name has an attic or a bin for an out-ofthe way closet where one may hide the inevitable family skeleton. But who inviting a prominent guest to tea, or dinner, and hoping to make even the slightest of good impressions, feels called upon to guide the guest sedulously through every nook and corner of the house, not omitting attic, bin, and the dusty retreat of the skeleton? In most well-regulated households one’s guest would not get further than the parlor. . . . The parlor should be large enough for [the white man’s] entertainment and instruction. (44)

In discursive practice, however, going with Cullen’s figure of the domestic household here, it’s precisely the ‘‘parlour’’ that we do get beyond, the constraining limit of the ‘‘closet’’ in this instance doubling as the constitutive means by which the parlour does indeed become ‘‘large enough,’’ and then some. In short, Cullen’s double-consciousness forges the link between theory and practice.

II In the three sequences of Cullen’s poems to which I now turn, in preparation for a reading of his later novel, the shear labor of ‘‘working the tension’’ in artistic discourse would appear to be the overriding thematic in the two collections of verse I shall be briefly visiting: Color (1925) and Copper Sun (1927). In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North speaks of a tension quite pronounced in the expatriate writings of High Modernists like Pound and Yeats—‘‘a tension between what is and what might be’’ that largely stems from a feeling of displacement that several of these writers had experienced first-hand. Comments

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North: ‘‘To feel oneself in two places at once, at home and abroad, is almost to feel as two persons and thus to acquire skepticism about the possibility of ever having an identity if that means being just one thing’’ (67). The months Cullen spent tramping around Europe on vacations with his adoptive father in the formative years of his writing career, then later, studying French language and literature in Paris (see Fabre), undoubtedly exacerbated his own native sense of double-consciousness in precisely the manner that North describes. But if the benefit of the double-placement lies in the avoidance of ‘‘being just one thing,’’ of corralling the outbursts of the native muse ‘‘into some definite mold’’ (as Cullen would say) in order to enlist what Robert Langbaum calls the ‘‘mysteries of identity’’ (North, 67), it’s clear that containment in any form for Cullen is what must be resisted in the very first instance. Decontainment, therefore, bulks large as a central preoccupation in an initial sequence of poems featured in Copper Sun, the second verse collection in Cullen’s Collected Writings (CW hereafter). In ‘‘Thoughts in a Zoo,’’ for instance, lions, eagles, moles, and even snakes all suffer the indignity of an unnatural sequestration ‘‘in their cruel traps’’ (CW, 158). In the case of humankind, however, the indignity appears more cruel not only because the tension between what is and what might be is so much greater: ‘‘Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped, / But in the stifling flesh securely trapped’’ (CW, 158). But the indignity is also magnified by the fact that humankind has genuine insight, however fleeting, into the cruelty of its captive predicament: ‘‘Who is wretched, these caged ones or we, / Caught in a vastness beyond our sight to see?’’ (CW, 158). A second poem, ‘‘The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth,’’ also deals with the cruelty of a captive human predicament. Here, however, in the depiction of a husband who dies in an unsanctioned marital relationship, the sense of entrapment is verbal rather than physical—verbal with respect to the overwhelming sense of enclosure by social institution and orthodox tradition, and those who thoughtlessly pay lip service to them: And brand with ‘‘Shame’’ these two that burned Without the legal thong Her man would say they were no rabble To love like common clay,— But Christian tongues are trained to babble In such a bitter way. (CW, 157)

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In this instance, Cullen maps out the tension between the real and the ideal in terms of the shaming ‘‘Christian tongues,’’ on the one hand, and an unspeakable love too pure to suffer human regulation, on the other, like the Holy Spirit ironically alluded to in the poem’s title that ‘‘is always free,’’ and as in the New Testament, ‘‘bloweth where it listeth’’ (CW, 156). As we trace this first sequence further through Copper Sun, constrictions, captures, and confinements grow apace, accompanied by their appropriate hortatory cautions, as in ‘‘Advice to a Beauty’’: Sweet bird, beware the Fowler, Pride; His knots once neatly crossed and tied, The prey is caged and walked about With no way in and no way out. (CW, 170)

With such relentless fixation on incarceration, Cullen rather cagily seems to be suggesting that it’s by means of the very containment itself through which one might hope to gain its surcease. In ‘‘In Spite of Death,’’ for instance, the buried seed veritably ‘‘exults’’ over its flower’s desecration by the ‘‘bleakest winter’’ just so that its own ‘‘deathless / pulse’’ can triumphally exert itself when ‘‘Spring wipes [winter’s] sacrilege away’’ (CW, 162). And the narrator of the poem wagers to be no less the tempter of his own fate: ‘‘No less shall I in some new fashion flare / Again when death has blown my candles out’’ (CW, 162). In such contempt for captive death, the narrator dares to rival Cullen’s beloved Shelley, to whom ‘‘Cor Cordium’’ pays tender homage: Imprisoned in the flesh, he wrought Till Death as Prospero, Pitied the spark that life had caught, Loosed him, and let him go. (CW, 163)

Cullen’s pun on ‘‘wrought’’ in the above stanza—art’s ‘‘wrought’’ undone by nature’s ‘‘rot’’—in the end, I think, underscores the rank ambivalence that the decontainment sequence is intended to convey in the poet’s own double-mindedness about the binary thematics it evokes: ambivalences about freedom and restraint, about flesh and spirit, and ultimately, about life and death itself.

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If decontainment becomes most effectively achieved in Cullen by means, ironically, of an unremitting pursuit of containment, might not Cullen’s dutiful attention to poetry’s traditional forms and conventional meters throughout his work be expected to produce similar results? In this second sequence, which I extract from Cullen’s first book, Color, we notice something quite similar to the ‘‘built-in structure of disavowal’’ that Eric Lott identifies in the theatrical practice of blackface minstrelsy, where ‘‘denigrated features (like the reduction of black men to sexuality) could all too easily become secret sources of male identification’’ (123). In this new deformation sequence, however, Cullen’s ‘‘disavowal’’ operates in reverse when his poeticizing ostensibly honors all the features of an essentially white hegemonic verse tradition while at the same time secretly subverting various aspects of the prosodic mimicry, thereby sustaining what Lott calls ‘‘the irony of the counterfeit’’ (123). In ‘‘Atlantic City Waiter,’’ for instance, the black waiter currying favor with his white lady-diners is the very mirror-image of the black poet playing up to his dear reader in the ballad quatrains of alternating four and three stress iambic lines—right down to their heavily scrutinized poetic ‘‘feet’’: With subtle poise he grips his tray Of delicate things to eat; Choice viands to their mouths half way, The ladies watch his feet Go carving dexterous avenues Through sly intricacies; Ten thousand years on jungles clues Alone shaped feet like these. (CW, 85)

A careful reader, however, can hear Cullen’s formal structure go to smash in the final stanza with the willful introduction of the word ‘‘like’’ in the poem’s penultimate line. The extra stress added to the line makes it radically unlike any of the others we have read. Hence, the most sedulous investment in the protocols of form has yielded their opposite, and with this doubledisavowal, we are directed in the poem’s final line to find another place ‘‘where the sun strikes free’’ (CW, 85). If deformation equates to freedom in this last text, the link conceivably lies in that ‘‘acquiescent mask’’ that turns identity, like the poet’s own form, into a variable practice that may (or

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may not) require ‘‘colder artifice’’ (CW, 85). North’s suggestion, therefore, that a mask’s embodiment of the ‘‘indeterminacy of human identity’’ lends a certain ‘‘residual ambiguity’’ to ‘‘the racial masquerade’’ (67, 70) picks up on the notion of an ‘‘unclassified residuum’’ that Ross Posnock recently remarks upon in the antiracist and anti-imperialist pluralism of William James: ‘‘that which slips the concept’s grasp [on which a racially segregated social order depends] and encourages the ‘re-instatement of the vague’ ’’ in the case of a writer like W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, in order to ‘‘dissolve the stark rigidities bred by Jim Crow . . . and grant respect for the intricacy of black experience’’ (343, 342). Conceivably, Cullen’s deformation of conventional prosody can be read as a similar gesture toward the vague complexity of black experience, particularly in view of the fact that, so often, a ‘‘facility at ‘white-oriented’ discourse serves to defuse the ‘threat’ of rampant black male sexuality that constitutes so much of the sexuopolitical structure of U.S. society’’ (Harper, 10). In Cullen’s ‘‘To a Brown Girl,’’ for instance, the perfectly modulated rhymes and rhythms of the second stanza offer a kind of nice rhetorical vagueness against the male ‘‘glance,’’ which is far too ‘‘bold and free’’ earlier: What if no puritanic strain Confines him to the nice? He will not pass this way again, Nor hunger for you twice. (CW, 83)

With the deforming metrical irregularity of the penultimate line of the poem—‘‘Youth is the time for careless weather:’’ (CW, 83) and especially with the pun on ‘‘whether’’—enough difficult experience breaks through the textual patterning at least to make the Brown Girl, ‘‘like Magdalen and Mary,’’ of two minds about what the black male there might ultimately represent (CW, 83). The previous texts from Color ought not to suggest that Cullen himself could not have been of two minds about deformation. Undoubtedly, there are moments when the intricacy of experience is simply too overwhelming, too intractable, too painful. ‘‘[Its images] are too ‘real’ to be represented,’’ comments Rustom Bharucha in a related context, and ‘‘We learn to acknowledge our distances from the violence in question, and thereby, explore new proximities to its echoes and repercussions . . . as the lingering terror . . . continues to be sanitized in the

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oblivion of words’’ (55–56). Cullen’s best-known poem from his first book, ‘‘Incident,’’ perhaps suggests how poetic form sometimes offers a much needed thankful distance from the experience of racial terror, particularly when the target is so vulnerable and the incident so unexpected: Now as I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue and called me, ‘‘Nigger.’’ (CW, 90)

In the previous stanza, the breaking of form with the little narrator’s ‘‘Heart-filled, head-filled with glee’’ immediately opens him up to the threat of his ‘‘Baltimorean’’ antagonist’s more stringently paced ‘‘Keep looking straight at me’’ (CW, 90), and the dire consequences which follow. And although the metrical disparity here perhaps reinforces ‘‘the sudden realization,’’ for Cullen, ‘‘that the norms of the larger society do not work for him,’’ as Baker forcefully remarks (qtd. in North, 110), nonetheless the poet’s deformation sequence reveals, at least in this text, that being ‘‘somewhat impatient of discipline,’’ according to Claude McKay’s preface to Constab Ballads (qtd. in North, 110) is sometimes bought at a price. In the following ‘‘Saturday’s Child,’’ the devastating rejection of a young son by his father— ‘‘One more mouth to feed’’ (CW, 91)—appears at least to have been made bearable by the smoothness of Cullen’s perfectly rhythmical technique, where, indeed, an oblivion of words seems to have found a quarter for the child otherwise ruefully ‘‘handed to Sorrow’’ (CW, 91). It is by means of Cullen’s double-conscious deployments of decontainment and deformation that we come, finally, to understand the poet’s resorting to a necessary disidentification in the handling of various aspects of subjectivity in a third sequence of poems spanning the two verse collections already touched upon. The ‘‘mystery’’ or ‘‘vagueness’’ of the human subject in theories previously discussed can once again help us to comprehend this final grouping. But with ‘‘notions of ‘biculturality’ and ‘double consciousness,’ ’’ as Ien Ang observes, we also need to maintain a lively sense of the ‘‘creative tension between ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’ ’’—a sense, that is to say, of the ‘‘productivity’’ that ‘‘precisely fills the space [the mystery, the vagueness] . . . with new forms of culture at the collision/collusion of

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the two [sides in the bipolar dichotomy]’’ (16). In ‘‘Fruit of the Flower,’’ for example, the narrator is given to reflect upon his transgressive sense of selfhood—‘‘the hectic blood / That flushes this wild fruit’’ (CW, 96)—but is incapable of comprehending himself fully without at the same time taking into account his father’s ‘‘sober, steady ways’’ and his ‘‘mother’s life [as] puritan’’ (CW, 95). Indeed, his codependent sense of origin is so startlingly confirmed by the secret life of ‘‘wild sweet agony’’ he comes to realize he shares with his parents, that to prize apart his and their identity would be, to go with the productivity of the poems’s title, fruitless. ‘‘Fruit,’’ of course, may also impart the sense of ‘‘queer’’ to the wildness of the narrator’s identity, so that in reference to the narrator’s ‘‘naked tribal dance’’ in the foregoing text (CW, 95), it is conceivable that ‘‘Cullen use[s] race to blur the focus’’ (Reimonenq, 158). But the idea of blurring distorts the doubleconsciousness of the disidentified subject in this and other poems, the awareness, that is to say, that the disidentity is a ‘‘hybrid cultural form borne out of a productive, creative syncretism’’ that includes both white and black, young and old, straight and gay, and is, accordingly, ‘‘governed by the unerased traces of ‘where you’re from,’ no matter how mediated, but ultimately framed by the possibilities and limits offered by ‘where you’re at’ ’’ (Ang, 16, 17).6 Critics, therefore, who disavow Cullen’s identity politics as too assimilationist or too closeted unfairly saddle him with ‘‘the disciplinary yoke of authenticity’’ (Posnock, 345) that, like McKay, would indeed make him impatient by radically foreshortening the sense of ‘‘liminality’’ with respect to his disidentities—‘‘the ineradicable space in-between’’ where they are always ‘‘compelled to construct [themselves]’’ (Ang, 17). Cullen, of course, can ‘‘come out’’ to us as a writer, and as Reimonenq and Avi-Ram among others reveal, often does (see also Woods, 139, Chauncey, 265). But as black science fiction writer Samuel Delany shrewdly observes about such gay experiences in his own work, ‘‘I cannot claim that [they] either identified or defined anything of me but only parts of my endlessly iterated (thus always changing) situation’’ (26). In the poem ‘‘Hunger,’’ the in-between space of Cullen’s endlessly articulated disidentities thus becomes ‘‘the emptiness’’ he acknowledges he can never fill and the ‘‘desert thirst’’ he can never slake (CW, 168). And yet, each syncretic construction that takes form there is an ‘‘artifice of loveliness’’ as Cullen states, a tiny ripple in the much larger wave of what Nella Larsen in

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Quicksand (1928) undoubtedly would call a ‘‘moving mosaic’’—a permeable human pageant whose ‘‘suspensiveness subverts the dominant culture’s categories of monadic individualism and social determinism . . . operating at the limit of consciousness’’ (Esteve, 282, 283): Inevitable is the way I go, False-faced amid a pageant permeate With bliss, yet visioning a higher wave Than this weak ripple washing to and fro; (CW 168)

The false-face in this important passage I take to be the very figure of disidentification in Cullen, ‘‘not a cover for an unconventional sexuality’’ (or racial or ethnic identity), as North remarks of the mask, ‘‘but a revelation of it, even a means of achieving it’’ (70), or as Lott contends with the ‘‘self-commodification’’ of the minstrel’s blackface, ‘‘a way of getting along in a constricted world’’ (39). Hence, disidentification resists all essentialist notions of identity, and argues instead for subjective agency. ‘‘I hold not with the fatalist creed / Of what be must be,’’ Cullen tells us in ‘‘Ultimatum’’ (CW, 171): ‘‘The seed I plant is chosen well; / Ambushed by no sly sweven [i.e., preconceived vision]’’ (CW, 171, emphasis added). In ‘‘Epilogue,’’ therefore, he chooses to pass by the known ‘‘white’’ of the ‘‘lily’’ and the ‘‘red’’ of another ‘‘vivid flower,’’ opting instead for death’s ‘‘brilliant shade’’ that ‘‘no man knows’’ (CW, 174). His choice, here, squares with a kind of thinking about identity not ‘‘as an accomplished fact,’’ but rather as ‘‘a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation’’ (Hall, ‘‘Diaspora,’’ 222; see also Ang, 18). The unknown he takes by measure with the known, to complete the double process of his thought. Yet disidentification will always seem preferable to Cullen. ‘‘What’s in the grave,’’ as he states in ‘‘For Myself,’’ ‘‘is worth your tear; / There’s more than the eye can see’’ (CW, 121).

III The double-consciousness of the three poetic sequences investigated in the last section more than anything, I think, severely problematizes the notion of a discursive ‘‘purity’’ in Cullen’s

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work, whether the thematic focus is the issue of race, gender, sexuality, or even literary tradition. As William Carlos Williams once famously remarked at about this time, ‘‘The pure products of America / go crazy—,’’ (217). Cultural theorists and historians have not been remiss in dwelling on this point. Stuart Hall, for instance, cogently argues that the ‘‘underlying overdetermination [of] black cultural repertoires constituted from two directions at once’’ is to insist that . . . ethnographically speaking, there are no pure forms at all. Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagement across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural tradition. . . . Thus, they must always be heard, not simply as the recovery of a lost dialogue bearing clues for the production of new musics . . . but as what they are—adaptations, molded to mixed, contradictory, hybrid spaces (‘‘This ‘Black,’ ’’ 28).7

Cullen’s novel, One Way to Heaven (in CW, OWH hereafter), published three years after the bulk of his most important poetry had been written, to date (according to the ‘‘Editor’s Note’’) seems to have garnered little more than antiquarian interest as a Harlem Renaissance roman a` clef (OWH, 344). Although Cullen’s own coy prefatory ‘‘Note’’ may have steered readers in this direction—‘‘Some of the characters in this book are fictitious’’ (OWH, 349)—it is perhaps ‘‘not important today,’’ as Amritjit Singh contends, ‘‘to try to match Cullen’s satirical portraits with their real life models’’ (82). Indeed, extending the thematization of the double-consciousness motifs (as we shall see) carefully worked out in verse, Cullen’s prose narrative now might more instructively be viewed as a type of ‘‘hybrid space’’ just described, one chief purpose of which is to call into question the whole idea of a purity of artistic vocation. Can these motifs, this narrative effectively asks, be handled in only one way? Have not these motifs themselves placed Cullen, almost a decade after the publication of his first book of poetry, somewhat in the position of his own protagonist, Sam Lucas, late in the narrative—that is, ‘‘made him think that there were more ways to heaven than one’’ (OWH, 495)? In any event, to be ‘‘cursed of heaven,’’ within the terms of the novel, is to compromise the essential purity of racial definition, a miscegenated condition to which the horrifically negrophobic Professor Calhoun views ‘‘the duty of white America to look’’ in order ‘‘to protect its sons and daughters from the insidious and

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growing infiltration of black blood in the arteries of this glorious republic’’ (OWH, 463). Cullen, whose ‘‘belief that [interracial] marriages when they prove unhappy, have color no more than other [factors] as the cause of their disintegration’’ (‘‘Miscegenation,’’ 567), is pleased, therefore, to construct a characterological center for his novel as far removed from heavenly purity as he can. Accordingly, Sam Lucas is given to us as a black scam artist. Travelling from town to town as he makes his way from Texas to New York, he cunningly preys upon the sympathy of revivalmeeting congregations, at the moment of witness, with a fake act of spiritual conversion in which he ritually renounces a pack of cards and a straight-razor, the sham tokens of a formerly criminal past. A limb cut off by a train while ‘‘stealin’ a ride’’ makes his performance even more remunerative, and irresistible, apparently, to several women: ‘‘for the sight of his armless sleeve always tinged the religious fervor of his victims with pity, making them give money’’ (OWH, 391, 392). Thus, with Sam Lucas’s nefarious infiltration into the workings of the church, Cullen, in the first instance, is able to call into question the institutional integrity of religious devotion as an ostensible portal to purity—an integrity Cullen had some warrant to suspicion, even though he himself had been raised a devout Episcopalian (see Ferguson, 12.): The young Negro of today, while he realizes that religious fervor is a good thing for any people, and while he realizes that it and the Negro are fairly inseparable, also realizes that where it exists in excess it breeds stagnation, and passive acquiescence, where a little active resistance would work better results [since] . . . [t]here is such a thing as working out one’s own salvation. And that is what the Negro intends to do. (Cullen, ‘‘League,’’ 548)

The fact, however, that Sam’s performance does win others to the faith for life—Mattie Johnson, for example, whom he will eventually marry and get with child—suggests that, indeed, he may be working out a salvation in his own unique way, and that as a ‘‘mystery and miracle and the confirmation of faith’’ rather than ‘‘a lie’’ (OWH, 366, 370), Sam’s own true identity is not going to be an easy thing to pin down. As the Reverend Clarence Johnson observes on this note of disidentification, ‘‘I am not sure that you are not the most despicable man I’ve ever come across; I’m not sure that you aren’t a genius in your way, and I’m far from being certain that you aren’t an unwilling instrument in

