16
African-American Modernisms
In the spring of 1926, the editors of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, published a symposium entitled “The Negro in Art – How Shall He Be Portrayed?” The symposium began with a survey, sent to many leading black writers and intellectuals of the period, that posed the following questions:
With this set of questions, the editors of the Crisis magazine initiated a discussion that would come to characterize, even dominate, African-American creative expression during the modernist period and on throughout the twentieth century. For black artists, questions of identity – what does it mean to be black? – often turned on issues of representation – how does one portray blackness and how is blackness seen? African-American modernisms represent some of the very moments when black artists in the Americas began to define answers to questions concerning the meaning of blackness for themselves.
A distinctive feature of the various forms of black artistic production that occurred in Harlem and beyond throughout the 1920s and 1930s is their inherently performative dimensions, the products of an artistic movement forced to be ever aware of its social audience. At the very beginnings of the modern era, Virginia Woolf defined twentieth-century modernity as entailing a shift in human relations beginning approximately in 1910. African-American modernisms reflect the impact of that shift on black–white relations, the intercultural relationships blacks and whites in the Americas shared as they reinterpreted their pasts and present together at the turn of a new century.
For a canonical black modernist such as Alain Locke, the art of the “New Negro” blended the “motive” of “being racial” with the modernist imperative “to be so purely for the sake of art,” producing a uniquely black “idiom of style” that combined urban sophistication with “the instinctive gift of the folk-spirit” (Locke 1992: 51). Locke was one of the primary figures spearheading the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century, which by 1925 had consolidated enough to produce an anthology of the same name. What both the Crisis survey, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and The New Negro anthology edited by Locke, reveal was that embedded in the African-American modernisms of the early twentieth century was an often unwilling awareness of the text and the art work as inextricably intertwined within, and in dialogue with, a modern racialized social reality. David Krasner distinguishes between black artistic production and other forms of modernism by saying: “many Europeans sought autonomy through art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art). They wanted to remove art from social reality. African American modernists were trapped in a defensive position and were continually made aware of their ‘place’ in society. Hence, rather than eschew social realism, their art was informed by it” (Krasner 2002: 10). Consequently, in the inescapable racial context of the United States in the early twentieth century, black art would have as much to say and reveal about blackness and black performers as about the whiteness of the American audience.
The New Negro movement emerged in the late nineteenth century and continued on into the twentieth to become the most powerful ideology of blackness of the Harlem Renaissance. In the trope of the New Negro a racial politics was bound within gendered prescriptions in the service of a project to reconstruct the “image of the black.” This New Negro, representative of the new possibilities available in the urban North, possessed a “spontaneously generated black and self-sufficient self” (Gates 1988: 129). As one author would describe this figure physically at the very beginning of the century in 1904, “Here is the real new Negro man. Tall, erect, commanding, with a face as strong as Angelo’s Moses … every whit as pleasing and handsome” (Gates 1988: 142). This most representative modern black self was primarily male, although his masculinity would also be paired with certain prescriptions concerning the respectability of the New Negro woman during this period (Gates 1988).
The class dimensions of New Negro ideology were also revealed in the Crisis survey’s concern that black artists and authors feel free to represent their “social class,” “Negroes of education and accomplishment,” the presumably more respectable members of the race, rather than “the sordid, foolish and criminal.” The New Negro movement, as both a cultural and political formation of African-American modernism, represented the consolidation of a black bourgeoisie, the New Negro men and women who were populating and setting up residence in Harlem, block by block, throughout the 1920s. These were the members of a rising black middle class often imaged in the photographs of famous Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee: Du Bois’s imagined “talented tenth” of the black elite, often formally posed in bourgeois domestic settings and apparel. In the absence of any real political power, art became the preferred venue for black middle-class intellectuals and elites to achieve a form of cultural recognition that would ultimately lay the groundwork for political recognition in the civil rights era to follow.
However, there is another backdrop against which to view the dialogue initiated in the pages of the Crisis concerning the cultural politics of blackness. As the last question of the survey reveals, by 1926 the New Negro “popular trend” had achieved a certain degree of cultural legitimacy and an audience in white circles, as evidenced by the success of the 1921 all-black musical Shuffle Along. Yet, alongside the hegemony of an older generation of black intellectuals and cultural critics, there were other, parallel, forces at work in black modernity that would assert themselves in the artistic concerns of a younger generation of black artists. They too were finding their voices in 1926 and their work would carry on into the 1930s. Exploring some of the forces this younger group represented, as they intersected with an African-American modernism often seen as “the by-product of an emergent black American urban identity rooted in Harlem” (Coyle 2001: 247), reveals the intersecting class divisions and sexual tensions that also shaped the various forms black modernisms would take in the early years of the twentieth century.
In the Crisis survey, the comparison between literary portrayal and painting was not accidental, for much of the cultural politics of blackness in the modernist period revolved around the visual dimensions of blackness. A constitutive feature of modern black art was its focus on visuality, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. puts it: “Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images” (Gates 1988: 129). At the turn of the century, caricatured, racist portrayals of black people dominated the American popular media in the form of newspaper cartoons and graphics, and in items of material culture such as Sambo, Uncle Tom, and Mammy black statuettes and dolls. These cultural representations not only demeaned black people, but also exaggerated color and physiognomy as the essence of what it meant to be black at the start of a new century.
In their search for more appropriate portrayals of the modern Negro, black artists developed a profound awareness of the specular dimensions of their art. As they attempted to provide new meanings for the color and the face of the race, they also engaged in a much more visual semiotics, where the politics of race relations also became a cultural politics of the image. If some saw the potential for real economic and social integration in the smaller, cosmopolitan world of Harlem, this possibility also revealed the need for a new black cultural and political identity, a vision of blackness that could erase from American cultural memory the figure of the “darky” or the plantation slave. Many shared Alain Locke’s conviction that the “Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own patterns if it is ever to be seriously and importantly interpreted. Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid” (Locke 1992: 264). Locke pitted “the conventional blindness of the Caucasian eye with respect to the racial material at their disposal” against an Africanist artistic spirit and tradition that was “at its best in abstract decorative forms. Design, and to a lesser degree, color, are its original fortes” (p. 267).
In the more traditional performative arenas of the theatre and the concert stage, the minstrel form also defined popular black drama at the turn of the century as primarily comic, vaudevillian burlesques with stereotyped black characters. By the mid-1920s, African-American cultural critics called for a more serious, and more modern treatment of urban black life. In his essay on “The Negro in American Literature,” also included in Locke’s defining 1925 anthology, William Stanley Braithwaite lamented that the writers of more popular forms of entertainment “refused to see the tragedy of the Negro and capitalized [on] his comedy” (Locke 1992: 31). In the debate over the status of the serious and the comic in the theatrical productions of the New Negro, the politics of representation were elaborated onstage. While the goal of African-American theatre was ostensibly to re-present black life and history authentically, many critics of the Harlem Renaissance argued for a Negro theatre that could also function as a form of Americanization, using the demonstration of African Americans’ cultural heritage as a way to legitimate their claims to citizenship in America. African-American cultural forms could “work as passports proclaiming a slave worthy of citizenship,” and art itself could become a “universalizing, humanizing passport” to African-American freedom (Fraden 1996: 50, 64).
Different critics imagined their cultural “passports” of blackness working in radically different ways. Early in his career W. E. B. Du Bois used the dramatic form of the pageant to chronicle a separate black history that not so much blended with American history as ran alongside it. Despite his strong criticisms of Marcus Garvey several years later, in his 1913 pageant, “Star of Ethiopia,” Du Bois attempted to use the popular form of the mass spectacle in very similar ways to his Jamaican contemporary – to empower and inspire in African Americans a sense of their entitlement to citizenship through a glorious display of their imperial past.
Earlier, at the very turn of the century and with slavery still a haunting presence, Du Bois chose to foreground another performative black art in his account of Southern black life, The Souls of Black Folk. In the soulful refrains of the spirituals, later popularized for a national audience by Paul Robeson in his first concert on April 19, 1925, Du Bois heard in musical form “the very means for imagining black people as integral to the national political community and for imagining black culture as a form of national culture” (Carby 1998: 89, 91). By the mid-1920s however, members of the black cultural elite described this form of identifiably black music as still too close to “ ‘the slave people’ among whom the songs had originated” (Duberman 1989: 33).