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the hands of Heaven. . . . There are some things which we cannot understand’’ (OWH,368–69, 370). On the final pages of the novel, Cullen makes a great deal of the ‘‘trickster’’ nature of Sam’s character—‘‘All his life he had played tricks. . . . Now one more trick was left him, the sweetest, kindest trick of all,’’ etc. (OWH, 529)—and deploys this figure several times before the ending: ‘‘his masquerade’’ as an ‘‘arrant trickster,’’ the constant peering ‘‘through the slits between his fingers,’’ the ‘‘woman’s conceit for his eyes and his skin,’’ and so forth (OWH, 377, 364, 352; also on 351, 391–92, 405, 428). Cullen’s characterization thus has a fairly close analogue in Henry Louis Gates’s well-known theory of the Signifying Monkey extrapolated from the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology: a symbolic being ‘‘dwelling at the margins of discourse,’’ or more appropriately, in the ‘‘space between two linguistic domains,’’ where a maximum amount of ‘‘repetition and reversal (chiasmus) constitutes an implicit parody of a subject’s own complicity in illusion’’ (Gates, ‘‘Blackness’’ 286, 293, 289). More especially, I think, from what we have been saying about disidentification is the relevance to Cullen of Gates’s tricksterfigure as a critique of ‘‘the received idea of blackness as a negative essence, as a natural transcendent signified [or] presence,’’ or what Ishmael Reed criticizes as ‘‘the Afro-American idealism of a transcendent black subject, integral and whole, self-sufficient and plentiful, the ‘always already’ black signified, available for literary representation in received Western forms’’ (315, and qtd. on 297). Accordingly, Cullen’s strategy to resist the essentializing transcendence of static containment for his own trickster, as we might expect, is to highlight as much as possible his threshold or liminal positioning throughout the novel. Assigning to Sam, once married to Mattie, employment in ‘‘the role of a ticket-chopper’’ at the Star Movie Palace ‘‘gayly garnering tickets,’’ for instance, strategically places the protagonist on a color line between the lighted world outside the cinema, where he is readily identified by his ‘‘gorgeous uniform of smooth bright green material, square padded shoulders, gold epaulettes,’’ and the rest, and a darker world inside, where he sometimes might unloose his passional self to the ‘‘crude voluptuousness’’ of the theater’s lone usher, Emma May (OWH, 468, 493, 504). ‘‘The hither and thither of [the liminal space, in-between the designations of identity], the temporal movement and passage that it allows,’’ remarks Bhabha in a parallel context, ‘‘prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primor-

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dial polarities’’ (‘‘Beyond,’’ 16). And even Sam’s wife Mattie can resist such primordiality in her overly devout sense of selfhood when she, too, has occasion to cross the threshold, and enter the cinema’s dark-world to confront Emma May with her suspicion of an affair with Sam: ‘‘Gone was the gentle servitor of the gentlest of all the gods. The primitive woman, she whose skin is neither white nor black, she who is older than her Jesus, looked out of Mattie’s blazing eyes and spoke with her rasping tongue. ‘Was he with you last night?’ ’’ (OWH, 508, emphasis added). What is more, ‘‘[t]his interstitial passage in-between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without hierarchy’’ (Bhabha, ‘‘Beyond,’’ 16). Unquestionably, it is Sam’s very misordering of hierarchy that accounts for the scandal he produces when he appears one evening, ‘‘precipitate and unsolicited’’ (OWH, 486), at the intellectual soire´e of his wife’s employer, Constancia Brandon, to take Mattie away. There, all of the attendees jockeying for position with their holier-than-thou ‘‘non-inclusive’’ Garveyite theories of Negro purity on ‘‘a day no less luminous and no less marked for heaven’’ (OWH, 472, 473) are, undoubtedly for Cullen, the racist equivalents of the white supremicist Professor Calhoun noted previously. In their corporate effort ‘‘to combat miscegenation,’’ therefore, they can only be scandalized by someone like Sam who refuses ‘‘to abandon his perilous perch on the threshold for a place among the company,’’ choosing instead to ‘‘stand beautifully balancing himself in the doorway’’—a kind of hybrid ‘‘Black Samson’’/‘‘Emperor Jones’’ who ultimately must repudiate all their intellectual hauteur in disgust (OWH, 474, 485). If Sam Lucas comes to us as a critique, as Gates suggests, of the received idea of blackness as a transcendent and righteous presence, then his repudiation in the above scene must be founded on an unstable and sinister absence that Cullen perhaps rhetorically figures with the ghastly amputation of Sam’s left arm—a repudiation via absence, however, that must inevitably include Mattie Lucas herself: They turned in the direction toward which she had pointed, and she made as if to take his arm. But she grasped only the empty sleeve of his coat. He was aware of a tremor of uneasiness running through her as she dropped the sleeve, afraid, it seemed, to anchor herself to anything of such instability. He flicked away both her embarrassment and her fears with a laugh. (OWH, 376)8

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Mattie’s registration of a fear for Sam’s ‘‘instability’’ in this important passage joins her to the oneness of the novel’s other heavenly purists who can only conceive of difference, if it crosses their minds at all, as ‘‘a reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the tablets of ‘fixed’ traditions,’’ rather than as ‘‘a complex on-going negotiation among minorities against assimilation’’ (Bhabha, ‘‘Beyond’’ 15). Thus, in response to Constancia Brandon’s query concerning the guest list she is eager to assemble for Mattie’s nuptials— ‘‘Tell me, Mattie, how do you feel about miscegenation . . . if I invite some white people to witness the ceremony?’’—Mattie can only react negatively: ‘‘I don’t think I’d like that. I don’t care much for white people’’ (OWH, 416–17). But usually Mattie would prefer not to think at all. Her zealous entry into the fixed traditions of the church is sparked by that excess of religious fervor that Cullen would abominate, we recall, as ‘‘passive acquiescence’’ when we find that her religion has turned to ‘‘fatalism, and she was leaving all to the Lord’’ (OWH, 468). In the end, Mattie’s fatalistic reliance upon religion as the one and only way to deal with her husband’s alleged infidelity—‘‘pray[ing] to Heaven to meet her halfway’’ since ‘‘There isn’t anything more powerful than prayer, and what Heaven won’t do’’ (OWH, 499, 505) becomes her undoing. For the more fanatical Mattie’s faith becomes as the solution to all their marital problems, the more alienated Sam becomes from devotion to wife and church, eventually ceasing altogether to be ‘‘a practicing Christian, though Mattie laid him on the altar morning after morning [to] no avail’’ (OWH, 492). With the person of Sam Lucas, then, Mattie is truly in the position of the self in its primal encounter with its liminal other—‘‘his mind and feet wavering on a line’’—and her feeling that ‘‘the only way of fastening him securely to his life with her lay in getting him back in the fold’’ bespeaks a complete failure to reckon with the decontainment, deformation, and disidentification within which that otherness is so radically imbricated. An even more complete failure in this regard is thus represented by Mattie’s mentor, the unflappable Constancia Brandon, who (as her name suggests), can view life in the most maddeningly single-minded terms. Hence, ‘‘if the Negro is God almighty’s one mistake,’’ as she is once given to remark, ‘‘as I look about me at white people, I am forced to say so are we all’’ (OWH, 471). Accordingly, Constancia surrounds herself with an assortment of people whose outlook on a variety of tangled social issues— the Back-to-Africa movement, for instance—is endlessly

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rehearsed ‘‘without stint and without thought of the complications which might arise,’’ unshakable opinions that appear endlessly to pour out of so many ‘‘block[s] of the purest black marble’’ (OWH, 473, 474). In Constancia’s milieu, theirs is ‘‘the yoke of gentility,’’ where all is ‘‘order and precision,’’ and where one looks to ‘‘safeguard[s] one’s health’’ and ‘‘take[s] no step out of season’’ (OWH, 488). By contrast, more ‘‘mongrel’’ temperaments like that of Sam Lucas bespeak, in Cullen’s own words, ‘‘The individual diversifying ego [that] transcends the synthesizing hue’’ (qtd. in Douglas 341). ‘‘[B]esieged by restlessness’’ as they are, to them ‘‘duty and routine become torture,’’ and to one degree or another, ‘‘they begin to look around for any hidden means of escape’’ (OWH, 489). By the time Sam Lucas realizes his desperate need to escape— escape both from the grasp of his wife and that of her church, as they seem to meld into ‘‘one vast accusing eye, as one great voice pleading for his redemption’’ (OWH, 501)—the realization comes too late. Overtaken by alcoholism as a consequence of his one hopeless attempt at marriage, Sam is far too gone in drink to withstand a terrible fever that befalls him shortly after he learns of Mattie’s failure to birth their child. And so he succumbs to double pneumonia at the age of twenty-nine, dying within a year of his New Year’s arrival in New York. Curiously, his age is the same as Cullen’s the year the novel was published, arguably the author’s last substantial piece of work to issue from his ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ period, and one gives pause to reflect that in a little over a dozen years, Cullen himself would be dead. If a certain doubling of life and work is taking place here, in conclusion, it’s interesting to speculate just how. In the novel, Cullen is very careful to make clear to his reader that Sam’s passionate response to Mattie is a dual reaction: a genuinely imaginative outpouring of emotion that appears to be provoked, and necessarily so, by the presentiment of a person diminished untowardly by the jagged circumstances of real life. ‘‘The picture was rapturous,’’ the narrator tells us, ‘‘and he closed his eyes, shutting out the real Mattie, filling the dark behind his lids with the gayer Mattie of his imagination’’ (OWH, 398). On a later, related occasion, Cullen casts the structure of Sam’s experience in identical terms: ‘‘As they sauntered out into the warm Harlem air, Mattie prayed to heaven . . . while Sam was lost in dreams and in the feel of Mattie close to him. . . . He walked as if he were a poet thinking on immortal lines instead of a ticket-chopper out for an evening stroll’’ (OWH, 499).

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Clearly, the import of both of these important passages is to suggest that a completely engaged response to life is a two-way process, filling up a space—‘‘the dark behind [Sam’s] lids’’— between the twin poles of real-life experience, on the one hand, and imaginative distillation, on the other, where more than the eye can see, as in the poem earlier. The syncretic transformation of human identity we spoke of previously—Sam rightly calls it ‘‘poetry’’ in the generic sense of that word, i.e., a making or manufacturing—is reducible to neither pole, but is made possible and only made possible by vigilantly guarding that transformative space in between. When Mattie surrenders her life to an orthodox fatalism, she in effect collapses her imaginative level of perception into its opposite, and foregoes any hope for effecting alteration or change in her character except in only one way. Sam, to the contrary, is imaginatively attuned to Mattie’s transformative possibilities throughout the greater part of the novel: all that is ‘‘strange and mysterious’’ in her character—so much so, indeed, that at one point he is tempted ‘‘to lean over and invade’’ her, to wrest all that strange and mysterious possibility, with ‘‘the concentrated vigor of his one lone arm,’’ entirely for himself. But the moment passes when he realizes that the most heinous violation is one that Mattie quite likely is in the process of perpetrating on herself: her ‘‘getting religion and joining the church had suddenly grown walls about her and shut her away from the world’’ (OWH, 402). When Countee Cullen burst onto the Harlem Renaissance scene, there was a good deal that was ‘‘strange and mysterious’’ about him as well. As the editor of his Collected Writings recounts, to this day, we still do not know where he was born, or who his real parents were, or when he moved from the South to live in New York, or why he took up writing as a vocation. He even proved to be somewhat of a willful trickster concerning the specific details of his life—about his height, for instance, the precise figure for which he kept altering on several documents through the 1930s (Early, 10, 6; also 69).9 Could all of this mystery conceivably have been Cullen’s own attempt to hold open that darkened transformative ‘‘poetic’’ space behind his own eyes, where the theoretical hither-and-thither of the betweenness of decontained, deformed disidentities—white and black, North and South, straight and gay, American and European— once translated to practice in the public sphere, might sustain ‘‘the notion of a politics which is based on unequal, uneven, multiple and potentially antagonistic’’ subjectivities (Bhabha,

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‘‘Third Space,’’ 208)? That Cullen might potentially effect all of these positionalities, moreover, strongly indicates that ‘‘one’s subjectivity is never fully steeped in the modality of the speaking position one inhabits at any one moment,’’ as Gayatri Spivak argues, and further, that ‘‘ ‘speaking as’ . . . always involves a distancing from oneself’’ (qtd. in Ang, 4; cf. Jarraway, Going the Distance). Not surprisingly, a similar distance opens up in the novel when Sam watches ‘‘the divergent ways of his path and Mattie’s widen,’’ and is made desperately uneasy to realize that ‘‘the further he looked into the distance the more apart they were’’ (OWH, 490). By then, however, the man who was once proud to call himself ‘‘a travellin’ man’’ has long since admitted ‘‘His traveling days were done,’’ and is only a few months away from uttering his dying wish: ‘‘I’d like to go home’’ (OWH, 391, 439, 526). For the disidentification or de-essentializing of diasporic subjects that a true distancing of selfhood guarantees, there is no ‘‘return home’’ (Ang, 18; and Martin and Mohanty), that is to say, there is ‘‘no fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return’’ if, in Cullen’s complex treatment of diasporic subjectivity, there is to be any kind of ‘‘politics of position’’ (Hall, ‘‘Diaspora,’’ 226) as previously described. And yet in Cullen’s quite similar case, when he makes his own final return from his travelling days in Europe to settle down in New York to a life of French language instruction and a second marriage to the sister of a good friend, we are, at the last, given to wonder whether there has not been a severe foreshortening of the transformative distancing of his own discourse. In that all too brief remaining period following the publication of Cullen’s novel, one is witness to a kind of journeyman’s writing that can only pale by comparison to the efflorescence of extraordinary work composed in the period preceding: a verse translation, a couple of children’s books, a few new poems along with some song lyrics, but mostly the re-editing and reordering of previously published material. If the diasporic distancing of hybrid cultural subjects has tended to become somewhat occluded by later work considerably constrained by bourgeois domesticity and the final intimations of mortality, in the end, it perhaps becomes necessary for the reader to take over where the writer with his eyes perhaps open, now, and fully trained on heaven, leaves off—‘‘necessary’’ that is, in Henry Louis Gates’s words, ‘‘to create distance between reader and texts in order to go beyond reflexive responses and achieve critical insight into

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and intimacy with their formal workings’’ (Loose, 79). In this essay, with reference to Cullen’s diasporic doubles, I have attempted to foreground an area where the reader is afforded a good deal of critical insight into the formal workings of his achievement as a Harlem Renaissance writer. By focussing on the first decade rather than the second of that achievement’s double-consciousness, I follow the wavering line of Cullen’s novel thresholded in-between, acknowledging once again that ‘‘there really [were] some things which Heaven could not do’’ (OWH, 515).

Notes 1. See further Eric Garber, 319–20, and Avi-Ram. 2. After a disastrous eight-month marriage to Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of famed black intellect W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1928 (Lewis 201–3), Cullen much later married Ida Robertson in 1940 (Reimonenq, 159). 3. ‘‘It is only through that disavowal [of Otherness],’’ as Judith Butler similarly comments, ‘‘that whiteness is constituted, and through the institutionalization of that disavowal that whiteness is perpetually—but anxiously— reconstituted’’ (171; cf. also Hitchcock 16). 4. Cary Wintz is especially reminded of the issue from the black perspective, particularly after the collapse of the magazine, Fire!!: ‘‘[N]o matter how committed to giving expression to the black experience, the [Harlem] Renaissance was, in the final analysis, dependent on white audiences, white magazines, white publisher, and white money’’ (86; see also Douglas, 426). 5. Similar to Cullen’s own diasporic displacement from a likely birthplace in Louisville to New York in his teens, ‘‘Escape from the suffocating fatalism of the South preoccupied the young [Charles Chesnutt],’’ Ross Posnock writes, but ‘‘[b]efore moving North . . . Chesnutt rigorously educated himself in classical and European languages and literature,’’ commenting that ‘‘few people have more tenaciously applied and appropriated the riches of ‘all that has gone before’ ’’ (347). 6. In a similar way, both Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois ‘‘insist on a dialectic that preserves the interplay of the universal and the particular rather than liquidating them in an optimistic teleology. . . . In Du Bois especially both roles jostle against each other . . . and his effort at balancing them is a source of creative tension throughtout his career’’ since ‘‘[a] productive life will depend on negotiating the universal through the particular and vice versa’’ (Posnock, 329, 333). 7. Hence, ‘‘Du Boisian hybridity is indifferent to white or black fantasies of purity,’’ according to Posnock, and ‘‘the famous start of The Souls of Black [Folk] stages what could be called a primal scene of inauthenticity’’ (327). 8. Sam’s missing left arm is perhaps also an upward displacement of the maimed trickster, for ‘‘In Yoruba mythology,’’ as Gates notes, ‘‘Esu always limps, because his legs are of different lengths: one is anchored in the realm of the gods, the other rests in the human world’’ (287). For a further expansion of

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the notion of disidentification based on absence, what I theorize as a model of ‘‘deferred subjectivity,’’ see Jarraway, ‘‘Langston Hughes,’’ 824, 828–29. 9. It is perhaps no accident, therefore, that one ‘‘key’’ to the theory of diasporic consciousness in Du Bois, alluded to earlier as an important influence on Cullen, was provided by an essay, according to Sundquist, penned by William James entitled ‘‘The Hidden Self’’ (first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1890), and ‘‘whose central theory posited an unconscious portion of the mental self, a ‘hidden personality,’ that was unknown but nonetheless watchfully participating in mental life . . . influencing the behavior of the antagonistic or double self’’ (Sundquist, 570–71).

Works Cited Ang, Ien. ‘‘On Not Speaking Chinese: Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora.’’ New Formations 24 (1994): 1–18. Appadurai, Arjun. ‘‘Patriotism and Its Futures.’’ Public Culture 5.3 (1993): 411–29. Avi-Ram, Amitai F. ‘‘The Unreadable Black Body: ‘Conventional’ Poetic Form in the Harlem Renaissance.’’ Genders 7 (1990): 32–45. Baker, Houston A. Jr. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. ———. ‘‘Discussion.’’ In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 139–49. Dia Center for the Arts: Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 8. Seattle: Bay, 1992. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘‘Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation.’’ Kunst and Museum Journal 5.4 (1994): 15–23. ———. ‘‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.’’ In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 207–21. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Bharucha, Rustom. ‘‘Around Ayodhya: Aberrations, Enigmas, and Moments of Violence.’’ Third Text 24 (1993): 45–58. Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cullen, Countee. ‘‘Countee Cullen on Miscegenation (from The Crisis 36 [November 1929]).’’ In My Soul’s High Song, 565–68. ———. ‘‘The League of Youth Address (from The Crisis 26 [August 1923]).’’ In My Soul’s High Song, 547–50. ———. My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen. Edited by Gerald Early. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Delany, Samuel R. ‘‘Coming / Out.’’ In Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their

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Coming Out Stories, edited by Patrick Merla. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1961. Early, Gerald. introduction to My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Esteve, Mary. ‘‘Nella Larsen’s ‘Moving Mosaic’: Harlem, Crowds, and Anonymity.’’ American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 268–86. Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991. Ferguson, Blanche E. Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1966. Garber, Eric. ‘‘A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture in Jazz Age Harlem.’’ In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., 318–31. New York: Meridian, 1989. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ‘‘The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.’’ In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 285–321. New York: Routledge, 1984. ———. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Grossberg, Lawrence. ‘‘Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds.’’ In Race, Identity and Representation in Education, edited by Cameron McCarthy and Cameron Crichlow, 89–105. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hall, Stuart. ‘‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora.’’ In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–37. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. ———. ‘‘Culture, Community, Nation.’’ Cultural Studies 7.3 (1993): 349–63. ———. ‘‘Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies.’’ Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10–18. ———. ‘‘What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?’’ In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 21–33. Dia Center for the Arts: Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 8. Seattle: Bay, 1992. Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Harris, Thomas Allen. ‘‘About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer.’’ In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 34–42. Dia Center for the Arts: Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 8. Seattle: Bay, 1992. Hitchcock, Peter. ‘‘The Othering of Cultural Studies.’’ Third Text 25 (1993/ 1994): 12–22. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Jarraway, David R. Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. ———. ‘‘Montage of an Otherness Deferred: Dreaming Subjectivity in Langston Hughes.’’ American Literature 68.4 (1996): 819–47. Julien, Isaac. ‘‘ ‘Black Is, Black Ain’t’: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities.’’ In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 255–75. Dia Center for the Arts: Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 8. Seattle: Bay, 1992. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Martin, Biddy, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. ‘‘Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?’’ In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis, 191–212. Theories of Contemporary Culture vol 8. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pinckney, Darryl. ‘‘The Sweet Singer of Tuckahoe.’’ The New York Review of Books 39.5 (1992): 14–18. Posnock, Ross. ‘‘How It Feels to Be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the ‘Impossible Life’ of the Black Intellectual.’’ Critial Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 323–49. Reimonenq, Alden. ‘‘Countee Cullen’s Uranian ‘Soul Windows.’ ’’ In Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 143–65. New York: Harrington Park, 1993. Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. Tuttleton, James W. ‘‘Countee Cullen at ‘The Heights.’ ’’ In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanely Brodwin, 101–37. New York & London: Garland, 1989. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I: 1909–1939. Edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice University Press, 1988. Woods, Gregory. ‘‘Gay Re-Readings of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.’’ In Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. 127–42. New York: Harrington Park, 1993.