Another challenge black performance artists faced in the early years of the century was the prevailing presumption in theatrical circles that black actors were naturally emotive and dramatic, a guiding assumption of earlier, late nineteenth-century constructions of blackness on the minstrel stage (Fraden 1996). The “naturally dramatic” elements of African-American modernisms, however, were less the features of an art instinctively geared toward entertainment than the products of a black artistic sensibility uniquely cognizant of the reality of a social audience. In their everyday experiences, black artists were profoundly aware that they lived in a racial modernity in which literally “all the world was a stage.” For artists working in visual mediums – the photographer Van Der Zee and painters such as Aaron Douglas and Archibald Motley – and in the work of the early black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who combined in his films both visual and dramatic elements of a new and modern black aesthetic, “color consciousness” represented a positive awareness of the visual politics of race and the potentialities inherent within blackness as an object or image to be manipulated by black and white artists alike.
The Crisis symposium gave a substantial number of writers the opportunity to weigh in on the debate, many of them the key literary figures of the movement that would also come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The range of responses anticipated many of the issues central to black cultural politics throughout the twentieth century and beyond, a sense of the black art work as an inherently intercultural object, produced with an ever constant awareness of its racial audience and that audience’s limited understanding of African-American identity as concentrated in the color of the skin. In “The Paradox of Color,” an essay by Walter White also written for The New Negro, “color consciousness” was contrasted with race consciousness as a more negative form of experiencing one’s race. Race consciousness involved a certain historical awareness of the condition of blacks in the Americas and the relevance of that history for their modern status. Color consciousness reflected attitudes of mind that fixated on the color of one’s skin, attitudes that characterized both racism from without and insidious forms of internal prejudice located within the African-American community (Locke 1992: 366). Passing was a symptomatic form of color consciousness for it was based on the negative experience of one’s racial identity through the color, or in this case, lack of color, in one’s complexion and appearance.
The blackface minstrel, played (in)famously throughout the 1910s by the comedian Bert Williams, a West Indian immigrant to the United States, was a vilified figure throughout the African-American intellectual community. Both onstage and onscreen, Williams “blacked up” for a predominantly white American audience in comic song and dance routines, using burnt cork as a cosmetic agent to darken his complexion for the caricatured roles he played on stage. In his performances, Williams embodied visually the plantation types that had carried over from the late nineteenth century, caricatured and stereotyped images of African Americans as Aunt Jemimas, Sambos, or Coons, that dominated both visual and dramatic representations of black people at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (Krasner 2002: 12). Given the prominence of these racist images and portrayals, it was a matter of extreme urgency to black social and political leaders that writers and artists create new images that reflected black people’s changing lifestyles.
However, Bert Williams also represented a less visible form of racial masquerade, one rarely noted in discussions of African-American modernisms. In a recent assessment of the significance of Williams’s West Indian background, Louis Chude-Sokei argues that the performer represented and embodied ethnic forms of blackness that were literally unrecognizable, and therefore unmarketable, to American audiences. If the early years of the twentieth century saw West Indians migrating to the United States, and Harlem specifically, in record numbers, it was also true that to an outside white world these Caribbean immigrants “passed” in Harlem as African Americans (Allen 1991, Watkins-Owen 1996, Kasinitz 1992). Culturally, West Indians in Harlem during the 1920s were forced to perform African-American racial identities as the only recognizable way of being black. Chude-Sokei identifies this as another, unremarked upon, form of racial masquerade, as a “particularly black West Indian process and strategy of passing as an African American through the mastery of black vernacular speech and symbolic/cultural codes” (Chude-Sokei 2005: 104). Throughout the New World more broadly, blacks appropriated the minstrel mask and other sanctioned performances of black masculinity, “in order to construct a face” that could be recognized according to dominant constructions of blackness shaped by American racial concerns (Chude-Sokei 2005: 14).
In the early years of the twentieth century, West Indians’ assimilation into American society was represented precisely by their willingness to become not so much Americans as African Americans, to substitute African-American racial identities for their Afro-Caribbean ethnicities. Bert Williams epitomized a certain dynamic amongst the members of black New World cultures, namely, their constant performance and self-creation of black identity in each other’s presence as the inhabitants of a circumatlantic New World (Roach 1996). British Caribbean author Caryl Phillips sets his biographical novel on Bert Williams (Dancing in the Dark, 2005) in a Harlem populated by newly arrived black migrants from the Caribbean and the US south. Here the blackface minstrel performance is observed and adapted by various other modern black subjects, diverse in their ethnic, class, and gendered makeup. From this perspective, the Harlem Renaissance as a modern, African-American cultural formation becomes “a complex metaphor for an extended cultural moment that cut across geographic boundaries both within the United States and the black diaspora” (Coyle 2001: 247).