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Part III Imaging and Imagery in Poetry and Fiction

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Rereading Langston Hughes: Rhetorical Pedagogy in ‘‘Theme for English B,’’ or the Harlem Renaissance in the Composition Classroom Frank E. Perez

IN ONE RESPECT, INCLUDING AN ESSAY ON LANGSTON HUGHES’ POEM

‘‘Theme for English B’’ in a collection of essays whose theme is re-envisioning the Harlem Renaissance is somewhat odd since the poem was not published until 1949, well after the Harlem Renaissance ended. But in another respect, an essay about this poem fits perfectly within the theme of this collection in that the poem itself is a revisioning of one of Hughes’s experiences during the 1920s, specifically his experience as the only African American in an all-white composition course. Rereading the poem today, especially with an eye toward the rhetorical elements at work in the poem, brings into vision pedagogical possibilities that until recent decades were impossible to conceive. I refer specifically to the poem’s potential as an effective heuristic in the composition classroom.1 Before revisioning the poem in light of its rhetorical elements and its implications for the composition classroom, it is important to remember that the poem was originally Hughes’s own revisioning of his own college experience in the 1920s. Upon graduating from Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio in 1920, Hughes lived with his father in Mexico for a year and then entered Columbia University as a freshman in 1921. A year later he withdrew and worked several odd jobs until 1926, when he transferred to Lincoln College in nearby Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated in 1929. Arna Bontemps has noted that during his time at Lincoln, Hughes was keenly aware of the movement in Harlem and would often visit Harlem on weekends (Taylor, 95). It was during the 1920s that Hughes met such leading figures as Jessie Fauset, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cul241

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len, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman (Rampersad and Roessel, 8–9). Much had transpired in Hughes’s life during the twenty-eight years between his first year of college at Columbia University in 1921 and the publication of ‘‘Theme for English B’’ in 1949: Hughes transferred to and was graduated from Lincoln College in Pennsylvania; he traveled extensively both abroad (Africa, Europe, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Mexico, to name a few places) and in the United States; he became associated with the political left (he addressed the International Association of Writers in 1938 and the Third American Writer’s Congress in 1939); and he became established as a writer by successfully publishing in a number of different genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. The aforementioned historical context is complicated in ‘‘Theme for English B.’’ Rampersad and Roessel, editors of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, note that line 9, ‘‘to this college on the hill above Harlem,’’ describes the City College of the City University of New York (675). But Hughes never attended CCNY. If the poem is read as autobiographical, Hughes fashions himself as a speaker drawing on his own experiences at Columbia, where he would have been the only black student in a composition course, and at Lincoln, where the student body was predominantly African American, but had an all-white faculty. Furthermore, there is a certain irony in the poem, for Hughes had, by the time of his freshman year at Columbia, enjoyed some success as a writer, yet he positions himself as a student in an entry level writing course.2 Hughes’s converse experiences at Columbia and Lincoln, coupled with his firm establishment as a leading writer by the time of ‘‘Theme’s’’ publication, enabled Hughes to re-envision his experience as a student during the Harlem Renaissance. Fifty years after the publication of ‘‘Theme for English B,’’ it is possible to re-envision Hughes’s original re-envisioning, for much has transpired in the field of English studies since 1949. Not only has our discipline expanded its field of inquiry from the new critical scrutiny of mostly canonical texts to include a more diverse range of literary works, it has also begun to explore fields such as linguistics, creative writing, folklore, and pop culture. One of the major developments in our discipline over the last fifty years has been the emergence of rhetoric and composition studies. Interestingly, the Conference of College Composition

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and Communication was founded in 1949, the same year ‘‘Theme for English B’’ was published.3 In 1965, Edward P. J. Corbett published Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, a textbook centered around the rhetorical theories of Aristotle and Cicero. This text is important not only because it revived classical theories of how to compose arguments, but also because it enabled writing teachers to see that writing instruction has a theoretical foundation as well as a long history. This realization resulted in a burst of scholarship and the birth of a ‘‘new’’ discipline which to this day continues to thrive. Today, many universities offer graduate degrees in rhetoric and composition, and the job market today is considerably more favorable for rhetoric and composition specialists than for their counterparts in literature. But in 1949, rhetoric and composition was virtually nonexistent as a discipline, yet Hughes’s poem, and the rhetorical elements in it, stand as an almost prophetic guidepost for the direction in which composition studies would grow. In this essay I argue that several theoretical and pedagogical issues, which have been vital to the growth of composition studies, and which remain current today, are foreshadowed, if not overtly addressed in Hughes’s poem. These include: invention, voice, student identity or ethos, institutional ethos, decentering authority in the classroom, students’ confidence in their writing, the role of place in student composition, and composition as the nexus of an implicit transactional relationship between students and instructors. In addition to these pedagogical issues, there are also traces in the poem of several common pedagogical paradigms in composition studies. I also suggest that because of the presence of these rhetorical and pedagogical issues in the poem, it can be an effective and useful heuristic in the composition classroom for discussing issues relevant to students and to formulate writing assignments about those issues. In a larger sense, I am arguing the position that literature may, though not necessarily should, have a place in the composition classroom. A glance back over the last one hundred years or so suggests that literature has enjoyed more prominence and visibility within English departments than has composition. This began to change in the 1960s and 1970s when composition studies emerged and asserted itself as a legitimate academic discipline in its own right. Since that time, scholars have argued about what the relationship between literature and composition should be. In the late 1960s, there were very few articles dealing with literature’s relationship to composition studies, but this

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changed by the early 1980s. For the last two decades, a quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, debate has occurred in English departments and various journals such as CCCs and College English over literature’s role in composition studies.4 One of the more provocative exchanges in this debate occurred in 1993 in the pages of College English, between Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate. In ‘‘Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature,’’ Lindemann argues that literature in the composition classroom is inappropriate for several reasons, not the least of which is that the textual insights yielded by critical theory can be studied with nonliterary texts (314). In response to Lindemann, Tate questions why literature was banished from composition in the first place and argues that no form of discourse, including literature, should be excluded without question from composition (317). Tate’s assumption is that, depending on what the goal of the composition course is, all types of writing can potentially serve as resources for improving student writing. This latter position seems reasonable, and in agreeing with it, I would add one further qualification. Literature’s place in the composition classroom depends not only upon what the goals of the course are, but also upon what pedagogical approach around which the course is centered. There are presently several pedagogical approaches common in composition studies. These pedagogical approaches include current-traditionalism, Expressivism, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, writing-across-thecurriculum pedagogy, and collaborative pedagogy. Hughes’s poem ‘‘Theme for English B’’ is unique in that it is a poem about a student’s experience in a composition class, a fact that makes the poem useful in just about any composition class, regardless of course goals and/or the pedagogical approach of the teacher. More specifically, the poem addresses issues that are important to a number of competing pedagogies. As such, it can be used as the basis for class discussion and writing assignments.

Invention, Voice, Current-Traditionalism, and Expressivism The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. (1–5)

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In lines 1–5 of the poem, the instructor’s directions raise the issue of invention. Invention was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric in ancient times and referred primarily to the discovery of arguments in the preparation of legal speeches and orations.5 With the advent of widespread literacy, invention took on a wider meaning having to do with ‘‘getting started’’ on written compositions.6 Today, invention is generally referred to as prewriting, and is a staple of most composition courses. For example, in current composition courses, much time is spent on prewriting activities such as freewriting, looping, brainstorming, and electronic discussion boards. But invention was not always as privileged in composition courses as it is today. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dominant paradigm in composition was a model now referred to as current-traditionalism. The current-traditional approach viewed writing as essentially product oriented; consequently, writing instruction was usually prescriptive (focusing mainly on grammar) and little attention was given to the writing process, much less to generating topics about which to write. Current-traditionalism also facilitated the composition course’s role as gatekeeper and served to indirectly reinforce white middle-class values. The first three lines of the poem—‘‘The instructor said, / Go home and write / a page tonight’’—could easily have been uttered by a current-traditional writing teacher forty or fifty years ago. Such an assignment does not take into account invention as compositionists today understand the term today. A general neglect of the process that results in a final written product was characteristic of the current-traditional model of composition instruction. The fourth and fifth lines become problematic as well as prophetic. ‘‘And let that page come out of you— / Then, it will be true’’ (4–5) are instructions a current-traditional teacher would never give. Rather, this concern with self and honesty and voice in writing is the hallmark of Expressivism—a composition paradigm that helped, in part, to challenge and dismantle the once monolithic current-traditional model in composition studies. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Expressivist writing theorists such as Donald Murray, Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and William Coles began publishing writing textbooks that emphasized composition’s potential to help students discover their own authentic writing voices through several innovative prewriting, or invention, techniques, such as freewriting. Whereas current-

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traditionalism is centered around a written product, Expressivism focuses on the writer. By helping students discover their own authentic writing voices, Expressivists believed they could empower students. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the Expressivist movement coincided with the political activism associated with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War; and in academia, Expressivism dovetailed with the origins of liberatory or critical pedagogy. Though the link between these two related pedagogical approaches has weakened over the last twenty-five years, this yoking of Expressivism and liberatory pedagogy remained current through the 1990s as evidenced in bell hooks’s Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1993) and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) (Burnham 218). In a curious blend of what seems to be current-traditionalism (‘‘Go home and write / a page tonight.’’) and Expressivism (And let that page come out of you— / Then, it will be true’’) several questions emerge for the composition instructor: How much control do we give students over how they respond to writing assignments? If we ask for a theme, is it okay for them to write a poem? Do students prefer to be assigned a specific topic or would they prefer to have more freedom in selecting a topic about which to write? This passage of the poem can be especially useful in teaching students about their writing voices. What does it mean to ‘‘let a page come out of you?’’ Can writing be generated from a ‘‘self?’’ How do our postmodern students conceptualize the notion of self? And what role does environment play in the writing process? In line 27 of the poem the speaker queries, ‘‘So will my page be colored that I write?’’ and we are left to ask how identity shapes voice. To what extent is our students’ writing influenced by their identity? And to what extent are our students’ identities influenced by their environments? Is the search for a writing voice obsolete? Posing these questions as prompts for class discussion or short writing assignments can go a long way in relieving students’ anxieties about writing, especially about getting started on an assignment, because they help students realize they are not alone in their anxieties about writing. Also, such questions help to disarm the fears that many students have of English teachers because they let the students know that the teacher is aware of and sensitive to the angst many students experience in writing classes.

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Student / Institutional Ethos and Cultural Studies The issue of voice, so dominant in Expressivism, brings up the larger issue of our students’ ethos, for voice stems from ethos. In line 10 the speaker observes, ‘‘I am the only colored student in my class.’’ This line, in conjunction with the final section of the poem: As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free. This is my theme for English B. (37–41)

raises the issue of institutional ethos, a central concern of cultural studies pedagogy. Here the poem presents three specific ethical clashes: the ethical clash between minority students and nonminority students, the ethical clash between students (specifically minority students) and instructors, and by extension, the ethical clash between students and the educational institution in which they are enrolled. How are the tensions that inevitably result from these ethical clashes negotiated? Is it useful to identify these clashes in ethos? What are our students’ perceptions of the university? To what extent do we as instructors personify students’ perceptions of the university? Cultural studies has perhaps been the dominant trend in the humanities during the last decade or so. By shining a spotlight on the issues of race, class, and gender, cultural studies has done much to advance and sustain an ongoing conversation in higher education about discrimination and inequality in the West. One vein of investigation which cultural studies overtly addresses, and one at which the poem subtly hints, is how institutions (such as universities) serve to perpetuate dominant power systems that all too often serve as oppressive mechanisms against minorities and other disadvantaged groups. Concerning this point, the poem affords students the opportunity to not only discuss inequality in general, but also the opportunity to critique the power relationship they are a part of as students within an educational institution.

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Decentered Authority, Democracy, and Critical Pedagogy Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free. (34–40)

In addition to the issue of racial inequality, lines 37–40 also address the relationship between students and instructors. An examination of this relationship is a chief concern of critical pedagogy. Along with cultural studies, critical, sometimes called liberatory, pedagogy also shares a concern with equality, liberty, and societal injustice in general, but its focus is not necessarily the cultural critique of dominant or oppressive institutions, but rather the equipping of students to be active participants in the discourse of a democratic society. Whereas cultural studies is primarily concerned with the cultural critique of issues involving race, class, and gender, critical pedagogy is more concerned with empowering or liberating students through literacy and critical thinking skills. One prominent classroom feature of critical pedagogy is the teacher’s tendency to decenter her authority. The attempt to share power with students takes many forms that range from sitting in a circle to allowing students to help formulate syllabi and grading policies. It is often the case that attempts by teachers to decenter their authority in the classroom catch students by surprise and result in confusion and bewilderment. A typical student response to such attempts might go something like, ‘‘You’re the teacher, you decide.’’ Prefacing attempts to decenter authority with discussions of the aforementioned ethical clashes between students and instructors can help disarm students by bringing perspective and context to the issue at hand.

Confidence, Place, and Writing Across the Curriculum Another useful topic of classroom discussion is found in line 6, ‘‘I wonder if it’s that simple?’’ Helping our students overcome

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a lack of confidence in their writing is one of the most challenging duties we have as teachers. Line 6 seems to be the mantra of more and more students. What a relief it is to them when they discover what we already take for granted—that writing is a process. ‘‘A what?’’ one student asked me with a look of puzzlement on his face. I took the opportunity to discuss common myths about writing and explore just where exactly the class lacked confidence in its writing. I then asked them to write for five minutes on what they found difficult about writing. Ironically, that simple prompt yielded some of the best student prose I read all semester. The students seemed to identify with the speaker in the poem. Reflective questions such as ‘‘I wonder if it’s that simple?’’ may be considered an example of what writing across the curriculum advocates call writing to learn. Writing to learn is one of the two types of writing emphasized in the writing across the curriculum movement, the other being writing to communicate. Writing to communicate is probably what most people think of when they consider freshman composition, for it is centered around the use of language to effectively communicate one’s ideas. Writing to learn, on the other hand, is not writing for another person, but rather writing for the self. A student who rewrites her lecture notes in preparation for a history exam is employing a form of writing to learn; the essay exam she writes for her history professor is an example of writing to communicate. Many of the questions arising from Hughes’s poem posed in this article as writing or discussion prompts are examples of writing to learn questions. Because writing to learn questions are not graded, and because such questions are centered around the needs of the student, writing to learn questions can help students gain confidence in their writing. Another advantage of assigning writing to learn questions is that by placing students at the center of their learning, such assignments demonstrate the fact that writing can actually be useful. Writing to learn questions also work well with another issue the poem raises—the issue of place in student composing. In lines 11–15, the speaker mentions the Harlem branch ‘‘Y’’ as the place where he writes his theme. Here the poem provides an excellent opportunity for discussion about how where students write can affect how and what they write. Discussion and writing prompts may include questions such as: Just where do our students compose their papers? In a dorm room? At the library? Their parents’ house? In addition to shaping our students’ iden-

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tities, does place also affect our students’ writing? If so, how? The issue of place is often neglected in composition textbooks, yet it is an important issue because it is a very real issue with which students, especially freshmen, have to grapple. The poem may be used as the basis for discussing how being in a familiar, comfortable, and specific place facilitates the writing process.

Teachers, Audience, and Collaboration Lines 27–30 suggest that the writing students do in composition classes is the result of a transactional relationship between themselves and teachers: So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be A part of you, instructor. (27–30)

In composition studies, collaborative pedagogy manifests itself in many forms, some of which are: small group discussions, peer response of drafts, and collaboratively written papers. Collaborative pedagogy does not necessarily preclude the simultaneous existence of other pedagogical approaches. For example, a teacher employing a collaborative pedagogical approach generally uses such an approach to enhance other pedagogical orientations. Collaborative learning and writing in composition has its theoretical foundations in the scholarship of Kenneth A. Bruffee, who was influenced by the work of philosopher Richard Rorty. Bruffee conceptualized thought and discourse as a conversation: If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized. (642)

Lines 27–30 of the poem raise several interesting questions: In what way(s) is student writing a part of us as teachers? Are there subtle hints of a collaborative angle here that are yet to be explored? To what extent are we the audience of student writing? Do our students really believe us when we tell them, ‘‘I’m not your audience?’’ In my own experience in recent semesters, this

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particular passage of the poem has evoked some rather impassioned and engaging responses from my students which, in turn, led to fruitful class discussions. Implicit in this discussion of the previous seven pedagogical issues have been topics that are relevant in, or foundational to, a variety of pedagogical approaches. These approaches include: current-traditionalism, Expressivism, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and collaboration. The experience of most teachers probably suggests that no single pedagogy exclusively fits a course like a hand in a glove. Whether we realize it or not, I think we probably employ a combination of many, if not all, of all these pedagogies in our classrooms. This is why Hughes’s poem can be such a powerful classroom heuristic for generating productive discussions and writing assignments. But even if a composition course is designed around one particular pedagogical approach, ‘‘Theme for English B’’ can be a useful and provocative place to start the conversation we all want our students to eventually enter.

Notes 1. Examining issues important to composition studies in the poem, and the Harlem Renaissance in general, is also timely in light of the recent trend in composition studies to rediscover and examine African American contributions to the growth of composition as a discipline. Those interested in exploring such contributions might begin by referring to the June 1999 edition of College Composition and Communication (hereafter referred to as CCC, 50), where the following articles appear: ‘‘History in the Spaces Left: African-American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies’’ by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams, and ‘‘African American Contributions to Composition Studies’’ by Keith Gilyard, Chair of the 1999 Conference on College Composition and Communication. 2. In 1918, while still in high school, Hughes began to publish poetry as well as short stories in the Central High Monthly Magazine. In June of 1921, ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’’ was published in The Crisis. 3. CCCC, a part of the National Council of Teachers of English, is currently the largest conference in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. 4. Space does not allow for an exhaustive survey of that debate here. What follows is a brief survey of important works in the debate. In a 1982 CCCs article entitled ‘‘From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing,’’ Anthony Petrosky argues that literature can used to enhance student’s writing. In 1983 two books were published on the subject—Winifred Bryan Horner’s Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap and Richard Lanham’s Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, which argues that unless literature and composition are reconciled, literary studies will diminish and illiteracy will slowly creep over the nation. Nearly ten years later, Donald McQuade, in a 1992 article entitled

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‘‘Composition and Literary Studies,’’ observes that the relationship between literature and composition remains fractured despite the efforts of scholars such as Wayne Booth, Richard Lanham, and Richard Scholes to draw the two fields together on the basis of a shared understanding of textuality. 5. The other four canons were arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. 6. For an excellent discussion of rhetoric and literacy in antiquity, see Havelock and Ong.

Works Cited Bruffee, Kenneth A. ‘‘Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’ ’’ College English 46.7 (1984): 635–52. Burnham, Christopher. ‘‘Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/Practice.’’ In A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper-Taggart, and Kurt Schick, 19–35. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gilyard, Kieth. ‘‘African American Contributions to Composition Studies.’’ College Composition and Communication 50 (1999): 626–44. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963. Horner, Winifred Bryan. Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Hughes, Langston. ‘‘Theme for English B.’’ In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, 409–10. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Lanham, Richard. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Lindemann, Erika. ‘‘Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature.’’ College English 55 (1993): 311–16. McQuade, Donald. ‘‘Composition and Literary Studies.’’ In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 482–519 New York: MLA, 1992. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Petrosky, Anthony. ‘‘From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing.’’ College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 19–36. Rampersad, Arnold, and David Roessel, eds. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. ‘‘History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.’’ College Composition and Communication 50 (1999): 563–84. Tate, Gary. ‘‘A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition.’’ College English 55 (1993): 317–21. Tate Gary, et al. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Taylor, Patricia E. ‘‘Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.’’ In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps, 90–102. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972.