These were the widened geographic boundaries that characterized the fiction of one less well-known West Indian artist of the Harlem Renaissance, the writer Eric Walrond, whose collection of short stories, Tropic Death, was also published in 1926. In his fiction Walrond answered the call of the writers of the Crisis survey in new and unexpected ways, offering a different type of class narrative of modernist black art than the editors may have intended.
As the world experienced the upheaval and aftermath of World War I, black migrants from both the American South and the Caribbean were traveling to northern cities such as Harlem in unprecedented numbers. They came to escape poverty and racial discrimination in the South and in the colonies, and to benefit from wartime economic prosperity in the North. Known as the Great Migration, this mass movement of black migrants also represented the integration of black peasants from the rural Caribbean and American South into the modern industrial economies of the northern United States. The poetry and fiction of Walrond’s more famous West Indian contemporary, Claude McKay, traced precisely this trajectory from the dialect poems of the Jamaican peasantry in Constab Ballads (1912) to the modern vernacular of black urban America in the picaresque novel Home to Harlem (1928), which followed an African-American and Haitian character through the streets of American cities such as Philadelphia and New York. Differentiating his work from that of white modernists of the lost generation writing after World War I – from “[their] confusion – all the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out” – McKay used the documentary tools of social realism to capture and express his fascination with the modern rhythms of American commerce and industry (McKay 1970: 247).
With tales set in both the Caribbean and the United States, Walrond’s fiction described the New World Negro’s transition from rural to industrial economies, a transition experienced by West Indian peasants both in their movements within the Caribbean and from the Caribbean to the United States. Yet in contrast to McKay, Walrond’s writings did contain elements and themes that more closely resembled those found in the literature of white American modernists. Formally, his literary style reflected many of the tricks in the high modernist repertoire – “fragmentation, the primacy of form, the integration of non-poetic material, and the sense of a culture in crisis” (Coyle 2001: 86). As has been said of other interracial pairs of poets and writers working in the modernist period, such as Langston Hughes and Ezra Pound, if we compare the formal elements of the work of a T. S. Eliot with that of a writer such as Walrond, “in every way that counts – the mask, the fragment, the vernacular, the myth, the reworking of genealogies – the literary movements [they represented] are truly distinguishable only in terms of race” (Coyle 2001: 86–7).
Whereas many modernists would turn to the Caribbean and Africa for fetishes of the primitive that they hoped would help animate their own creative work, Walrond attempted to counter these exoticized images of New World blackness with the much grimmer realities captured in the title of his collection, Tropic Death. Though the book is not a novel per se, the stories in Tropic Death do thread together to constitute a narrative; as fictional fragments they capture in snapshots an inter-American space consisting of the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, with movement between these places also serving as the strands connecting each story. Both in structure and in tone, Walrond’s collection resembled that of his African-American contemporary Jean Toomer, whose novel Cane tells a story of the American South in a similarly fragmented form, with a first section composed of short vignettes, and the second a short novella. Toomer’s Cane, however, for all of its similar borrowing from literary styles available to high modernists, retains a nostalgia and lyricism about the South that is not Walrond’s focus in turning to the Caribbean. Instead, Walrond contrasted the romantic discourse of tropical “islands in the sun” with images of that which was dying in the Caribbean as rural black subjects entered the modern economies of a new twentieth-century world. His migratory, black laborers lived in the space where the modern tempo of life and the lifeworld of the peasant collided. One could say that a black modernist such as Walrond transferred the site of the modern wasteland from Europe to the Americas, from the “First World” to the “New World.”
Tropic Death consisted of 10 short pieces set mostly in Barbados and Panama. The stories were linked, on the one hand, by the “grisly deaths” that occurred in each of them and, on the other, by their celebration of “the resilience of Caribbean people in the face of the harshness of the environment and the pervasive legacy of colonialism” (Parascandola 1998: 12). In his use of dialect and his employment of tropes of folk culture, Walrond highlighted elements that were also predominant in black American approaches to literature during this period – a focus on the folk as central protagonists of black narratives, and on black dialect as a form of expression particular to their lifeworld and experience (Parascandola 1998: 13).