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‘‘By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light’’: Technology and Vision in Langston Hughes’s ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ Steven A. Nardi

IT

HAS OFTEN BEEN RECOGNIZED THAT ‘‘THE WEARY BLUES’’ IS A

central text in the development of Langston Hughes’s poetics. In practical terms, the poem won Hughes first prize in the 1925 Opportunity magazine poetry contest that is widely seen as raising the curtain on the Harlem Renaissance. It also was instrumental in persuading Carl Van Vechten to convince Knopf to print Hughes’s first collection of poetry (for which Van Vechten suggested the name The Weary Blues). In broader terms, however, it foreshadows the style that has given Hughes’s work life beyond the Harlem Renaissance. Written in 1922, at the beginning of his career, ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ marks the point where Hughes moved from his early Carl-Sandburg influenced efforts to the formation of a poetics that draws upon African American folk culture and music, a path of development that culminates in his 1929 book Fine Clothes to the Jew, which is written almost entirely in the African American vernacular voice. In his biography of Hughes, Arnold Rampersad views the jazzinfluenced poems of Fine Clothes, the style that ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ prefigures, as Hughes’s ‘‘most radical achievement in language’’ (141). ‘‘At the center of his effort,’’ Rampersad writes in an earlier article, ‘‘would be the recognition of a link between poetry and black music, and in particular the music not of the Europeanized spirituals, so often lauded, but of the earthy almost ‘unspeakable’ blues’’ (Callaloo, 146). With these poems Hughes established the jazz poem as a poetic possibility—an influence felt strongly by subsequent generations of African American poets. Rereading ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ through a historical lens, however, gives a different understanding of the ‘‘link’’ that Ramper253

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sad notes between poetry and music. In particular, Hughes’s representation of the source of the poem’s music—the bluesman—as a creature of a previous technological age that is rapidly fading, splits the ground between the speaking poet and his blues muse with a historical gulf. The music the poet listens to is rooted in a past existence being erased by modernity. ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ then, is a poem as much about separation and incompatibility as connection and influence. In the rapid rush of modernization, the recent past disappears into a world already remote, removed into nostalgia by technological change which has changed the relationship between an individual and the world. Rather than a figure of reinforcement and accessible cultural heritage, the blues musician in the poem appears as a figure rooted in the past and therefore trapped there. That singer is available to the poet only through nostalgia and dreams. In ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ the jazz poem, a poem that asserts an affinity with African American music, begins not simply as a conversation with folk artists in the present, but as an attempt to recover, even resurrect, a shadowy figure from among the dead. In the 1920s, the ‘‘link’’ between poetry and black music that ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ strives for was immediately recognized as the advent of a new form of poetics, but was also treated with ambivalence. Countee Cullen’s reaction to the complete volume The Weary Blues, is an unusually prescient realization of what Hughes’s accomplishment had realized. Cullen’s attack on the volume, in a 1926 review, has been often quoted: ‘‘I wonder if jazz poems,’’ Cullen writes, ‘‘really belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry?’’ (Mullen 38). Despite the pretensions of this remark, Cullen is not simply dismissing Hughes’s work as valueless. To the contrary, in the same review he readily acknowledges the power of the jazz poems, specifically citing ‘‘The Cat and the Saxophone.’’ Far from not recognizing the power of Hughes’s accomplishment, Cullen worries that by its very success Hughes’s jazz poetry has contracted the possibilities for African American poetics. It is the fear of the very power of these poems that drives Cullen’s hesitation: ‘‘In the face of accomplished fact,’’ he writes, ‘‘I cannot say This will never do, but I feel that it ought never to have been done’’ [Cullen’s emphasis] (38). To a great extent Cullen’s fear of the limiting effect of the jazz poem has proven prophetic. In his 1986 biography of Hughes, Arnold Rampersad defines the subordination of poetry to African

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American popular culture as the kernel of Hughes’s achievement: In his willingness to stand back and record, with minimal intervention, aspects of the drama of black religion (and later, of music and dance) Hughes clearly showed that he had begun to see his own learned poetic art, even with his individual talent, as inferior to that of ‘‘ordinary’’ blacks—inferior, for example, to an old black woman in the amen corner who cries to Jesus, ‘‘Glory! Hallelujah!’’ At the heart of his sense of inferiority—which empowered rather than debilitated Hughes—was the knowledge that he (and other would-be poets) stood to a great extent outside the culture he worshipped. (Life of Langston Hughes, 146–7)

It is certainly true that in the poems of Fine Clothes Hughes consciously ranked his poetry as inferior to the folk voice, but how is it that Hughes could find a sense of inferiority ‘‘empowering’’? For Rampersad, the solution to this paradox lies in the particularity of the relationship between poet and music. Hughes, according to Rampersad, envisions himself as a medium for the otherwise silenced voices of the black masses. Through his art he can make visible the culture he is otherwise ‘‘outside’’ of. It is in the very ‘‘unspeakability’’ of the blues that Hughes is giving voice to that makes his voice so necessary. ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ in particular, for Rampersad, represents the moment when Hughes found a balance between the competing demands of his own poetic voice, and the voices of silenced black culture that Hughes found himself excluded from. ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ according to Rampersad, was the solution to this dilemma; in that poem, Hughes ‘‘finally wrote himself and his awkward position accurately into a poem’’ (Life of Langston Hughes, 65). Rampersad continues on, expanding on the difficult relationship between music and poetry: Just as the classically trained black musician Scott Joplin had labored to notate ragtime in order to enshrine its beauty as art, so Hughes worked to link the lowly blues to formal poetry in order that its brilliance might be recognized by the world. He knew immediately that in so honoring the blues, he had done something unprecedented in literature. (66)

The important thread linking these images is the consistently subordinate relationship that poetry holds relative to music. The work that Hughes is bringing into existence, and claiming

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as revolutionary in its importance, is fundamentally an imitation of musical forms. But between the voice of an individual poet speaking from a relatively elite perspective, what Du Bois would have called the ‘‘talented tenth,’’ and a folk blues tradition rooted in the anonymous and downtrodden masses, there are inevitably deep fractures. Hughes himself calls attention to this division in his 1926 essay ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ where he argues that the ‘‘truly great’’ black artist is an artist who, like the common people, ‘‘accept[s] what beauty is their own without question’’ (693). The effect of this, of course, is to locate even Hughes himself outside of this vision. He, as one who necessarily is caught in the need to ‘‘question,’’ cannot embody the position of the ‘‘truly great Negro artist.’’ As a result, if ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ is to be viewed as closing the gap between individual poet and the folk tradition, close attention must be paid to the details of the representation of the relationship between the poet and the singer in the poem itself. As Rampersad notes, the poem depicts the encounter between the speaker, a poet who writes in couplets, and a blues musician, who sings the traditional twelve bar blues. But in claiming that the poem depicts this encounter as an instance of the transmission of the folk voice from musician to poet, Rampersad underestimates the degree to which Hughes represents the relationship between music and poetry as a disjunction rather than a connection. To sustain the ‘‘empowering’’ view of Hughes’s subordinate relationship to African American popular culture, the musician and poet must be assumed to exist in a relationship of contiguity. The poet must be able to participate equally in the music’s triumph. His relationship to it must not be merely an appendage, but the only channel through which the original folk art form can be heard. Interpretations of ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ as a triumphant encounter between poet and musician, subsequently, emphasize the unification of the poem’s voices. Like Rampersad, Steven Tracy, in his book Langston Hughes and the Blues, asserts that the voices of musician and poet intertwine in a relationship of support and reinforcement. He argues that this poem is a happy melding of two voices—the poet’s voice and the blues singer’s. For Tracy, what is revealed here is the continuity between the two voices. Hughes’s career begins, according to this argument, when Hughes defines his relationship to the black oral tradition as ongoing. ‘‘Clearly,’’ he writes, ‘‘in this poem the

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blues unite the speaker and the performer in some way’’ (221). He notes that, in the opening lines, the two voices grammatically merge together: ‘‘Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play.’’ It is not clear which voice is ‘‘drowning’’ and ‘‘rocking’’— the narrator’s, or the blues singer’s. The adjective, Tracy points out, weaves their voices together in a web of syntax. Music, in these opening lines, thus at once pervades both the poet’s voice and the singing incorporated into the poem. But even more than in Rampersad’s argument, for Tracy the relationship between these voices is not equal. Tracy assumes that it is only through the subordination of poetry to music that Hughes makes his poetry unique. He writes, ‘‘Hughes rarely, if ever, wrote lines as startling or breathtaking as those sung by some blues artists . . . He approached the blues more as an imaginative craftsman than a creatively arresting lyricist’’ (187). Hughes then, as great a poet as he is, is not a poet of invention, but one of craftsmanship. If this relationship is to be considered ‘‘empowering,’’ it must involve an unfettered line of transmission of influence from the original artists to Hughes the copyist. Hughes has to be read as embodying, even channeling, the influence of his predecessors. Small wonder that Tracy’s metaphors for this influence are spiritual: ‘‘In a very real sense,’’ Tracy writes, ‘‘the blues, a form of folk poetry, is the soul of Langston Hughes’s work, for it is the very essence of the souls of the black folk who were so important to Hughes’s artistic expression’’ (2). But although these lines of ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ hint at the closeness of the two voices that make it up, the poem also implies that there is an unbridgeable difference between them. It implies that the transmission of influence is much more problematic than Tracy or Rampersad acknowledge. Hughes is as interested in defining the differences between these two figures as well as the contiguity of these figures. He is as insistent on the costs of the poet’s subordination to music as he is interested in the benefits. It is too simple to say, as Rampersad does, Hughes was merely ‘‘empowered’’ by his association with the blues. We must also take into account the profound and desperate sense of silencing that the poet must feel in the face of what Hughes himself defined as superior expression. At the very heart of the dilemma encapsulated in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ is Hughes’s consciousness that the old woman’s ‘‘Glory! Hallelujah!’’ (which Rampersad

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views as animating his poetry) already expressed more than Hughes could ever make his poetry say.1 The disjunction between narrator and musician is an integral part of the language of the poem. The narrator’s voice is, first of all, rhythmically distinct from the musician’s: the voice of the poet is primarily iambic couplets; the voice of the singer is a shorter, four beat, ballad stanza. In his book The Rhythms of English Poetry Derrick Attridge makes the case that these two distinct types of lines form the basic division of English poetics. Attridge points out that five beat lines are much more akin to spoken language; four beat lines are derived from songs. Hughes’s couplets may have a bluesy rhythm, but this does not change the essential rhythmic distinction between the two voices. It is easy enough to sing the bluesman’s four beat ‘‘He did a lazy sway’’; it is much harder to sing the poet’s five beat ‘‘Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon.’’ In these first lines of ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ moreover, there are already hints that the relationship between poet and bluesman is more complicated than identity and mutual support. Immediately after the confusion of the narrator’s voice with the singer’s voice in the first two lines (the lines Tracy emphasizes), it is revealed that both time and space separate the speaker from the voice he is listening to: Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . . He did a lazy sway. . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. (Collected Poems, 50)

The scene of their encounter took place ‘‘Down on Lenox Avenue the other night’’ [emphasis added]. This is an event remembered, filtered through the mind of the speaker, not in the process of happening. In addition, although the two voices may blend together, they do not have an equal relationship to the music. The sum total of that ‘‘I’s’’ action is passive—he ‘‘hears.’’ It is the bluesman who sings. Filtration, in fact, is not only through individual memory. The figure remembered is seen in ‘‘the pale dull pallor of an old gas

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light,’’ a description that again underscores the temporal distance between the event and the narration of the event. But this distance is not only in simple chronology, it is also the distance of nostalgia and memory. As the poem implies, in 1922 gas streetlights were quaintly antiquated—they had been removed from Lenox Avenue by 1911.2 The vision that the speaker evokes is steeped in the nostalgic light of an older, disappearing, technology. It signifies a radically different relationship between subjects, not merely a different hue or color of light. ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ in other words, uses metaphors of technology and vision to disrupt the smooth transition of knowledge from the musician to the poet. Technology, and the expanded vision it makes possible, undermine the hierarchy that is being built between poetry and music by pointing toward the limits of musical poetry. Sight is one sense not confined by music; the knowledge the poet receives by his sense of sight undermines the bluesman’s influence by making visible the space between the two. Technology makes possible vision that hints at knowledge that is not subsumed under the bluesman’s voice. The possibilities for new kinds of art that electricity opens are touched upon by Ezra Pound, when, on a visit to New York in 1912, he called the Manhattan skyline ‘‘the most beautiful city in the world’’—but only in the evening. ‘‘It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers,’’ Pound wrote, ‘‘They are immaterial; that is to say one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will’’ (‘‘Patria Mia,’’ 107). For Pound, a new type of poetry beckoned to the artist willing to be open to the lure of the electric light. Moreover, moving from gas to electric streetlighting is not an incremental change in technology. This leap marks a sea change in the relationship of public spaces and darkness. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, argues that after the change from gas streetlights to arc lighting (the first widely used public electric streetlights), the relationship among people on the darkened street changed. Schivelbusch writes, The introduction of arc lighting for the first time made good the metaphorical description of street lanterns as artificial suns. The arc-light was, in fact, a small sun and the light it cast had a spectrum similar to that of day light. In arc-light, the eye saw as it did during

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the day, that is with the retinal cones, while in gaslight, it was as it did at night, with retinal rods. Stepping from an arc-lit street into a gas-lit street fully activated the eye’s mechanism for adapting to the dark. (118)

Gas lighting created a streetscape that was little more than visible darkness. Schivelbusch goes on to cite an 1880s source that describes gas street lighting as ‘‘a weak, reddish glow’’ in contrast to electric lanterns (118). The body’s physical response to gas lighting, according to this argument, is the same as its physical response to the dark; in contrast, the body reacts to electric light the same way that it reacts to daylight. In other words, there is a qualitative difference between gas lighting and electric lighting. It signifies a radically different relationship between subjects, not merely a different hue or color of light. When Hughes describes a shift backward into a obsolete technology he describes a return to a previous way of seeing at night. The impact of this new technology on individuals was immediate and profound in its implications. David Nye, in his book Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, writes, ‘‘[Electrification] was both a process and an attribute, and Americans understood the new technology in both ways. They regularly shifted from seeing electricity in terms of technical change to a metaphorical level where it meant novelty, excitement, modernity, and heightened awareness’’ (x). The new mode of seeing that electricity offered, in other words, was understood as not merely adding to the previous experience of culture, but adding something fundamentally new. Through the first two decades of the century, electricity, and the new way of experiencing the urban night, expanded outward from the central business districts and main streets. At the beginning of the century, according to David Nasaw, in his article ‘‘Cities of Light, Landscapes of Pleasure,’’ ‘‘the contrast between flats partially lit by gas and streets blazing with light could not have been greater’’ (275). By 1926, however, electricity had spread to most residential buildings. The opening up of night as a new type of public space was a radical moment that marked a fundamental difference in ways of experiencing the city. The poetry Pound envisioned would have reflected an experience then almost unique to New York. In 1926, an article in American City surveying the history of streetlighting in the city boasts that while ‘‘like daylight, the lighting of the streets of New York has been accepted almost as a natural phenomenon,’’

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this is not true outside of the city (295). ‘‘It is doubtful,’’ the article continues, ‘‘whether any other large city in the world maintains equal standards of illumination throughout its occupied areas’’ (296). Electricity was seen as central to the vision of New York as a modern metropolis. It was central to the myth of the city that never sleeps; Broadway was dubbed ‘‘the great white way’’ because of its electric lights. It was not only lighting the streets, but was for the first time integrated into the architecture. Floodlights, used for the first time as integral elements of skyscraper design, made electricity a defining presence in the new skyscrapers then exploding out of the city streets (Rub 73). Nasaw writes ‘‘In going out into the city of lights, individuals did not experience an extension of transformation of their individual identities, but a momentary departure from them’’ (284). The experience of being bathed in electric lights is a primal scene of modern urban life, but an experience in 1926 tightly linked to New York’s position as emerging world capital. In these years electricity becomes a fundamental trope of modernity, and the electric lights of the city a defining aspect of the modern urban environment—but one tied to the particularity of Manhattan. In setting his own poetics against the beckoning modernism of the electric light, Hughes therefore is articulating a fundamental cost of modernism. The very agencies of technology that are creating the Harlem Renaissance, and the culture’s modernization are divorcing him from the foundation of his poetics. In a fundamental way, ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ portrays black poetry as antimodern: as incompatible with the modern world. The effect of his metaphors of changing technology is to suggest that the voices are set into a relationship that suggests dreams and nostalgia, rather than affirmation and support. The bluesman of ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ emerges from a streetscape darkened by memory; he is only half-seen in the visible darkness of a previous type of public space literally banished from Lenox Avenue in 1911 by the bright glare of technology. While electric lights brought the night street fully into the visible public realm, the bluesman emerges from a semidarkness of shadowy figures only identifiable from close proximity. He is cloaked in a type of privacy and anonymity in public now banished by technology. Changing the time of the poem from actual encounter to a blurry and indistinct memory of times past gives the seemingly simple cliche´ phrase, ‘‘the other night’’ a new twist. Is this ‘‘other night’’ the space of the casual everyday, where such cli-

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che´s easily resolve themselves into previous evenings? Or is this the space of dreams, where ‘‘the other night’’ is an episode in the narrator’s dream life? We have already noticed that this is a leap back into memory rather than simply past years. Critically, the nostalgic gas lighting does not enliven the figure, but gives him the pallor of a corpse—‘‘pale,’’ and ‘‘dull’’—as if he were part ghost as well as man. The reassuring legitimization Tracy posits as the relationship between the poet narrator and the blues figure becomes harder to sustain given these subtexts. The relationship invokes fear as well as love, death as well as birth. Hughes, then, far from portraying poet and musician in a seamless continuum of space, separates them by not only time, but with the light of passing technology. Rather than immediacy, the relationship of the speaker to the singer is one of a nostalgic remembrance and longing. This lyrical relationship— where the poem dwells upon the separation and distinction of poet and musician—culminates in the last lines of ‘‘The Weary Blues.’’ This ending portrays a new relationship of these voices as the most problematic case of nostalgia—mourning and melancholia. Contrary to the happy promise Tracy reads in the opening lines, the poem concludes in a bad state, a bad state that is represented by music. In the end, the nostalgic space the blues singer inhabits is impenetrable to the living poet. The poem’s last stanza represents the echoing blues song as confined to a very claustrophobic space—either a rock or a dead man’s skull. The lines read, And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Music has a strange double existence in these lines. It is both excessively powerful—its echo outlasts time and nature—and also confined to an inanimate and dead landscape—inside the head of a musician who is asleep so profoundly he is either a rock or a corpse. Taken literally, the poem claims that the stars and moon ‘‘go out’’ before the singer stops playing. The metaphor suggests that nature and time take the place of the lights and curtain of the cabaret the blues musician usually performs in. As the music

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ends, nature begins to close up the stage. The echo of those departed notes exert a powerful negative influence, overwhelming time and nature. In this poem, time and nature cease when the bluesman’s performance ceases. This power, however, is threatening to the poet because it is power to which he does not have access. Music does not last far beyond the consciousness of the blues singer. The echo of this powerful tune, we are told, persists only in the singer’s mind—rather than in the poet’s—and the last line insists that this mind is no longer accessible to us: ‘‘He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.’’ This is sleep, yes, but it is the sleep of either a dead person or a rock. Hughes himself claimed to have had a terrible time finishing this part of the poem. In The Big Sea he wrote, ‘‘Every so often I would take [the text] out of the suitcase and do something about the ending. I could not achieve an ending I liked, although I worked and worked on it—something that seldom happens to any of my poems’’ (92). The difficulty in stopping the poem that Hughes encountered persists into the final text. The very last line of the poem pushes past the poem’s natural ending in several ways, as if the text, too, cannot stop itself from going on too far. That last line is extra, a one line complete sentence, and an extra rhyme. In this extra line the poem seems to take a step too far. The ‘‘bed’’/‘‘head’’/‘‘dead’’ rhyme, the only triple rhyme in a poem full of couplets, seems to go on too long, as if the sound of the rhyme drives the poem on longer than it would ordinarily go. These words are also all reminders of enclosure—beds, heads, and death all hinting at confinement. The very echo where poetry is most similar to music—rhyme—here leads to the speaker encountering poetry’s limitations. As a poem about influence, ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ presents a unique dilemma. Instead of becoming the possession of the poet—the model for successful influence—the notes of the singer’s voice remain confined to the inanimate, dead, space of the singer’s head. In the end the problem of the poem is not only how to associate itself with the bluesman’s voice, but how to disassociate itself from that same music. The echo of the blues, which was sought as authority and inspiration, now serves only as a chilling reminder of where the poem cannot go. Rather than reassuring the reader that the blues echoing through the musician’s head is the sound of influence and persistence of music, the last lines assure the reader that this artistry is entombed within a figure inanimate or dead. The transmission of authority and influence from musician to poet becomes instead the trans-

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mission of voicelessness and silence. The connection that endures between poet and musician is not one of happy contiguity. Although at times their consciousness overlaps, instead of the mutual authorization and reinforcement that Tracy claims to find, poet and musician face each other across a series of ruptures. The representation of the blues singer is ambivalent—he is both the root source of art and the object of an impossible desire. The singer’s voice, originally sought as the source of inspiration and power, becomes shaded by anxieties of being infected with voicelessness and incapacity. The disjunction between musician and poet in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ raises interesting questions for some of the more interesting recent interpretations of Harlem as a cultural space. In particular, Joseph Boone has argued that the emergence of a new urban configuration in Harlem, the Left Bank of Paris, and Greenwich Village made possible the development of coherent gay subcultural spaces that confound the otherwise normalizing social and political hierarchies. The size and density of the new metropolis of the 1920s created a conception of the city as ‘‘uncontrollably vast, internationally diverse, and spectacularly unknowable’’ (247). At the same time, the very visibility of these coherent enclaves, Boone relates, literally became a ‘‘stage,’’ as tourists gathered to gawk through the plate glass windows at the brightly electrified interiors of famous gay hotspots (262). In fact, Boone writes, ‘‘the gay enclave participates in the dissemination of ‘gay knowledge’—that is, knowledge of things gay—to unfamiliar terrains outside its immediate borders’’ (259). Transmitted by the modern city, the subversive power of the visible enclave, in other words, has the power to spread subversive knowledge. Those enclaves upend received normalizing hierarchies in the larger city and culture beyond. But in ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ the very visibility provided by electric light is a source of division rather than community. The same modern city that, as Boone argues, engenders the development of coherent subcultures, deprives the speaking poet of continuity and communication with the blues singer. Rather than the infectious knowledge that Boone describes, being seen and exposed by technological vision distorts the blackness Hughes is trying to produce. The brightly lit ‘‘stage’’ that, Boone argues, makes possible an empowering visibility for the gay subculture, for the bluesman has a quite different valence. For the musician of ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ the only stage possible has closed up along with the darkened world to which he belonged. Electricity,

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which rendered the gay enclave visible, eclipses the blues musician. On him, the stars have truly gone out. The difficulty of embracing the black tradition in music echoes arguments on the use of blackness in American literature Toni Morrison offers in her 1992 book Playing in the Dark. In that text Morrison notes that representations of black culture have, in traditional American literature, been used to buttress the presentation of a coherent white, American, subjectivity. By being characterized as animalistic or subservient, black characters make possible meditations on American nationality and ethics. Similarly, in the 1920s, particularly in New York, jazz was often identified with the modernization of black culture through that culture’s conversion into a commodity and reflection of the machine age. Waldo Frank, for example, in 1925 argues that jazz is not a ‘‘folk’’ art, exactly because it is ‘‘the art of a commerce-and-industry-ridden people’’ (119). Frank means, in fact, to praise jazz as representative of machine age culture and therefore as a profoundly modern cultural formation, but as Morrison argues, in order to make a case about modernity he dehumanizes Afro-America. Likewise, in 1926 John Alden Carpenter’s ballet ‘‘Skyscrapers,’’ in order to make a point about the dehumanizing force of modern culture, is set to a jazz score. ‘‘It is significant to note that early in the development of jazz,’’ Merrill Schleier writes of Carpenter’s ballet, ‘‘observers likened its varied and repetitive beats to both the sounds of building and the rapid pace of the city’’ (106). David Levering Lewis also discusses the increasing association of jazz with commercialization—at least in New York—when he writes that Fletcher Henderson, ‘‘New York jazz in the flesh,’’ was ‘‘the debut of jazz as a product for national consumption’’ (171, 173). Black music, in other words, is tied, in the 1920s, to a modern culture defined as commercialized and therefore dehumanizing. In ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ in other words, Hughes must attempt to find what Morrison would call an Africanist presence that remains apart from the dominant representation of the black musical tradition in the 1920s. The problem is in doing so he needs to remove that presence from the modernist culture its representations are embedded in, representations that use jazz to denote the dehumanizing side of modernity. Adverse to the electric light of modernity (the very stage that Boone finds liberating for a gay enclave), that blues presence assumes a meaning Hughes both wishes to grasp and must represent as unavailable. The poem is therefore caught in a paradox. Only in presenting the

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bluesman as inherently premodern and therefore apart from the modern world can that musician and his art remain authentic. Yet that very distance makes the blues musician’s art unavailable to the conscious poet of the talented tenth that Hughes, however reluctantly, embodies. This is the problem Hughes acknowledges in ‘‘The Negro Artist’’ when he explicitly places himself outside of the culture that will produce a ‘‘truly great Negro artist.’’ But as Morrison writes of her own text in Playing in the Dark, ‘‘My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject’’ (90). Hughes, too, in ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ diverts the gaze of the reader from the easy assumption of the availability of the black musical tradition for either use in his poem or, by extension, commodification by modernity, to that tradition’s difficult and complex origin in a nostalgic past. Contrary to much of the arguments of Rampersad and Tracy, Hughes’s relationship with jazz and the blues cannot simply be read as affirmation and authorization. The relationship between poetry and music is much more vexed than has been previously considered; that relationship must be seen as antagonistic as well as complementary. As my reading of ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ makes clear, Hughes is also concerned with the difficulty of appropriating his musical roots and the danger that invoking the powerful haunting figure of the blues musician entails. Music is not only a powerful influence, it is an overwhelming one. The poet’s words, compared to the musician’s notes, seem pale and inadequate. Hughes appeals to music as an authority, but simultaneously he recoils from the power of music to silence poetry. I call this double reaction—fear and attraction—‘‘jazzaphobia.’’ For poetry, jazz offers a lesson in fear and obsolescence, but also a model of the full potential of an artistic expression of African American culture. I mean with this word to be playful, but also to get at the depth of the emotional dilemma that black music poses for the literary black artist. Before the black poet speaks, his (and this does appear to be gendered) most profound cultural expression has not only already happened, but has happened in a way and in a medium that makes it unavailable for literature.

Notes 1. The similarity to a dilemma common in religious poetry is striking. One unexpected example is George Herbert, who would also rank his verse below

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the woman in the street’s spontaneous exclamation. In Herbert’s case, he would defer to the sincerity of prayer. For both poets, the problem is poetry’s status as a self-conscious, constructed craft. 2. The Manhattan Borough President’s 1911 ‘‘Report of the President of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York’’ lists repairs to the street signs on Lenox Avenue ‘‘owing to the change from gas to electric lighting.’’ Thus the change from gas to electric must have been shortly before that year. The first electric street lights in Manhattan were installed on 14th Street in 1884, the last in the late 1920s.

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. Edited by Randolf Quirk. English Language Series. Essex: Longman, 1982. Boone, Joseph A. ‘‘Queer Sites in Modernism: Harlem/the Left Bank/Greenwich Village.’’ In The Geography of Identity, edited by Patricia Yeager, 243– 72. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Frank, Waldo. ‘‘Jazz and Folk Art.’’ In In the American Jungle, 1925–1936, 119– 23. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. ‘‘The History of Streetlighting in New York City.’’ The American City (March 1926): 295–96. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. ——— The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1994. ——— ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.’’ The Nation (1926): 692–94. Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992. Mullen, Edward J., ed. Critical Essays on Langston Hughes. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986. Nasaw, David. ‘‘Cities of Light, Landscapes of Pleasure.’’ In The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900–1940, edited by David Ward and Olivier Zunz, 273–86. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pound, Ezra. ‘‘Patria Mia.’’ In Selected Prose, 1909–1965, edited by William Cookson, 101–41. New York: New Directions, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew.’’ Callaloo 9, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 144–57. ——— The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I, 1902–1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rub, Timothy. ‘‘Lighting Up the Town: Architectural Illumination in the Jazz Age.’’ Architectural Review (August 1986): 73–77.

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Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Angela Davies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Schleier, Merrill. The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986.

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Getting the Full Picture: Teaching the Literature and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance Anne E. Carroll

THE LITERATURE OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE HAS ENJOYED A GOOD

deal of attention in recent years. The MLA bibliography lists a multitude of new studies on writers who worked during the Renaissance, including dissertations, journal articles, and scholarly books. Many of these are single-author studies, and many recover the work of relatively unknown writers or neglected texts by more familiar writers. Primary texts—some long out of print—can be found in recent reprints and in collections of fiction, poetry, and drama, and African American literature anthologies routinely devote a good deal of attention to the period. The mammoth Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for example, includes more than four hundred pages of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs in its section of texts from 1919 to 1940. This attention to the literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance corresponds with the way many of us teach the movement in our English Department courses: primarily as a literary phenomenon. But a few recent works point in another direction: they place the literary output of the movement in the context of other kinds of creative work done in the early decades of the twentieth century. For example, Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition sets written texts alongside samples of African American oral and musical traditions. The section of the anthology on the Harlem Renaissance opens with discussions of the blues, gospel, jazz, toasts, sermons, and folktales; it also includes transcriptions of lyrics by the most well known performers of the period. Next are two essays calling for political and social change, followed by two essays debating the purpose and possibilities of representations of 269

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African Americans in literature and other forms of art. Only then does the anthology open its selection of poems and fiction written in the 1920s and 1930s. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance puts the literary work of the Harlem Renaissance into an even broader context. This book is a catalog of material from the movement that was exhibited in England and the United States in 1997 and 1998. The exhibit included movies, music, paintings, photographs, graphic designs, and sculpture as well as books published in the 1920s, and the catalog includes a number of essays that discuss each of these kinds of texts. This breadth of focus, as Richard Powell argues in his contribution, allows us to move beyond the tendency to think of the Harlem Renaissance as an overwhelmingly literary and musical movement and to appreciate it as a movement that involved many cultural forms (16–17). The purposes of this essay are, first, to explore the importance of and the advantages of reflecting such an understanding of the Harlem Renaissance when we teach texts from the movement and, second, to discuss a number of texts that illuminate the connections among the arts during the movement. Even when we teach courses focusing primarily on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, setting this literature in the context of other kinds of texts produced then—such as films, visual art, and music—enriches our presentation of the movement. There are a multitude of texts that allow us to demonstrate its broad cultural dimensions, including novels, volumes of poetry, illustrated books, magazine issues, and anthologies. Including such texts in our courses opens up a range of possibilities for students’ work, and, although including a range of media can be a challenge to teachers with primarily literary backgrounds, there are a number of interdisciplinary studies of the Harlem Renaissance that are useful resources for presenting this material.

Literature and the Arts in the Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a movement in which participants forged important connections among the arts and explored parallels between different forms of representation in different media. But that aspect of the movement is often hidden when we focus exclusively on the literature produced during the movement. That said, certainly literature was of crucial importance to participants, and it captured a great deal of their atten-

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tion. The pages of magazines like Crisis and Opportunity were full of reviews of literature by and about African Americans, and critics carried on extensive discussions of the significance of the images in these texts. Many participants of the Harlem Renaissance believed that literature contributed to attitudes toward African Americans, and they heralded the work of African American writers who were creating new images of African Americans that might replace outmoded, stereotyped caricatures of African Americans. Montgomery Gregory, for example, argued that Jean Toomer’s Cane provided portraits of African Americans in the South that served as counterpoints to the ‘‘alien exploitation’’ and ‘‘caricatures of the race’’ that had been created by white artists (374). He made a similar point in his praise of Jessie Fauset’s treatment of the ‘‘educated strata of Negro urban life’’ in There Is Confusion, emphasizing that the book offered readers a chance to look in on the life of a class of African Americans that they did not know existed and that it ‘‘[won] a new understanding for the Negro and a wider respect and recognition for him throughout the world of culture’’ (181). Of course, there were critics who resisted this emphasis on the cultural work literature could do, arguing that it put too much pressure on writers. These critics felt that literature should bear no such weight and that writers should be free to create without the burden of social responsibility. Langston Hughes’s oftenquoted proclamation in ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’’ that the artist should be free to create whatever he or she desired demonstrates this point of view. But even Hughes had clear ideas about what kind of work artists should create: Hughes encouraged work by black writers in which they embraced their blackness and resisted what he called the ‘‘urge within the race toward whiteness’’ (692). He opened his essay, after all, with an attack on an unnamed poet who had said that he wanted to be known simply as a poet, and not as a ‘‘Negro poet’’ (692). Essays, reviews, and proclamations such as these constituted an ongoing debate about literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance, and they can be used to outline the ideological context in which literary texts were produced and to establish questions about the social and political implications of literary representation. In general, these debates about the purposes and production of African American literature are familiar to scholars and teachers of the Harlem Renaissance. But it is less widely recognized that these discussions focused not just on the importance of litera-

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ture but also on the importance of other kinds of creative work. After all, even as Hughes and Gregory were discussing writers and literature, they also referred to artists and art. Their essays are typical of those written by the many participants in the Harlem Renaissance who saw the attempt to represent African Americans’ experiences and to explore and define African American identity as a collaborative and a cumulative one. They believed that it was not only African American writers who contributed to that effort, but also African American actors, singers, musicians, politicians, and sports figures. Commentators emphasized the importance of work being done in folk arts, painting, sculpture, photography, music, film, and on the stage, as well as in literature. In their eyes, the Harlem Renaissance was not simply a literary movement; instead, they saw it as a broad cultural movement that involved all of the arts and popular culture. One of the earliest indications about the scope of the movement to come was W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘‘The Negro in Literature and Art,’’ which he published in 1913. Du Bois opened with an argument about the importance of the spirituals, turned to a discussion of literature, and closed by noting the work of African American painters, actors, and composers. His discussion of literature is the most extended section of the essay, but the fact that Du Bois preceded and followed that consideration with discussions of other kinds of creative work manifests his understanding of the relations among these arts. By the years of the Harlem Renaissance, this interest in the many ways African Americans expressed and represented themselves was widespread. James Weldon Johnson, in a particularly clear example, discussed the cumulative impact of many different kinds of texts in ‘‘Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,’’ an essay that he published in 1928. His focus was on the ‘‘ameliorating effect’’ of African Americans’ creative work on race relations (770), and he linked a variety of texts to that effort. Johnson opened his discussion by noting the growing appreciation of the spirituals and the corresponding increase in understanding of African Americans as contributors to ‘‘our common cultural fund’’ (770). He then moved on to consider the work of poets, actors, singers of spirituals and the blues, fiction writers, painters, and sculptors (771– 73). These various artists, Johnson concluded, were doing much to smash the stereotype of African Americans as ‘‘intellectually, culturally, and morally empty’’ by demonstrating that the Negro ‘‘has long been a generous giver to America’’ (775–76). Like many other commentators, Johnson, in his assessment of the

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importance of the work being done by African American artists, identified the literary output of the Harlem Renaissance as only one part of the movement. The fact is that Du Bois and Johnson—like Hughes and so many others—were discussing the work of ‘‘artists,’’ and while they sometimes used the term to refer to visual artists, they often used it to refer to musicians, actors, and writers. Thus when Du Bois announced the symposium ‘‘The Negro in Art’’ in February 1926, he made it clear that he was interested in how African Americans ‘‘should be pictured by writers and portrayed by artists’’ (‘‘A Questionnaire’’ 165, emphasis added). Many of the people who responded to Du Bois’s questions about the representation of African Americans in the arts focused on literature about African Americans, but they also mentioned other kinds of texts, from the musical review ‘‘Porgy’’ to the work of painters and sculptors to the singing of Paul Robeson to magazines like Crisis and Opportunity. The contributors to this symposium clearly saw work in different media carrying out similar functions. The parallels between the arts are also implied in the pages of Crisis, Opportunity, and other literary and social magazines of the period, where literary reviews were printed alongside essays about other arts and reviews of music or theater performances. Gregory’s review of Cane, for example, appeared in the December 1923 issue of Opportunity, which included an editorial on ‘‘Negro Life and Its Poets’’ and a number of poems by other writers, as well as a tribute to singer Roland Hayes and a transcription of an African folk story. Thus developments in literature were discussed alongside developments in other fields, rather than as unique phenomena. The belief among participants in the Harlem Renaissance that different kinds of creative work served similar purposes also is clear in the literary work they produced, much of which draws attention to such connections. Writers demonstrated their interest in and awareness of the other arts both in the content of their work, when they focused on characters like Joanna Marshall, the dancer who is the main character of There Is Confusion, and in the presentation of their work, when they combined their texts with work by other kinds of artists in a number of collaborative volumes. These include many books of poetry and fiction that were illustrated, either simply with cover art, like Hughes’s The Weary Blues, or with more extensive illustration throughout, such as Johnson’s God’s Trombones; illustrated periodicals such as Crisis, Opportunity, and Fire!!; and magazine issues and an-

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thologies that were meant to define the New Negro movement, most notably Alain Locke’s Survey Graphic’s issue on Harlem and his anthology, The New Negro. The most complex of these volumes include written texts and visual ones, transcriptions of songs, sermons, and folktales, and discussions of music, drama, and literature. They are particularly clear manifestations of the efforts of participants in the Harlem Renaissance to forge connections among literature and the other arts. These creative works and collaborative volumes, along with the critical debates that tied together work in so many different media, clearly demonstrate the multidisciplinary dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance. They add to our understanding of the literature produced then and of the complexity of the movement. As teachers and as scholars, then, we do the period justice when we uncover and explore these connections among the arts in our attention to the period.