The subjects of Walrond’s vignettes were not the beleaguered aristocracy of Europe’s Victorian age nor were they yet the members of the black bourgeoisie or the urban proletariat in the United States. Rather, they were West Indian peasants uprooted from their island homes and employed by the United States, often as workers constructing the Panama Canal. Here they received their first introduction to American ways and racial codes. If, for white modernists after World War I, modern Europe had become a wasteland ravaged by war and nationalism, in Tropic Death the persistent backdrop is a Caribbean landscape transformed by modernization and industrialization. Furthermore, in the work of black modernist writers of the Americas such as Walrond, we find a perspective that identifies colonialism as the historical force behind both modernism and the World War.
Walrond’s New World writings expanded the worlds of both black and white modernists alike. In his hands and literary imagination, the Harlem Renaissance becomes less “a cultural phenomenon located specifically in New York during the 1920s” and more the product of a black geography that stretched from “Sepia, Georgia [to] a backwoods village in Barbadoes” (Coyle 2001: 247, Parascandola 1998: 23). Mary Ann Calo observes that if we follow African-American modernisms beyond Harlem and beyond the national borders of the United States, we discover “a good deal of creative activity taking place in Paris, London, and the Caribbean during the inter-war decades” (quoted in Coyle 2001: 247). This broader landscape of black creative expression provides a perspective particularly relevant for the visual artists of the period who worked both outside of Harlem and also outside of the timelines usually associated with the literary Renaissance. Her observation applies equally well to Eric Walrond’s writings, as he attempted to portray a Caribbean version of blackness that lay both adjacent to and underneath the mask of assumed African-American racial identity in the North. During the 1920s, both in his prose essays on black art and magazine stories of modern black life, Walrond revealed how the focus on blackness as a primarily visual, epidermal phenomenon had expanded outward from the United States to further define blackness in the New World.
The meeting of African Americans and Caribbeans in the early years of the twentieth century represented a unique moment of black intercultural encounter, when intellectuals and artists from different locations in the New World engaged back and forth in a conversation about the nature of black identity, its relationship to stories of the racial past, the cultural and entertainment technologies of the present, and the politics of black liberation in the future. Eric Walrond’s black transnational perspective contributed to this discussion by locating “color consciousness” – the visual politics of blackness, race, and race relations within the United States – within broader hemispheric and colonial genealogies that shaped diasporic race consciousnesses. Alongside transatlantic, Anglo-American modernisms he traced a diasporic, black Atlantic modernity, one that expanded in the 1920s to include the Martinican René Maran, the first black colonial author awarded the French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Batoula (1921) (Walrond 1998: 53).
Walrond’s essays also reveal his sense that there were two kinds of black art representing two very different visions of the race. In one form the ground of racial identity was a historical consciousness of racial oppression. As Walter White observed: “The constant hammering of three hundred years of oppression has resulted in a race consciousness among the Negroes of the United States which is amazing to those who know how powerful it is” (Locke 1992: 366). This historical consciousness of race, whose dimensions included “that deep spirituality, that gift of song and art, that indefinable thing which perhaps can best be termed the over-soul of the Negro” also drove the narrative in Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century classic, The Souls of Black Folk (Locke 1992: 364). Du Bois’s work was another early attempt to locate this “indefinable thing,” this race essence generated out of a particular New World history, by studying and describing the conditions of the once enslaved black populations of the rural South. However, by the 1920s the visual politics of the New Negro revealed black artists’ engagements with a different notion of racial identity, one less invested in a narrative history of the race’s progress “up from slavery.”
This other notion of black art was driven by color consciousness and a cultural politics of the skin. Walrond’s essays during this period reveal his deep concerns about the conversion of racial history into epidermal performance, the visual “fact of blackness” becoming the dominant trope guiding the political vision of African Americans and maybe even their sense of self. Describing the melancholic Bert Williams as possessing a “nostalgia of the soul,” Walrond imagined the comedian asking himself, “Is it really worth it – lynching one’s soul in blackface twaddle” (Walrond 1998: 65). In the 1922 story “On Being Black,” visuality becomes central to the plot and the main character’s “color ordeal,” setting up a clear tension between narrative and visual forms of apprehending race and racial meanings.
The story begins with the main protagonist’s visit to an optician to be fitted for glasses, and his subsequent misidentification as a “colored chauffeur.” The false identification is in terms of class, but the scene nevertheless becomes a racialized encounter, followed by equally excruciating scenes of interracial interaction in which the visual continues to play a key role. At employment agencies the narrator is self-consciously aware that he is “black, foreign-looking and a curio” (Walrond 1998: 77). As he determinedly eradicates his “sensitivity” to being seen, he is suddenly no longer seen – “they do not see me. I am just one of the crowd.” When he tries to escape “to the tropics,” described in a “sheaf of booklets telling me all about the blueness of the Caribbean, the beauty of Montega Bay,” he still has to pass through the gateway of the travel agent’s question, “White or colored?” and when he enters the booking agency “a dozen pairs of eyes are fastened upon me. Murmuring. Only a nigger” (p. 79).
The ending of “On Being Black” reveals a plot strategy Walrond continued to employ, one of relocating his black characters to the Caribbean. Walrond’s African-American characters move away from the United States and escape to New World spaces where the black American subjects are no longer the only sign of blackness, neither to themselves nor, as importantly, to Walrond’s white and black American readership. In this small way, Walrond attempted to denaturalize American forms of “color consciousness,” where black skin becomes the only and absolute signifier for what it means to be black and what it means, more broadly, to be raced. In Walrond’s fiction, the world of color, composed of a variety of “darker” races speaking many languages, is fragmented into so many shades and cultures that American and African-American understandings of blackness do not disappear, but are reframed within different geohistorical contexts.
Techniques of “linguistic imitation and racial masquerade” are often described in the works of white modernists when race is seen as central to the project of transatlantic modernism (Coyle 2001: 258). In Walrond’s black New World sensibility and geography, such techniques also became applicable for the analysis of black, cross-cultural relations and circumatlantic cultural production in the period. These formal, black cross-cultural connections were undergirded by deeply historical concerns shaped by the political economies of the New World emerging in the early twentieth century. They continued to shape African-American modernisms from the years following the Harlem Renaissance and on into the mid-twentieth century. In 1954, at the very end of what would be described as the modern period, African-American modernist Richard Wright drew a connective line between his own Southern black past, as described in his autobiography Black Boy (1945), and the Caribbean world of his contemporary, George Lamming, as described in the latter’s first, semiautobiographical novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1970). Wright’s autobiography told a classically black American story, one of his migration North from brutal and racist conditions in the South, and the continued shaping influence of those conditions on his own character development and sense of self. Lamming’s novel, on the other hand, is a coming-of-age story of the boy narrator and his troupe of friends, all the children of rural folk on the island of Barbados. Their story becomes an analogy for the Caribbean transition into economic modernization and political modernity. In his preface to the American edition of the novel, Richard Wright saw deep connections between his life story and the autobiographical resonances of Lamming’s modern Caribbean fiction.
Like Walrond 30 years before, Wright described at mid-century the forces of modernity and industrialization shaping diasporic black identities at this meeting-point of Southern and Caribbean lifeworlds. “What, then, is this story that Lamming tells?” Wright asked, and answered by defining the Caribbean novel as “a symbolic repetition of the story of millions of simple folk who, sprawled over half of the world’s surface and involving more than half of the human race, are today being catapulted out of their peaceful, indigenously earthy lives and into the turbulences and anxiety of the twentieth century” (Wright 1953: vi). For Wright, the historical forces that had created these conditions placed black subjects in modernity in a unique way:
The Negro of the Western world lives, in one life, many lifetimes. … His is the story of two cultures: the dying culture in which he happens to be born, and the culture into which he is trying to enter. … Such a story is, above all, a record of shifting, troubled feelings groping their way toward a future that frightens as much as it beckons.
(Wright 1953: vi)
For other black writers throughout the twentieth century, such as the Francophone Edouard Glissant and the African-American Ralph Ellison, this was the definitive condition of American modernity that shaped “the novel of the Americas” regardless of writers’ different literary and racial genealogies.
Edouard Glissant extends this “shifting, troubled” sensibility to the writers of the Americas as a whole, describing them as sharing a common condition, “the irruption into modernity, the violent departure from tradition, from literary ‘continuity’ ” (Glissant 1989: 144). He goes on to say that the “American novelist, whatever the cultural zone he belongs to, is not at all in search of a lost time, but finds himself struggling in the confusion of time” (p. 144). During the first half of the twentieth century, such confusion often produced the desire to draw clearer boundaries rather than affording the American writer a new sense of freedom. Hence Ralph Ellison’s sense that color consciousness was the very outcome of a violent modernity in the Americas, both its product and its mirror image or reflective sign, and that black stereotypes represented an America in which “humanity masked its face with blackness” (Ellison 1994: 44). Both Ellison and Glissant concerned themselves with describing in their fiction this “mask of blackness,” Glissant in his focus on creolized African/ European/ New World languages of expression, and Ellison in his groundbreaking novel, Invisible Man (1952). In the latter work, the unnamed protagonist is so overwhelmed by the contradictions between his own hypervisibility in American culture and invisibility in the social sphere, that a dark, underground basement becomes the only place from which he can find the clarity to narrate the events of the novel.