Teaching the Harlem Renaissance as a Broad Cultural Movement There are many kinds of texts that we can use to recover and explore the connections among the arts during the Harlem Renaissance, including anthologies; documentary films, audio recordings, books on art, and other secondary sources; and a range of texts produced during the period, including works of fiction and poetry that draw attention to other arts, illustrated texts, and collaborative volumes. These texts open up questions and issues for exploration in the classroom, establish broader contexts for the literary work produced during the period, and illuminate the importance of many kinds of creative work. They can be used in introductory level undergraduate courses, more focused undergraduate courses, or advanced graduate courses. In courses that focus relatively briefly on the Harlem Renaissance, two anthologies are particularly helpful for exploring the relations among the arts during the period. For a unit on the Harlem Renaissance in a survey course on African American literature, Call and Response is the most useful anthology, because it includes so many kinds of texts. For courses which place the work of the Harlem Renaissance in other contexts, such as American literature or literature and the arts, an anthology of material from the Harlem Renaissance might be more appropriate. Nathan Huggins’s Voices from the Harlem Renaissance

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includes essays, fiction, and poetry, as well as a brief selection of visual arts. Both anthologies are worth supplementing with more examples of the visual arts and with recordings of music from the period, though. For a course focusing entirely or even extensively on the Harlem Renaissance, there are many ways to draw attention to the range of media that were linked in the movement. I find it useful to begin by establishing the historical context of the period and by exploring the representation of African Americans in American popular culture. There are a number of studies of the Harlem Renaissance that offer engaging accounts of the events leading up to the movement, the relations among participants, and the work they produced. These begin with David Levering Lewis’s groundbreaking 1981 study, When Harlem Was In Vogue, and include more recent work like Steven Watson’s The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930. Both include many photographs of participants, thus allowing students to visually identify the artists and intellectuals whose work they will read. Lewis and Watson’s accounts make the sense of community among them clear, and it is worth considering how the personal and professional relationships among participants influenced the nature of the movement. The fact that many of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance knew each other and often worked together must have facilitated the exchange of ideas among them and contributed to the understanding that they all—writers, visual artists, musicians, and other kinds of creative artists—were united by their desire to express themselves and to explore particular ideas, even if they were working in different media. A number of video documentaries also are useful in establishing the connections among the arts in the Harlem Renaissance. William Greaves’s From These Roots discusses the historical, political, and cultural development of the Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the experiences of the African American soldiers who participated in World War I and their treatment upon returning to the United States. It includes discussions and examples of many kinds of creative work done in the 1920s, such as James Van Der Zee’s photography, the blues, popular dances, musicals on Broadway, and literature. The soundtrack includes recordings of both the music and the poetry of the period. With a running time of only twenty-nine minutes, From These Roots can be easily incorporated into classroom time. Two other documentaries are helpful for their discussion of images of African

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Americans in popular culture. Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions provides a survey of such depictions, from D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to cartoons to newspapers. The video also includes interviews with scholars of African American culture who comment on the effect of these images. Though many of the images are disturbing and painful, the documentary is extremely helpful in establishing the context of the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly in terms of participants’ interest in creating new texts that might replace or at least counteract these stereotyped and demeaning representations. Midnight Ramble also offers a helpful introduction to the period; it focuses on the development of race movies, with Oscar Micheaux as the central figure. It includes clips from films by a number of African American directors of the period, which is helpful since many of these films are difficult to find or unavailable. Participants’ discussion of the literature, art, movies, and music of the Harlem Renaissance can be found in a number of collections of primary material. Sondra Kathryn Wilson has edited three relevant volumes, The Opportunity Reader, The Crisis Reader, and The Messenger Reader, each of which includes a selection of poetry, fiction, and essays from the magazines. More extensive selections of reviews and essays are included in The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance and The Politics and Aesthetics of ‘‘New Negro’’ Literature, edited and published by Cary Wintz in 1996 as part of Garland’s seven-volume series on the movement. These volumes, at $95 to $105 each, are too expensive to require students to buy, but they are useful as reference sources, since they include so much primary material from the Harlem Renaissance. There also are many novels and books of poetry that draw attention to connections among the arts during the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer’s Cane is a helpful book to begin with, both because it was published in 1923 and because its content, form, and reception introduce a number of parallels among the arts. The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance and the Norton Critical Edition of Cane both include a number of the reviews of this collection of fiction, poetry, and drama that appeared shortly after its publication; these reviews introduce many of the debates about the purposes literature might serve in their praise for Toomer’s work, and they show the tendency of critics to draw connections between literature and the other arts. Gregory’s argument that Cane works as portraiture can be used to frame an exploration of the ‘‘portraits’’ Toomer offered in his writing

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through close readings of some of the poems and short stories; it invites consideration of the effectiveness of his portraiture in the different forms of writing. Gorham B. Munson, on the other hand, emphasized the musical unity of Cane in 1925, an idea picked up by B. F. McKeever in 1970, when he likened Cane to the blues; excerpts from his essay are included in the Norton Critical Edition. Discussing the text with its portraits and its musicality in mind draws certain thematic issues and poetic techniques into focus, particularly Toomer’s use of vivid visual imagery and his references to the music of the South, including the spirituals as well as the blues. A number of texts are useful for further exploration of the similarities between Cane and other forms of art. Toomer’s portraiture can be even more vividly compared to portraits in other media with the help of Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance: the center of the catalog includes reproductions of sculpture by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Sargent Claude Johnson, and Richmord Barthe´; paintings by Palmer Hayden, Winold Reiss, Edward Burra, Malvin Gray Johnson, and Aaron Douglas; and photography by Doris Ulman and Richard S. Roberts. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America includes a wide selection of photographs by James Van Der Zee, an analysis of his work by Deborah Willis Ryan, and reproductions and discussions of the work of a number of other visual artists. On the other hand, Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words of the Harlem Renaissance offers recordings of vaudeville and blues music by some of the most important musicians of the period, and the CD audio companion to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes recordings of six spirituals and gospel songs. A number of the books published in the years following Cane’s publication further demonstrate writers’ interest in the work of visual artists. Fauset’s 1928 Plum Bun, for example, is most obviously concerned with questions of passing and with the treatment of black women, but its characters include Angela Murray, an art student; Rachel Powell, an art student who is denied a scholarship because she is black; and Anthony Cross, a portrait painter. Virginia Murray, Angela’s sister, is a music teacher who becomes active in the artistic and intellectual circles in Harlem. Fauset used these characters to comment extensively on art, representation, and racial identity. Similarly, Wallace Thurman included a number of visual artists among the writers, singers, and actors who populate Infants of the Spring,

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which he published in 1932 and which reflects his cynical and pessimistic attitude toward the Harlem Renaissance. Thurman’s characters are failures, artists who are unable to create meaningful texts. While Thurman’s novel offers a stark contrast to the optimism evident in so many other Harlem Renaissance texts, it fits well with their attention to the work of all sorts of artists. The importance of musicians in the Harlem Renaissance also is clearly reflected in the literature of the movement. James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is worth mentioning here, given its narrator’s vocation as a musician. Of course, this novel was first published in 1912, but its republication at the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1927 and its thematic connections to the work of the movement make it an appropriate text to include in a course on the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson’s narrator’s work as a ragtime performer and composer allowed Johnson to include lengthy discussions of ragtime, and the book includes a number of analyses of the music and its performers. Johnson also discussed the work of African Americans in other forms of creative expression, including the spirituals, the cakewalk, and sermons. Like Johnson’s novel, two of the short stories in Hughes’s collection, The Ways of White Folk, focus on main characters who are musicians, Oceola in ‘‘The Blues I’m Playing’’ and Roy in ‘‘Home.’’ Writers’ awareness of the importance of music in the Harlem Renaissance also is demonstrated in the many texts that include scenes in musicals and cabarets. Perhaps the two most obvious—and most controversial—are Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Both include passages of vivid descriptions of dance halls and their patrons, and both sparked intense criticism from reviewers, including Du Bois, who objected to the characterization of African Americans in both texts. Du Bois’s review of Nigger Heaven, along with those by McKay, Johnson, and Hughes, are included in the 1971 edition of the book. In any case, the role of music in both novels is crucial: both include transcriptions of blues lyrics as well as commentary on the music, its environs, and its effects on its listeners. Van Vechten also commented on the spirituals, although in far less depth. Many of the films of the period also include scenes in clubs or at shows, such as The Blood of Jesus and Scar of Shame, and Robeson’s singing is a key part of movies like The Emperor Jones and Song of Freedom. The poetry of Hughes and Sterling Brown goes even further

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than these texts toward demonstrating the relations among different kinds of creative expression: Hughes and Brown both focused numerous poems on blues musicians and incorporated the form of the blues into the structure of their poems. Hughes’s ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ and Brown’s ‘‘Ma Rainey’’ are probably the best-known examples, but the books they appeared in, The Weary Blues and Southern Road, respectively, are full of blues poems. The most obvious blues poems have titles like ‘‘St. Louis Blues,’’ focus on topics common in the blues, and use the threeline, repeating structure of the blues. Recordings of the blues can be used to discuss the characteristics of the music and to lay the groundwork for discussions of the extent to which Hughes and Brown were able to capture the spirit and the techniques of the music in their poetry. Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance is a particularly helpful source for such recordings, since it includes both music and spoken-word selections. A number of writers of the Harlem Renaissance also used their texts to draw attention to other kinds of performers. One example is Fauset’s emphasis in There Is Confusion on the cultural work Joanna Marshall carries out as a dancer and an actress and the potential impact of Marshall’s performances on perceptions of African Americans. Another example is Johnson’s God’s Trombones, in which Johnson transcribed sermons often delivered by African American preachers. The book as a whole and the individual poems demonstrate Johnson’s knowledge of and respect for the preachers, which also are clear in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in the narrator’s descriptions of the performances of Singing Johnson and the preacher John Brown. But in God’s Trombones, Johnson also raised questions about the how written texts might preserve oral traditions in compelling ways—or fail to do so. Johnson opened the book with a preface in which he pondered his ability to capture these sermons in a meaningful, compelling fashion in poetry, and his discussion of the difficulties of reflecting the complexities of oral performance in writing and the poetic techniques he used to indicate the patterns of delivery opens up questions of craft and technique. He used punctuation, repetition, and diction to give his poems some of the characteristics of his preachers’ art, but the poems still can only hint at these aspects of the preachers’ delivery. Johnson, in fact, believed that the art of the preachers’ work was largely lost in transcription, and he insisted on the need to perform the sermons. He often ‘‘intoned’’ these sermons at parties

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and on radio broadcasts, thus demonstrating the kind of performance he wanted to preserve. Teachers today can bring such performances into the classroom thanks to an audiotape recording of the sermons being delivered by a number of the most prominent African American ministers in New York City in 1993. These sermons were recorded in front of live audiences, and the listeners’ responses to the sermons demonstrate the call and response structure and the relation between preacher and audience that would have been so important to the delivery of the sermons. Zora Neale Hurston’s first three books demonstrate still more connections among literature and the other arts. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine Hurston blended fiction and folklore, and many of the issues of the ability of writers to transcribe oral traditions raised in God’s Trombones apply as well to Hurston’s transcription of the sermons and prayers of her main character, the preacher John Buddy Pearson, as well as to her use of proverbs and her recordings of songs and stories. Furthermore, Hurston’s use of dialect and her inclusion of a glossary of terms bring questions of language to the fore. Similar issues can be explored in Mules and Men, where Hurston wove the stories and rituals shared with her by African Americans in the rural South into a narrative about her work as the collector of this material. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the folklore is perhaps secondary to the narrative of Janie’s experiences, but the importance of storytelling and rituals is clear throughout the novel. The three books, then, offer various perspectives on the relations between fiction and folklore. Importantly, a number of these books also include illustrations, and they thus demonstrate parallels and connections among the visual arts, literature, music, and folklore. The illustrations in God’s Trombones are particularly important. Johnson’s poems are accompanied by eight illustrations by Douglas. These illustrations complicate Johnson’s versions of the sermons: in ‘‘The Crucifixion,’’ for example, Douglas focuses his illustration on Simon, the black man who carried the cross for Jesus. Johnson mentions Simon only briefly in his poem. In this pair of written and visual texts, then, as well as in a number of the other pairs in the book, the illustrations more clearly than the written texts recenter these Biblical narratives around the roles of black participants. As I have argued more extensively elsewhere, visual and written texts complement one another; the total volume has a greater scope than either its written or

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its visual components (see my ‘‘Art, Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance’’). Although the illustrations were produced in black and white in God’s Trombones, Douglas did full-color studies for them, a number of which are included in Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. A number of other volumes of poetry and novels include illustrations. Brown’s Southern Road includes a series of black and white woodcuts by E. Simms Campbell, and Countee Cullen’s Color, Copper Sun, and Black Christ include drawings by Charles Cullen. A similar collaboration occurred between Hughes and Douglas in ‘‘Two Artists,’’ a two-page spread that appeared in Opportunity, in which Douglas provided black and white drawings for each of five poems by Hughes. The poems are brief but clear examples of Hughes’s use of the blues in both the form and content of his poems, and the illustrations demonstrate Douglas’s ability to communicate the essence of the blues in simple visual images. Hughes’s The Weary Blues was published with cover art by Miguel Covarrubias, who also contributed a few drawings to Mules and Men. Douglas did cover art and art for ads for a number of other books, including Nigger Heaven, the 1927 edition of The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, and Home to Harlem. Most of the contemporary reprints of these works omit the visual art, but the images are reproduced in secondary sources that discuss the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance, including Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, Amy Kirschke’s Aaron Douglas, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, and Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. There also are a number of illustrated, collaborative volumes produced during the Harlem Renaissance that bring together literature, visual art, and discussions of many other kinds of creative work. The fact that they include reproductions or discussions of so many kinds of texts makes them particularly vivid demonstrations of the connections among the arts and the complementary roles of different kinds of texts. The first of such volumes was the Survey Graphic magazine’s special issue on Harlem. Edited by Locke and published in March 1925, this issue combines social analysis with creative work; it includes expository essays, creative writing, discussions of music, and visual art. The Survey Graphic issue is relatively brief; the fact that it includes such a range of texts in such a concise format makes it a particularly condensed demonstration of the complementary nature of different kinds of texts. In the months follow-

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ing its publication, Locke expanded it into The New Negro, the anthology that has become the most well-known defining work of the period. This volume includes, as did its predecessor, essays and sociological studies as well as creative work. Here, the creative work includes poetry, short fiction, and drama, and it is complemented by essays about and transcriptions of African American music, folklore, drama, and visual art. The New Negro also includes visual texts, black and white designs and illustrations by Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas and portraits by Reiss. These portraits appeared in full color on special paper in the 1925 edition of The New Negro; clearly Locke saw the portraits as a crucial part of his definition of the movement. Unfortunately, most reprints of the volume drop these visual texts. The edition of the book published by Arno Press in 1968 is the only one that includes the portraits, but it reproduces them in black and white, so they have far less impact than did the originals. To show the portraits to students, a first edition is necessary—or, given the likelihood that one would not be available, Jeffrey Stewart’s reproductions of Reiss’s work in To Color America can be used. This book only includes a few of the portraits that were in The New Negro, but they demonstrate what the series was like. Fire!! was the next defining volume of the Harlem Renaissance to appear. Published in 1926 by a group of the younger artists and writers to whom Locke had dedicated The New Negro, it was intended to be the first issue of a quarterly journal, but only one issue was published. That issue offers a very different portrait of the New Negro movement than Locke’s anthology does, but like The New Negro, it includes a range of texts that represent African Americans. For example, Thurman’s short story, ‘‘Cordelia,’’ has a written portrait of a prostitute and is preceded by Richard Bruce Nugent’s drawing of a nude woman. This pair of texts makes clear the editors’ intent to shock their readers and draw sexuality to their attention, and it demonstrates the role of both visual and written texts in announcing the challenge of this younger generation to Locke’s portrait. Other texts in the volume also offer portraits of African Americans who had not been seen in The New Negro. Hurston’s short story ‘‘Sweat’’ and her play ‘‘Color Struck,’’ a collection of poems, and Douglas’s line drawings of a waitress, a preacher, and an artist use different kinds of written and visual texts to focus on the folk; this range of creative texts allows for a consideration of how different texts function to make the folk the center of

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attention in this volume. The issue also contains a number of manifestoes: these constitute yet another type of written text involved in the Harlem Renaissance, this type a call to action. These volumes demonstrate complex and dynamic definitions of African American identity, as I discuss in my Word, Image, and the Harlem Renaissance. Their significance here is as examples of texts in which visual and written texts were brought together during the Harlem Renaissance. A number of similar works reinforce this point. One example is Charles Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz, published in 1927. It is a less well-known anthology than Locke’s The New Negro, but one that includes a similar combination of stories, poems, folktales, songs, and essays. It also includes striking illustrations by Douglas, Charles Cullen, and a handful of other illustrators, as well as a number of facsimiles of title pages from books and pamphlets by African American writers. A number of periodicals also published special issues focusing on African Americans, including The North Carolina Review and Palms. Teachers who wish to present the Harlem Renaissance as a broad cultural movement, then, have an abundance of texts to choose from. The fact that participants reflected connections and parallels among the arts in everything from novels to films to anthologies means that teachers can incorporate this aspect of the movement into their courses in many ways. Those who wish to keep their focus on the fiction and poetry of the movement can continue to do so but can simply use the content of these texts to draw attention to the other arts, while those who want to include a broader range of texts in their courses can do so through individual texts, illustrated books, and collaborative volumes, or through music, film, and visual art.

Resources for Teaching the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance We may be teachers in English departments, scholars whose primary academic training has come from English departments, and critics who see the literary output of the Harlem Renaissance as particularly fascinating. But the many different kinds of written texts produced during the Harlem Renaissance invite us to broaden the concept of literature to include texts that might not be considered ‘‘literary,’’ such as sociological essays, editorials, news stories, and autobiographical accounts. Furthermore,

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the written texts that demonstrate connections to other arts invite us to explore the relationship between literature and music, the visual arts, cinema, and folklore, as do the illustrated and collaborative volumes produced during the movement. Focusing on the Harlem Renaissance as a broad cultural movement forces us to push our studies in new directions, to learn far more about art, film, music, and performance than we may already know. But the secondary texts I have mentioned in my discussion above are great helps for understanding and teaching the Harlem Renaissance as a broad cultural movement. Another part of the challenge of this approach to the Harlem Renaissance is collecting the material for discussion. Again, I have already mentioned a number of the collections of primary work from the period, texts that reproduce the visual arts, and recordings of the music and sermons. A few additional words about currently available primary texts are necessary, though. First, the Survey Graphic issue is now available on the internet, prepared in 1995 and 1996 by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Catherine Tousignant at the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center. The web page address is http://etext.virginia.edu/ harlem/index.html. This site includes an introduction that discusses the significance of the issue, compares the issue to The New Negro, and offers information about this electronic edition. The site also includes a page of excerpts from reviews of the issue which appeared in the May 1925 issue of the Survey Graphic. The Harlem issue also is now available in print form in two sources. The most affordable is a 1981 reprint from the Black Classic Press in Baltimore, but it also is reproduced within Wintz’s The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Only one version of The New Negro is currently available: a relatively inexpensive edition from Simon and Schuster. But the full-color portraits from the original are not included in this edition. Even without them, this is a crucial volume, particularly because, as an anthology that collects work by so many different writers and artists, it includes so many different opinions about and representations of African Americans. Fire!! has recently been made accessible by a reprint available through The Fire!! Press in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The reprint includes a reflection on the origins and the production of the issue, written in 1982 by Nugent. It also includes a discussion of the issue by Thomas Wirth. The Weary Blues and Southern Road both have been out of print for some time. Many of the poems are included in volumes of collected works by Hughes and Brown. But to study these volumes

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in their original form, finding copies of the individual volumes is essential. God’s Trombones, in contrast, is available in an inexpensive paperback edition, as are the novels I mention above. Further publication information is included in my bibliography. Teaching the Harlem Renaissance using a range of texts may be a bit of a challenge to literary scholars, but the rewards are extensive, in terms of furthering both our own understanding of the movement and our students’. Students who understand the Harlem Renaissance as a broad cultural movement are able to assess the movement on its own terms, as one in which artists explored parallels and connections between the arts. That understanding leaves them prepared to undertake a range of critical or creative projects. Students might carry out, for example, a comparative study in which they explore the relations between two texts in different media—say, the poems and illustrations in Southern Road—or they might analyze how two artists used different kinds of texts to express similar ideas. They might do more biographical or historical research into the creation or production of a particular text and its connections to other works. On the other hand, they might do a creative, multimedia project that allows them to explore the ways that different kinds of texts work together. They might, for example, create a series of illustrated poems inspired by Southern Road. In any case, they leave the course with an ability to look closely at individual texts and to consider how they relate to other texts, with a curiosity about the context in which texts were created, and with new insights about the ways artists work, both as individuals and with one another. These understandings of the creative work of the Harlem Renaissance also carry over into students’ work on literature and the arts in other courses, whether those courses focus on literature or art or music or another media. Having explored the Harlem Renaissance as a broad cultural movement, students are armed with an ability to consider how artists of all kinds use different media to express their experiences and their ideas.

Works Cited Brown, Sterling. Southern Road. Illustrated by E. Simms Campbell. 1932. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Edited by by Patricia Liggins Hill, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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Carroll, Anne. ‘‘Art, Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages of God’s Trombones.’’ In College Literature, 29.3 (Summer 2002): 57–82. Cullen, Countee. Color. Illustrated by Charles Cullen. 1925. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1993. Du Bois, W. E. B. ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art.’’ The Crisis (October 1926): 290–97. Rpt. in Mitchell, 60–68. ———. ‘‘A Questionnaire.’’ The Crisis (February 1926): 165. Ethnic Notions. Directed by Marlon Riggs. Videocassette. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1986. 58 minutes. Fauset, Jessie. There Is Confusion. 1924. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Fire!! 1.1 (1926). Metuchen, N.J.: The Fire Press, 1982. From These Roots: A Review of the Harlem Renaissance. Directed by William Greaves. Videocassette. Exxon Corp./William Greaves Productions, 1974. 29 minutes. Gregory, Montgomery. Review of Cane, by Jean Toomer. Opportunity 1.12 (December 1923): 374–75. Rpt. in Wintz, Emergence, 24–25; and in Toomer, 165–68. ———. ‘‘The Spirit of Phyllis [sic] Wheatley: A Review of There Is Confusion. By Jessie Redmon Fauset.’’ Opportunity 2.18 (June 1924): 181–82. Rpt. in Wintz, Emergence: 41–42. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1987. New York: Harry Abrams, 1994. Huggins, Nathan Irvin, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hughes, Langston. ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.’’ The Nation (June 23, 1926): 692–94. Rpt. in Wintz, Politics: 166–68. ———. The Ways of White Folks. 1934. New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. The Weary Blues. 1926. New York: Knopf, 1944. Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. 1934. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. ———. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Johnson, Charles S., ed. Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea. Illustrated. 1927. Rpt. in Wintz, Politics, 1–163. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912 (anonymously), 1927. Mineoloa, N.Y.: Dover, 1995. ———. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Illustrated by Aaron Douglas. Lettering by C. B. Falls. 1927. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. The Complete Live Collection. Saint Paul, Minn.: Penguin/HighBridge Audio, 1993. ———. ‘‘Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist.’’ Harper’s Magazine (November 1928): 769–76. Rpt. Wintz, Politics, 283–90. Kirschke, Amy Helene. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. 1981. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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Locke, Alain, ed. ‘‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.’’ Survey Graphic 53.11 (March 1, 1925): 621–723. Rpt. in Wintz, Emergence, 91–198, and rept., Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1980. ———. ‘‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro: A Hypermedia Edition of the March 1925 Survey Graphic Harlem Number.’’ Prepared by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Catherine Tousignant. November 3, 1996. University of Virginia, Electronic Text Center. http://etext.virginia.edu/harlem/index.html. April 26, 2001. ———. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc.: 1925. ———. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968. ———. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Atheneum/Macmillan, 1992. McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. 1928. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. McKeever, B. F. ‘‘Cane as Blues.’’ 1970. Rpt. in Toomer, 192–96. Midnight Ramble. Directed by Bestor Cram and Pearl Bowser. Videocassette. PBS Video, 1994. 60 minutes. Mitchell, Angelyn, ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Munson, Gorham B. ‘‘The Significance of Jean Toomer.’’ 1925. Rpt. in Wintz, Emergence, 76–77; and in Toomer, 171–74. ‘‘The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?’’ Symposium. Crisis (March– November 1926). Selections rpt. in The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology, edited by Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow, 479–90. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al. 2nd ed. Includes audio CD. New York: Norton, 2004. Powell, Richard. ‘‘Re/Birth of a Nation.’’ In Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, 14–33. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. London: Hayward Gallery, Institute of International Visual Arts, and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance. Audio CD. Rhino, 2000. Stewart, Jeffrey C. To Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1989. Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. 1932. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1988. ‘‘Two Artists: Poems by Langston Hughes, drawings by Aaron Douglas.’’ Opportunity (October 1926): 314–15. Rpt. in Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro, 114–115. Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. 1926. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

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Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930. Circles of the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, ed. The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P.’s Crisis Magazine. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ———. The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from The Messenger Magazine. New York: Modern Library, 2000. ———. The Opportunity Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Urban League’s Opportunity Magazine. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Wintz, Cary, ed. The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Garland, 1996. ———. The Politics and Aesthetics of ‘‘New Negro’’ Literature. New York: Garland, 1996.