Ellison was even more explicit in his prose writings where he reframed the black “darky” stereotype not just as the phantasm of a racist white American consciousness, but also as indicative of a deeper level of confusion and unrest that could be said to characterize New World modernity as a whole. In “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” he argued that the point of the Negro stereotype as myth was to impose a type of order onto the social chaos of a racialized America. As he put it:
The Negro stereotype is really an image of the unorganized, irrational forces of American life, forces through which, by projecting them in forms of images of an easily dominated minority, the white individual seems to be at home in the vast unknown world of America. Perhaps the object of the stereotype is not so much to crush the Negro as to console the white man.
(Ellison 1994: 41)
The attempt by black artists to reinterpret that stereotype would produce a shaking up of white assumptions concerning blackness, and by extension, white racial identity. In African-American modernisms we find the actual world of American racial modernity, what Toni Morrison describes as “a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm and desire that is uniquely American” (Coyle 2001: 128).
Whether borrowing “American Africanisms” or ignoring black art altogether, high modernists translated color consciousness into literature by creating modernist forms whose racial politics were shaped as much by their disavowed absences as their dark presences (Krasner 2002, Morrison 1993, Coyle 2001). Into the breach left by white modernism would step black artists, on the one hand bearing their color consciousness as an imprint and mark on their very bodies – on the other, resituating the racist gaze of white modernists as a performance of spectatorship that reflected back on themselves. It has been said that the awkward dialogues that occurred between black and white poets such as Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes represented in American cultural terms “not the putting on, but the taking off of a mask” (Coyle 2001: 80). Similarly, in black American modernisms as a whole, the performance of blackness for a white audience, whatever form it took, represented neither the act of “blacking up” nor the disavowal or effacement of the meaning of race. Rather, it was in the intercultural space between the black actor and the white audience that the meaning of race in the Americas was most often on display.
Bert Williams chose to negotiate his cultural invisibility as a West Indian by literalizing in blackface the visual politics that shaped perceptions of blackness and understandings of race in US society. As a writer, Eric Walrond opted instead to situate his fictional narratives in a black New World space of difference, an archipelagic Americas in which black modernity could be perceived and performed in multiple modes, genres, and registers. Walrond was unique in his attempts to extract African Americans, with their narratives of racial history intact, from the United States context, relocating them in a New World of color that made visible the hemispheric and colonial genealogies within which various racial stories were first created. Yet as much as African-American modernisms reflected certain forms of black mobility within the Americas at large, and domestically within the United States, in the 1920s there were other voices articulating the needs and desires of the peoples and cultures “left behind.” These writers, often prominent black female artists, articulated new meanings for folk culture and the relationship between different black classes in their reproduction of those relations in different classes and “colors” of women. In their sense of an Americas that was modern and African, women of color staged a different kind of intrablack dialogue during this period, one shaped by the realities of performing their black sexual and gendered identities in the presence of white audiences and in the face of the male gaze.
New Negro African-American modernisms represented a certain racial attitude, one that was very much an assertion of black cultural and class power. What is often less marked is that this was also a male speech act, exemplified by figures such as Du Bois in his role as the editor of The Crisis, and Locke in his role as the editor of The New Negro anthology. The masculinism of the New Negro movement represented not only a gendered, but also a sexual politics, with many of the Renaissance’s leading male figures involved in intimate relationships with each other (Hull 1987). Rare were the appearances, however, of the sexual politics of the New Negro, for the politics of respectability required a policing of black sexuality on the part of both men and women, and its relegation to, at best, a black private sphere.