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Notes on Contributors Paula C. Barnes, coeditor of this volume, is an associate professor of English at Hampton University. Her articles, mostly on African American female authors, have appeared in reference works, such as Black Women in American: An Historical Encyclopedia; The Oxford Companion to African American Literature; Critical Survey of Long Fiction: Second Revised Edition; African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook; African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook; and in Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature. Anne Carroll is an associate professor in the English Department at Wichita State University, where she teaches American and African American literature and film. She is the author of Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (2005), as well as essays in Public Culture, American Literature, College Literature, Soundings, The Centennial Review, and In Process. She is an associate editor of and contributor to The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2004). John Charles, an assistant professor, teaches African American, American, and Postcolonial literature at Central Michigan University. He is currently working on a study of the rise of the post-World War II African American ‘‘white-life’’ novel. Nicholas M. Evans has been a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His essays have appeared in the Minnesota Review, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, and ATQ, and his book, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s, explores the cultural and literary significance of early jazz. He is now a technical writer and editor. Granville Ganter is an assistant professor of English at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. His research concerns 289

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several areas of antebellum oratory, including African American literature. He has published articles on The Columbian Orator, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He has recently completed an edition of the collected speeches of the Seneca orator, Red Jacket, and is currently working on a study of U.S. women’s oratory prior to 1848. David R. Jarraway is professor of American literature at the University of Ottawa, and is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: ‘‘Metaphysician in the Dark’’ (1993); Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature (2003); and many essays on American literature and culture. His previous work on Harlem Renaissance authorship has appeared most recently in American Literature (on Langston Hughes) and College English (on Wallace Thurman). Steven Angelo Nardi teaches English at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. He is finishing his doctorate at Princeton University. His dissertation, from which this article is taken, is titled ‘‘Automatic Aesthetics: Technology, Race and Poetics in the Harlem Renaissance.’’ He has previously published articles on Maxine Kumin and Marshall Berman and contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Emily J. Orlando is an assistant professor of American literature at Tennessee State University in Nashville. She earned her MA and PhD in English at the University of Maryland (1996, 2002) and her BA at Saint Anselm College (1991). Orlando’s scholarship investigates the links between literature and the visual arts, and her publications include articles on Edith Wharton’s engagements with visual culture in The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. She has presented papers at national and international conferences, most recently at the London meeting of the Wharton Society and at the First Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, where she gave invited lectures on women in art in conjunction with an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite works from the Tate Collection. Frank Perez is a doctoral candidate at Texas Christian University and an associate professor of English at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, where he teaches composition, British literature, and popular culture. His research interests include the intersection between rhetoric and poetics, literary modern-

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ism, and early British literature. He has published articles on Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, E.A. Robinson, and Sir Philip Sidney, among others. In his spare time, he writes poetry and short fiction. Australia Tarver, associate professor of English at Texas Christian University, teaches African American literature, contemporary American literature, and African and multiethnic literatures. She has contributed to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature; Winds of Change (Adell Newson, ed.); Arms Akimbo (Janice Liddell and Yakini Kemp, eds.); MaComere; College Literature; Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women; Myth and Ritual in African American and Native American Literatures (Laura P. Alonso Gallo and Maria del Mar Gallego Duran, eds.); and Contemporary Literature in the Africa Diaspora (Olga Barrios and Bernard Bell, eds.).

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Index Africa, 22, 33, 40 African American identity, 151, 153, 165, 272 African diaspora, 51–52 Allen, George Leonard, 93 n. 30 Alves, Osterman Jaime, 89–90 n. 1 Ammons, Elizabeth, 108, 109, 115, 120 n. 16, 144, 145 Amott, Teresa, 131 Anderson, Benedict, 43, 181 Andrzejewski, Sartur, 189 n. 4 Ang, Ien, 223, 224, 225, 233 Appadurai, Arjun, 217 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 17, 28 n. 2, 156 Arie`s, Philippe, 67 Attridge, Derrick, 258 Avi-Ram, Amitai F., 224, 234 n. 1 Awkward, Michael, 108 Back-to-Africa movement, 230 Baker, Houston, 17, 28 n. 2, 36, 37, 43, 223 Bakhtin, Nikolai, 128, 129, 146 n. 9 Baldick, Robert, 205 Baldwin, James, 163, 197, 206 Banta, Martha, 90 n. 3 Barbeito, Patricia, 107, 120 n. 18 Barksdale, Richard, 179 Barnes, Albert C., 59 Barnes, Paula, 23–24, 98 n. 1, 99–124, 145 n. 5 Baudelaire, Charles, 195, 204 Bearden, Romare, 94 nn. 35 and 36 Bederman, Gail, 189 n. 7 Bell, Bernard, 99, 209 n. 1 Bell, Malcolm, 145 n. 7 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 22, 23, 62, 79–80; as visual artist, 82, 85, 89 Benston, Kimberly, 153, 156, 165 Bergman, David, 210 n. 7

Berzon, Judith, 119 n. 10, 118 n. 12 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 80 Bhabha, Homi, 188 n. 2, 228–29, 230, 232–33 Bharucha, Rustom, 222 Bisexual, 25, 196, 204, 210 n. 6 Black aesthetic, 156 Black Atlantic, 53, 163, 165–66 ‘‘Black Madonna, The’’ (Rice), 64–65 Black nationalism, 24; homosexuality, view of, 25, 157, 152, 155, 178, 188 Blood of Jesus (film), 278 Blues, 170, 187, 253, 254, 255, 263, 269, 272, 275, 277, 278, 279, 281 Boas, Franz, 40, 51, 54 n. 11 Bohemian, 25–26, 151, 158 Bone, Robert, 99, 118, 119 n. 8, 120 nn. 15 and 19, 207, 209 n. 1 Boni, Albert, 90 n. 2 Boni, Charles , 90 n. 2 Bonner, Marita , 22, 59, 62,68, 70 Bontemps, Arna, 78, 127, 146 n. 8, 241 Boone, Joseph, 209 n. 2, 232, 264, 265 Booth, Wayne, 252 n. 4 Borden, Anne, 159 Borras, F. M., 210 n. 11 Braithwaite, William S., 59 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 67, 91 n. 13 Brown, Sterling, 68, 91 n. 14, 278–79, 281, 284, 285 ‘‘Brown Madonna, The’’ (Reiss), 63–64 Bruffee, Kenneth A., 250 Burnham, Christopher, 246 Burns Mantle, Robert, 210 n. 4 Butler, Judith, 25, 149, 153, 157, 234 n. 3 Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, 99, 269, 274

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Call and response, 180 Calo, Mary Ann, 53 n. 1, 54 n. 9, 56 n. 20 Campbell, E. Simms, 281 Carby, Hazel, 90 n. 5, 186 Carpenter, Edward, 199–200, 210 n. 7 Carpenter, John Alden, 265 Carroll, Ann, 19, 20, 269–88, 281, 283 Carter, Bryan, 21, 29 n. 9 Carter, Mia, 181 Challenge (West), 99, 100 Charles, John, 21, 22, 33–58 Chauncey, George, 154, 157, 160, 171, 175, 180, 183, 186, 224 Chesnutt, Charles, 130, 141, 146 n. 13, 234 n. 5 Chinitz, David, 175, 184, 186 Christian, Barbara, 101, 102, 115, 119 n. 6 ‘‘City of Harlem’’ (LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka]), 17 Clark, Christian, 180 Clifford, James, 40, 46 Clinton, Bill, 28n1 Cobb, Michael L., 19, 20, 29 n. 7, 209 n. 2 Coleman, Anita Scott, 19 Coleman, Leon, 20 Coles, William, 245 College Composition and Communication 50 (June, 1999), 251 n. 1 composition studies: College English, debate in, 244; literature and composition, controversy over, 243–44, 252; pedagogical approaches in, 244; theorists in, 245 Conde, Mary, 141 Conference of College Composition and Communication, 242–43 Conroy, Jack, 146 n. 8 Corbett, Edward P. J., 243 Covarrubias, Miguel, 74, 80, 82, 281 Cowdery, Mae, 59, 87 Crisis, 25, 27, 53 n. 1, 62, 68, 89 n. 1, 91 n. 10, 126, 132, 146 n. 15, 184, 200, 271, 273 Crummell, Alexander, 37 Cuffe, Paul, 145 n. 7 Cullen, Charles, 281, 283 Cullen, Countee, 20, 21, 22, ‘‘Advice to a Beauty,’’ 220; ‘‘Atlantic City

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Waiter,’’ 221; American poets, influence of, 216; ‘‘Black Magdalens,’’ 68; British Romantics, influence of, 66, 216, 220; ‘‘A Brown Girl Dead,’’ 23, 67; Caroling Dusk, 63, 65, 92 n. 20, 217; Color, 26, 63, 66, 67, 70, 218, 221, 222; Copper Sun, 26, 218, 220; ‘‘Cor Cordium,’’ 220; decontainment in, 219, 220, 221, 223, 230; diasporic critique of, 26, 216; double consciousness in, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 234; ‘‘Epilogue,’’ 225; ‘‘For Myself,’’ 225; ‘‘Fruit if the Flower,’’ 224; ‘‘Girl,’’ 67; Harlem Renaissance, place in, 214, 215, 231, 232; heterosexual and homosexual identity in, 26, 214, 218, 232; ‘‘Hunger,’’ 224; ‘‘Incident,’’ 223; ‘‘In Spite of Death,’’ 220; ‘‘The League of Youth Address,’’ 227; My Soul’s High Song: Collected Writings of Countee Culen, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232; One Way to Heaven, 26, 59, 62, 215, 226–33; Pound and Yeats, connection to, 218–19; ‘‘Saturday’s Child,’’ 223; ‘‘Song of Praise,’’ 66; ‘‘Sonnet 130’’ (Shakespeare), compared to, 91 n. 12; ‘‘Thoughts in a Zoo, 219; ‘‘To a Brown Girl,’’ 63, 94 n. 34, 126, 145 n. 2, 160, 161, 184, 222; ‘‘Ultimatum,’’ 225; The Weary Blues, critical response to, 254; ‘‘The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth,’’ 219–20 cultural studies, 20. See also gay; lesbian Davis, Arthur, 118 n. 3, 209 n. 1 Davis, Thadious, 18, 20, 28 n. 6, 90 n. 4, 106, 120 n. 12, 126, 145 n. 2 Delany, Martin, 37 Delany, Samuel, 224 Diaspora, 34, 163 Dickie, Margaret, 18 Diggs, Marylynne, 189 n. 10, 190 n. 14, 209 n. 2 Dollimore, Jonathan, 166–67, 175 Dowling, Linda, 210 n. 7

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double consciousness, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226 Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, 90 n. 4, 91 n. 8 Douglas, Aaron, 21, 22, 59, 62, 68, 70, 80, 82, 90 n. 7, 280, 281, 282, 283 Douglas, Ann, 55 n. 13, 217, 231 Drake, St. Claire, 37 Dreiser, Theodore, 198 Du Bois, W. E. B., 21, 54 n. 7, 90 n. 4, 157, 165, 176, 184, 187, 215, 216, 222, 234 nn. 2, 6, and 7, 235 n. 9, 256, 272, 273, 278 Du Bois, Yolanda, 26, 234 n. 2 duCille, Ann, 18, 19, 28 n. 6, 104, 114, 120 n. 13, 132, 144, 145 n. 4 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 128 Early, Gerald, 20, 214, 217, 218 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 51, 52, 53 n. 4 Elbow, Peter, 245 Eley, Holly, 104 Ellrodt, Robert, 24, 100 Essentialism: debates over, 17, 155 Esteve, Mary, 145 n. 1, 225 Evans, Gaynelle, 106 Evans, Nicholas, 20, 151–93, 187, 188 Fabre, Michel, 219 Fanon, Frantz, 234 n. 6 Farrakhan, Louis, 151, 152, 157 Fauset, Jessie, 21, The Chinaberry Tree, 130; Comedy, American Style, 109–11, 130; ‘‘Double Trouble,’’ 24, 129, 134, 136, 142, 143; economic problems, depiction of, 130–33, 141–43; educated urban Negroes in, 271; ‘‘Emmy,’’ 130, 134, 137, 138, 142, 143; Great Migration in, 24; Harlem Renaissance, relationship to, 125–26; Hughes, review of, 177; images of black women in, 108, 109, 111, 138–39; ‘‘Mary Elizabeth,’’ 128, 133; ‘‘midwife,’’ reference to, 125; migration trope in, 127–28, 133, 144; ‘‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein,’’ 125, 129, 144; passing in, 130, 137, 138, 139–41; periodization in, 24, 143; Plum Bun, 277;

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‘‘The Sleeper Wakes,’’ 24, 128, 129, 137, 139–42, 143; short stories, inclusion in, 126; talented tenth, response to, 128–29; 61, 82, 90 n. 4, 93 n. 34, 132; There Is Confusion, 269, 273, 279; ‘‘There Was One Time,’’ 129, 131, 132, 143; West, comparison to, 106, 107, 108, 111–17; ‘‘When Christmas Comes,’’ 144; Woolf, comparison to, 125 Ferguson, Blanche E., 227 Ferguson, Sally Ann, 118 n. 3 Fire!!, 184, 200, 234 n. 4, 273, 282, 284 Fisher, Rudolph, 132, 146 n. 15 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 92 n. 16 Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur, 209 n. 2 Fleming, David, 24, 29 n. 11 Folk: African and African American, 34; heritage of, 156; musical and poetic voice in, 27; visual art of, 282 Foucault, Michel, 47, 158 Ford, Karen Jackson, 161 Frank, Waldo, 265 Frazier, E. Franklin, 142 From These Roots (video), 28, 275 Fry, Roger, 48, 56 n. 21 Fuss, Diana, 17, 28 n. 2 Gaines, Kevin, 38 Gaither, Renoir W., 209 n. 1 Ganter, Granville, 20, 25, 194–213 Garber, Eric, 152–53, 183, 190 n. 15, 209 n. 2, 234 n. 1 Garber, Marjorie, 215 Garvey, Amy Jacques: New Negro Woman, definition of, 89; 94 nn. 37 and 38 Garvey, Marcus, 36, 94 n. 37, 127, 145 n. 7 Garvey movement, 91 n. 9, 132, 229 Gates, Henry Louis, 17, 28 n. 2, 118 n. 1, 156, 159, 228, 229, 233–34, 234 n. 8 Gay, 25, 26, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 161, 162, 171, 189 n. 10, 194, 195, 199, 202, 209 n. 2, 224, 264 ‘‘Georgie Grimes’’ (Brown), 68 Giddings, Paula, 91 n. 9, 94 n. 38 Gide, Andre´, 166–67, 170, 176 Gilbert, Sandra, 100, 202

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Gilroy, Paul, 53, 155, 158, 163, 164–65 Ginsberg, Elaine, 139, 140 Gloster, Hugh, 104, 115 God Sends Sunday (Bontemps), 78 Gorky, Maxim, 195, 206–7, 210 n. 11 Graham, Maryemma, 89 n. 1, 156, 157 Greaves, William, 275 Gregory, Montgomery, 271, 272, 273, 276 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 24, 120 n. 12, 145 n. 6 Griffths, D. W., 276 Grimke, Angelina, 135 Grimke, Archibald, 135 Grimke, Francis, 135 Grimke, Henry, 135 Grimke, Sarah, 90 n. 4 Grossberg, Lawrence, 215–16 Gruesser, John Cullen, 53 nn. 4 and 6, 54 n. 7 Gubar, Susan, 100, 202 Guy, Rosa, 136 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 139 Haizlip, Shirlee Taylor, 137, 140 Haley, Alex, 107 Hall, Stuart, 216, 217, 225, 226, 233 Harlem, 27, 43, 73, 132, 143, 144, 169, 176; as a metropole, 39; cultural space, idea of, 264; historical image of, 15, 163, 242, 249, 259, 261, 266 n. 2; homosexuality, attitude toward, 157; life in, 200, 231, 241, 258; nightclubs in, 183 Harlem Book of the Dead (Van Der Zee), 67–68 Harlem Renaissance: art in, 63, 76, 277, 281; beautiful corpses in, 65; combined image of dead, beautiful dark woman in, 23; critical placement of women writers in, 18, 90 n. 5; feminine Calibans in, 68, 70, 92 n. 15; leading figures in, 241–42; literary approaches to, 17; literature and the arts in, 269–85; Locke’s Africanist discourse in, 35; Madonna image in, 65; major contributors to, 59; multiple discourses of, 22; portrayal of black women in, 62, 63; women artists of, 61, 62 Harper, Frances, 37, 92 n. 16, 133, 141

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Harper, Philip Brian, 137, 188 n. 1, 222 Harris, Trudier, 114, 115, 117, 120 n. 19 Harrison, Hubert, 36 Hart, Tara, 89 n. 1 Havelock, Eric A., 252 n. 6 Haynes, George, 142 Hays, Roland, 273 Hedges, Elaine, 92 n. 16 Helbling, Mark, 51, 53 n. 4, 54 n. 11 Hemphill, Essex, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 162, 189 n. 11 Henderson, Fletcher, 265 Herbert, George, 266 n. 1 Herder, Johann, 44 Heyward, Dubose, 177 Hirsch, Arnold R., 135 Hitchcock, Peter, 234 n. 3 Holquist, Michael, 146 n. 9 Home to Harlem (McKay), 78 Homophopbia, 20, 151, 157, 189 n. 3, 190 n. 17 homosexuality: omission of, 19, 24, 25, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156–57, 158, 161, 171, 175, 177, 186, 188 n. 2, 189 n. 10, 190 nn. 14 and 17 Honey, Maureen, 19, 29 n. 6, 65, 80, 90 nn. 4 and 5, 91 n. 8 hooks, bell, 156, 159, 162, 167–68, 186–87, 189 n. 6, 246 Hopkins, Pauline, 37 Horner, Winifred Bryan, 251 n. 4 Huggins, Nathan, 35, 209 n. 1, 274–75 Hughes, Langston: ambivalent identity in, 151, 152–53, 154, 155, 156, 160,161–62; The Big Sea, 163, 190 n. 11, 208, 263; celebration of black folk in, 18, 22, 157, 185–87, 253, 255; ‘‘Black Pierrot,’’ 67, 173; Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 160; critical reception of, 156–59; ‘‘Cross,’’ 173; ‘‘Danse Africaine,’’ 174, 175, 176, 177, 179; Dollimore, connection to, 166–67; Douglas, artistic collaboration with, 281; ‘‘Dream Variation,’’ 173, 177; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 183– 187, 253, 255; Gilroy, connection to, 163–65; ‘‘Harlem Night Club,’’ 181–83, 815; Harlem Renaissance,

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poet laureate of, 61; homosexuality in, 24; 25, 152, 158–59, 160–62, 187; I Wonder as I Wander, 168; ‘‘Lament for Dark Peoples,’’ 176; Locke, relationship with, 160–61; Looking for Langston in, 155–56, 158, 162–63, 162, 166, 190 n. 12; ‘‘Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ 61, 186, 256, 271; Not Without Laughter, 136; ‘‘Nude Young Dancer,’’ 74; ‘‘Old Walt,’’ 168; ‘‘Our Land,’’ 177, 178, 183, 185; passing in, 138, 146 n. 15; ‘‘Pierrot,’’ 173; ‘‘Poem,’’ 159, 160; ‘‘Poem [For the portrait of an African boy],’’ 176, 177; ‘‘Poem [To F. S.],’’ 177; ‘‘Suicide Note,’’ 172, 173; ‘‘Summer Night,’’ 169–71, 172–73, 174, 175, 177, 185, 189 n. 10; ‘‘Theme for English B,’’ 26, 241– 52; The Ways of White Folk, 278; The Weary Blues, 155, 159, 168, 169, 173, 175, 179, 183, 253, 254, 273, 279, 281, 284; ‘‘The Weary Blues,’’ 253–68; ‘‘Zazzonia,’’ 92 n. 17, 126, 146 n. 15, 147 n. 20, 179–181, 183, 185 Hull, Gloria T., 18, 28 n. 6, 90 nn. 4 and 5, 91 n. 8, 101 Hunter, Addie, 131 Hurston, Zora Neale, 61, 82, 184, 280, 281, 282 Hutchinson, George, 53 nn. 3 and 4, 55 n. 11, 185, 195, 208 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 195, 204, 208 hybridity, 24, 26, 153, 163, 188 n. 2 James, Henry, 125, 145 n. 1 James, William, 222, 235 n. 9 JanMohamed, Abdul, 47 Jarraway, David, 20, 26, 153, 154, 155, 165, 174, 180, 214–40, 233, 235 n. 8 Jarrett, Michael, 182 Jazz: as therapy, 187; black cultural nationalism, evocation of, 179–80; definition of, 265; Harlem cabarets, 181; musician, 27; poetry, 253, 265, 269 Jemie, Onwuchekwa, 179 ‘‘Jennie’’ (Jones): description of, 87; illustration, 88 Johnson, Charles S., 33, 145 n. 2, 283

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Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 22, 23, 62, 65, 72, 91 n. 11, 93 n. 26, 126 Johnson, Helene, 18 Johnson, James Weldon, 22, 62, 82, 91 n. 14, 141, 146 n. 15, 147 n. 19, 157, 165, 176, 187, 272, 273, 278, 279, 280, 281, 285 Jones, Jacqueline, 131 Jones, Lois Mailou, 22, 23, 62, ‘‘Jennie,’’ description of, 87; ‘‘Peasant Girl, Haiti,’’ 87;’’Marche, Haiti,’’ 87, 94 nn. 35 and 36 Jones, Robert B., 20 Jones, Sharon, 100, 118, 118 n. 2 Joyner, Charles, 145 n. 7 Julien, Isaac, 155, 158, 159, 162, 163– 64, 165, 166, 186 Kaplan, Amy, 53 n. 2 Kellner, Bruce, 210 n. 8 Kellogg, Paul, 28 n. 3 Kenny, Susan, 105, 107, 118 n. 1 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 284 Kirschke, Amy, 281 Klotman, Phyllis, 210 n. 4 Knopf, Marcy, 134 Kolodny, Annette, 74 Kramer, Victor, 21, 28 n. 5 Kubitschek, Missy, 106 Kuenz, Jane, 143 Langbaum, Robert, 219 Lanham, Richard, 251 n. 4 Larsen, Nella, 22; ‘‘Freedom,’’ 23, 77, 78, 92 n. 25; images of black women in, 108, 109; Irene Redfield, gaze of, 78–79, 93 n. 26; Passing, 23, 76, 78, 92 nn. 21, 23, and 26, 119 n. 8, 157; Quicksand, 202, 210 n. 9, 224–25; ‘‘The Wrong Man,’’ 23, 76, 77, 62, 78, 82, 92 n. 24, 93 n. 29, 199 n. 9 Lee, Andrea, 119 n. 9 Lesbian, 199 Levin, Dan, 210 n. 11 Levine, Robert S., 89 n. 1 Lewis, David Levering, 26, 29 n. 10, 35, 36, 40, 61, 65, 68, 91 nn. 10, 11, and 14, 93 n. 33, 118 n. 2, 120 n. 15, 126, 146 n. 10, 234 n. 2, 265, 275 Lincoln University, 184, 241, 242 Lindemann, Erika, 244 Locke, Alain: Africa in cultural na-

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tionalism, role of, 41; Africanist discourse, development of, 33–34, 35, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51–53; ‘‘Apropos of Africa,’’ 38, 39, 51; Africa, attitude toward, 48–50, 51, 54 n. 8; black behavior, biography, 53 n. 1; critic of, 18; editor of New Negro, 33; folk life, promotion of, 42, 45; Harlem renaissance aesthetics, arbiter of, 157, 195; Hughes, relationship with, 160–61; ‘‘Internationalism—Friend or Foe of Art?,’’ 35; invented term, New Negro, 18; ‘‘Legacy of Ancestral Arts,’’ 45, 46; missionary activity, view of, 38; ‘‘Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,’’ 50; ‘‘Negro in American Culture,’’ 49; ‘‘Negro Youth Speaks,’’ 43; New Negro Movement, description of, 37; The New Negro, 38, 274, 282, 284; New Negro, editor of, 33; New Negro, release of, 59; ‘‘The New Negro,’’ 38–39, 42; ‘‘The New Negro,’’ prefatory essay, 61; New Negro, gendered male as, 61; Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 38, 41, 44, 82, 90 nn. 2 and 4, 92 n. 17, 94 n. 36, 145 n. 2, 176; Survey Graphic, promotion of, 18, 21, 23, 281–82 Logsdon, Joseph, 135 Lott, Eric, 221, 225 Lucky, Crystal, 19 Macrorie, Ken, 245 marriage plot, 24, 100, 104, 105, 136 Marshall, Paule, 89, 101, 103, 117, 199 n. 11 Marsh-Lockett, Carol, 199 n. 11 Martin, Biddy, 233 Mason, Charlotte Osgood, 36, 46 Matthaei, Julie, 131 McCall, James Edward, 63 McCallum, Shara, 89 n. 1 McDougald, Elise Johnson, 22, 62, 80; ‘‘The Task of Negro Womanhood,’’ 89, 91 n. 11, 93 n. 33, 138 McDowell, Deborah: interview with Dorothy West, 18, 28 n. 6, 100, 119 n. 5; McKay and Bontemps, 78; 115, 120 nn. 12 and 15; view of Van

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Vechten, romance and fairy tale, view of, 129–30, 132, 140, 145 n. 3 McKay, Claude, 78, 92 n. 22, 93 n. 28, 190 n. 15, 223, 224, 278 McKeever, B. F., 277 McQuade, Donald, 251 n. 4 Mencken, H. L., 210 n. 5 Mercer, Kobena, 162 Michaels, Walter Benn, 18, 28 n. 4 Micheaux, Oscar, 276 Middle Passage, 34, 46 Miller, Christopher, 55 n. 18 Miller, R. Baxter, 179 Mitchell, Verner, 18, 20, 28 n. 6 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 233 Morrison, Toni, 89, 101, 103, 107, 108, 119 n. 11, 127, 146 n. 11, 265, 266 Moses, Wilson J., 37, 51, 53 n. 1, 56 n. 22, 209 n. 1 ‘‘Motherhood’’ (Georgia Douglas Johnson), 65, 72 Moton, Robert Russa, 82 mulatto(a), 24, 25, 68, 73, 100, 101, 102,104,108, 117, 119 n. 6, 135, 136, 200 ‘‘Mulatto, The’’ (Douglas), 68 Mullen, Bill, 245 Mulvey, Laura, 74, 92 n. 18 Mumford, Kevin, 173, 175, 176, 180 Mun˜oz, Jose´, 190 n. 12 Munson, Gorham, 277 Murphy, Beatrice, 19 Murray, Donald, 245 ‘‘Muttsy’’ (Hurston), 99 NAACP, 89 n. 1, 184, 208 Nardi, Stephen, 27, 253–68 Nasaw, David, 260, 261 National Council of Teachers of English, 251 n. 3 National Urban League, 89 n. 1 Naylor, Gloria, 101, 103, 107 Nelson, Cary, 281 Nelson, Emmanuel, 209 n. 2 New Calvacade, The, 99 New Challenge (West), 100 New Negro, The (Locke), 22, 23, 27, 33, 36, 37, 59, 62; archetypal mother in, 63; depiction of women in, 80; male exclusivity in, 80, 82, 90 n. 2

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New Negro: Aaron Douglas’s portrait of, 59; gaze, discussion of, 63; image in New Negro (Locke), 19; meaning of, 18, 89 n. 1 New Negro men, 19, 23 New Negro Movement: black improvement, source of (Locke), 22, 44, 53 n. 1; Thurman, response to, 194, 207, 274 New Negro Renaissance, identified as Locke’s term, 61 New Negro Women: consciousness of, 18; inclusion of, 19; in dialogue with New Negro Men, 23 Newsome, Mary Effie Lee, 19 Nicholls, David, 55 n. 17 Nielson, Gordon, 130, 142 Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 78 ‘‘Night’’ (Bennett), 79–80 North, Michael, 175, 190 n. 16, 218, 222, 223 Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 99, 269 Nugent, Bruce, 70, 92 n. 15, 158; ‘‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade,’’ 159, 161, 184, 189 n. 9, 194, 195, 202, 203, 205, 209 n. 2; 210 n. 10, 282, 284 Nye, David, 260 ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ (Bonner), 68 Ong, Walter, 252 n. 6 Orlando, Emily, 19, 22, 27, 59–98 Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life, 27, 53 n. 1, 59, 62, 68, 70, 72, 82, 89 n. 1, 93 nn. 30 and 32, 99, 253, 271, 273, 281 Osofsky, Gilbert, 142 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, 28 n. 4 Painter, Nell Irvin, 146 n. 7 Passing, 21, 76, 102, 106, 119 n. 8, 130, 137, 138, 146 n. 15, 147 n. 19, 200, 277 Patton, Venetria, 19, 29 nn. 6 and 15, 90 nn. 4 and 5, 91 n. 8 Pease, Donald E., 53 n. 2 pedagogical issues, 243, 251 Perez, Frank, 21, 26, 241–52 periodization, 18, 23, 24, 100

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Perkins, George, 93 n. 27 Perry, Margaret, 202, 207, 209 n. 1 Peterson, Carla L., 90 n. 5, 92 n. 16 Peterson, Louis, 136 Petrosky, Anthony, 251 n. 4 Poe, Edgar Allan, 67 Porter, James, 53 n. 1 Posnock, Ross, 222, 224, 234 nn. 5, 6, and 7 Pound, Ezra, 259, 260 Powell, Richard, 270 Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature, 99 Price, Richard, 36 Primitivism, 36, 40, 50, 175, 176, 185, 186, 190 nn. 16 and 18, 229 Queer, 24, 25, 152, 152, 154, 157, 161, 171,181, 195–96, 224 Rampersad, Arnold, 25, 27, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 173, 179, 184, 186, 188 n. 3, 189 n. 4, 242, 253–54, 255, 256, 257, 266 Randolph, A. Philip, 36 Randolph, Ruth Elizabeth, 20, 29 n. 6, 90–91n.8, 103 Ranger, T. O., 56 n. 23 Rapp, William, 196, 198 Rayson, Ann, 102 Redkey, Edwin S., 146 n. 7 Reed, Ishmael, 228 Reimonenq, Alden, 189 n. 8, 209 n. 2, 214–15, 224, 234 n. 2 Reiss, Winold, 21,22, 23, 62; ‘‘The Brown Madonna,’’ 63, 65, 80, 82, 90 n. 7, 93 n. 34, 94 n. 34, 282 Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (catalog), 270, 277, 281 Rhetoric, 26, 242, 243, 252 n. 6 Rhetoric and composition studies, 26, 242, 243, 245 Rice, Albert, 23, 65 Riggs, Marlon, 276 Robertson, Ida, 234 n. 2 Robeson, Paul, 93 n. 34, 273, 278 Robinson, Amy, 139, 201 Rodgers, Lawrence, 24, 115, 118 n. 3, 119 n. 10, 127, 128, 145 n. 6 Roessel, David, 242

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Rogers, Joel A., 182 Romagnolo, Catherine, 89 n. 1, 92 n. 15 Rorty, Richard, 250 Roses, Lorraine Elena, 20, 29 n. 6, 90– 91 n. 8, 103, 118 n. 1, 119 n. 4 Ross, Marlon B, 197. Rub, Timothy, 261 Rueschmann, Eva, 120 n. 12 Russ, Robert, 21, 28 n. 5 ‘‘Sahdji’’ (Douglas), 70, 71, 72, 82 Sankofa, 155 Scar of Shame (film), 278 Schivelbusch,Wolfgang, 259–60 Schleier, Merrill, 265 Scholes, Richard, 252 Schomgurg, Arthur A., 59–60 Schuyler, George, 146 n. 15 Schuyler, Phillipa, 119 n. 9 Scott, Emmett J., 146 n. 7 Scruggs, Charles, 210 n. 5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 158, 160, 167, 171, 172, 174, 189 n. 10 Senna, Danzy, 119 n. 9 Sermons, 274, 278, 280, 284 Shange, Ntozake, 103, 119 n. 11 Shepperson, George, 51–52 Shockley, Ann Allen, 91 n. 8 Silvera, Edward, 76, 92 n. 20 Simmons, Ron, 151, 157, 189 n. 3 Singh, Amritjit, 209 n. 1, 226 Sinutko, Natasha, 188 n. 2 Skow, John, 118, 118 n. 1 Smith, Barbara, 108 Smith, Charles Michael, 161, 120 n. 10 Smith, Timothy D’Arch, 210 n. 7 Song of Freedom (film), 278 Southern Workman, 147 n. 21 Spencer, Suzette, 19, 20, 29 n. 7 Spirituals, 187, 272, 277, 278 Spivak, Gayatri, 233 Stavney, Anne, 107, 120 n. 13 Stefansson, Harold Jan, 206 Steinberg, Sybil, 106, 112, Stetson, Erlene, 91 n. 8 Stewart, Jeffrey, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 55 nn. 12 and 13, 282 ‘‘Street Lamps in Early Spring’’ (Bennett), 79

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Streitfield, David, 118 n. 1 Summers, Claude, 210 n. 7 Sundquist, Eric, 216, 235 n. 9 Survey Graphic, 18, 28 n. 3, 90 n. 2, 281, 284 Sylvander, Carolyn, 110, 111,120 n. 14 Symonds, John Addington, 199, 210 nn. 6 and 7 Talented Tenth, 39, 256, 266 Tarver, Australia, 24, 89 n. 1, 125–50 Tate, Claudia, 136, 144, 145 n. 4 Tate, Gary, 244 Taylor, Patricia, 241 ‘‘Theme for English B’’: pedagogical discussion of, 244–51; theoretical and pedagogical issues in, 243–52 Thompson, Louise, 196, 197, 206, 209 n. 3 Thurman, Wallace: black behavior, critic of, 18, 20, 21, characterization, resistance to, 25, 194–95; The Blacker the Berry, 25, 194, 198, 202–3, 210 n. 9; ‘‘Cordelia the Crude,’’ 25, 198, 282; Decadent movement artists, identification with, 195; Dreiser, similarity to, 198, 199; Fauset, connection to, 199; feminine Calibans in, 92 n. 15; Gorky, connection to, 206–7, 210 n. 11; Harlem, 198, 209 n. 4; Fire!!, 200, 234 n. 4, 273, 284; Infants of the Spring, 25, 199, 200–201, 203–8, 210 n. 11, 277–78; Madame Bovary, connection to, 198–99; passing in, 25; 161, 184, 200–202; Rapp, letter to, 196–98; sexual hybridity in, 195–96, 197, 208; uranians in, 199–200; Wylie, review of, 200 Toomer, Jean, 22, 59, 62; Fern and Karintha as feminine Calibans, 72–75; 82, 92 n. 19, 126, 160, 199 n. 9, 271, 276, 277 Torgovnick, Mariana, 22, 40, 55 n. 19, 56 n. 21, 145 n. 2 Tousignant, Catherine, 284 Tracy, Steven, 27, 190 n. 18, 256–57, 262, 264, 266 Tragic mulatto, 92 n. 23, 119 n. 6, 173

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Trickster, 228, 234 n. 8 Trope: black Madonna, 91 n. 9; decontainment, 26; jazz writing, 182; Madonna and child, 63; male Harlem Renaissance depictions of black women, 63; migration 24, 127; modernity, 261; narcissism, 172; woman-as-feline, 78 Turner, Bishop Henry McNeal, 37, 127 Tuttleton, James W., 216 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 199, 210 nn. 6 and 7 Uplift: Africa, 22; as civilizing mission, 37, 38, 87, 142, 157 Uranians, 199–200, 210 n. 7 Van Der Zee, James, 67–68, 143, 275 Van Notten, Eleonore, 20, 195, 202, 209 n. 2, 210 nn. 5 and 8 Van Vechten, Carl, 78; Nigger Heaven, influence of, 78, 90 n. 6, 93 n. 27, 161, 168, 189 n. 9, 210 n. 8, 253, 278 Veblen, Thorstein, 93 n. 31 Wade-Gayles, Gloria, 99, 103, 104, 105, 112, 113, 120 n. 19 Wald, Gayle, 142 Wald, Priscilla, 181 Walden, Daniel, 209 n. 1 Walker, Alice, 89, 101 Walker, Margaret, 117 Wall, Cheryl: critique of periodization, 18, 28 n. 6, 90 n. 5, 92 n. 23, 109, 118 n. 2, 120 n. 16, 126, 136, 144, 145 n. 2 Warren, Joyce, 18, 100 Warren, Kenneth, 53 n. 2 Washington, Booker T., 37 Washington, Mary Helen, 89 n. 1, 90 n. 5, 91 n. 8, 99, 105, 114, 115, 118 n. 2, 120 n. 17 Watson, Steven, 210 n. 7, 275 ‘‘Weary Blues, The’’: antimodernism in, 261; balance of music and poetry in, 255; blues in, 262, 263, 265; central meaning of, 254; jazz in, 265, 266; metaphors of technology in, 259; nostalgia in, 262; poet and mu-

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sician, relationship between, 256, 257, 258, 259, 263, 264; street lighting, history of, 259–61 Webb, Frank, 137 Weir, David, 205 West, Dorothy: ‘‘The Black Dress,’’ 118 n. 3; color consciousness in, 102; disassociation from Richard Wright school, 99; family lineage theme in, 100; ‘‘The Funeral,’’ 99; Harlem Renaissance consciousness of, 24, 100, 115, 117, 118, 119 n. 7; ‘‘Hannah Byde,’’ 23, 99; The Living Is Easy, 24, 100, 102, 104, 107; marriage plot in, 100, 105, 106; middle class in, 100, 103, 104; mulatta protagonist in, 100, 101, 102, 117; parallels to Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, 21, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111–17; passing in, 102, 109, 110; ‘‘Prologue to a Life,’’ 23, 99; The Richer, the Poorer, 99; Thurman, opinion of, 195, 196, 199; ‘‘trends-of-a-period’’ theme in, 100, 107; ‘‘The Typewriter,’’ 23, 99; The Wedding, 24, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 118; ‘‘An Unimportant Man,’’ 99; 210 n. 5 Weyant, Jill, 112 Wheatley, Phillis, 125, 144 White, Walter, 104, 119 n. 8, 299 Wilde, Oscar, 166, 176, 195, 204, 205 Williams, John A., 202 Williams, Raymond, 155, 164–65 Williams, Sherley Anne, 101 Williams, William Carlos, 226 Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, 276 Wintz, Cary, 20, 29 n. 8, 234 n. 4, 276, 284 Wirth, Dr. Thomas, 210 n. 10, 284 Woods, Gregory, 152, 157, 178, 189 n. 11, 190 nn. 13, 14, and 17, 209 n. 2, 224 Woolf, Virginia, 125 Wright, Richard, 99 Wylie, I.A.R., 25, 200 Young, Robert, 188 n. 2 Zack, Naomi, 137

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