As generative as the prescribed image of the New Negro was for some forms of black art and literature, questions of black male sexuality and intrablack sexual relations remained a muted force, a subtext or tertiary storyline in a dominant narrative of black entertainment and white spectatorship. In the early years of the twentieth century, Aida Walker, the wife of Bert Williams’s partner George Walker and female star of his shows, described the taboo nature of representations of black couples and black romantic storylines on the American stage (Krasner 2002, Philips 2005). The emergence of a new generation of black modernists in 1926 represented not only a new set of options for portraying racial identity, but also new parameters for staging those identities in performances of black gender and sexual identity before white audiences, on and off the stage. Just as an older version of the New Negro movement was inscribing itself on the national American cultural consciousness, a new and younger group of black artists emerged – fleetingly – to celebrate the messier, less regulated elements of black identity. Edited by Wallace Thurman, and featuring plays, short stories, and poetry by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Bruce Nugent, the first and only issue of Fire!!, “a quarterly devoted to the younger Negro artists,” appeared in 1926. Fire!! sought to provide a literary venue where aspects of blackness not prescribed by the rigid gender contours of the New Negro as a social role – those typically relegated to the margins of New Negro discourses of blackness – could be taken up.
Many of the artists involved in the creation of Fire!! called on other artists to imagine more options for their work than simply catering to white interests. In his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes described this new imperative by stating: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. … If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either” (Hughes 1975: 476). In this black “left-wing literary modernism” as Alain Locke described the writers of Fire!!, blackness meant the assertion of a different black aesthetic in the presence and in the face of a white audience, a different form of speaking back to the power of the racialized and racializing gaze. The broader context for the Crisis survey could be seen as its simultaneous publication in 1926 with Fire!!, a magazine that ran for only one issue and yet reflected something fundamentally different about a new, black modernist aesthetic than that represented by the male generation of Locke and Du Bois.
Fire!! represented less the articulation of new racial concerns than new options for exploring those concerns in differently gendered idioms of style and in new expressions of black sexuality. Zora Neale Hurston was an exemplary figure of this younger black modernist aesthetic. Herself one of the bright, new, young and jazzy females of a stylish, urban black Harlem, she chose to reframe the black modernist experience through the eyes of the very people watching the future from a disintegrating black past. These were the peasants Eric Walrond had spoken for before her, looking back from that past to a modern space of disorientation and confusion, both in the Caribbean and in the United States. As a woman Hurston performed her own unique form of urban female blackness, very different from the prescribed roles of respectability for New Negro women at the time. But she also spoke for a group who had received little attention in the intercultural dialogue about black identity that was being shaped by masculine concerns. Hurston spoke for the poor Southern black woman left behind in the South, and concomitantly, for a Caribbean folk culture left behind on the islands.
In addition to Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel Cane, which represented the Southern woman as an object of the black male gaze, the West Indian author Claude McKay also made the switch to portraying a folk female protagonist in his 1933 novel Banana Bottom, the story of a young Caribbean girl of peasant background returning to the island of her birth. Wallace Thurman, the editor of Fire!! and a contemporary of Hurston’s, was another male author who focused on marginalized black women as central subjects and characters. Both Thurman’s and Hurston’s pieces in Fire!! (respectively, “Cordelia the Crude” and “Color Struck”) were dramas that emphasized the color ordeals of a dark-skinned black woman. As such, they revealed the forms of gender performativity such women lived and enacted throughout diasporic black cultures, their particular sexualized experience of blackness as color. Fire!! also included Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” a fragmented, color-infused story of male homosexuality, where the imaging of black love becomes also an expression of loving blackness, and of seeing black masculinity from a perspective other than that of a desiring white audience.
Not unaware of the color politics of the New Negro men and women who were her cohort, in her drama and fiction Hurston reframed the issue of color and the epidermal as a constraint on black female sexuality specifically, and black sexual mores and lifestyles more broadly. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is now seen as a classic in black women’s fiction, shining a very different and less romanticized light on the female protagonist of an all-black Southern town, Eatonville, Florida. The novel traces the character Janie’s increasing self-growth as she moves through a number of marriages, sexual awakenings, and loves. In her own autobiographical writings and self-presentation, Hurston modeled alternative and more confident ways of experiencing her color, her sexuality, and her relation to her black and white audiences.
In her 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston described how black and white relations of mutual spectatorship became reified in her own color consciousness in adolescence, constituting her sense of self: “In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown – warranted not to rub nor run.” “But I am not tragically colored,” Hurston continued, and proceeded to elaborate the white racial imagination also articulated in the phantasm of black and brown skin: “The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.” Hurston articulated an understanding of her own race as a cultural product of white and black social interaction: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. … When I sit … with a white person, my color comes.” An anthropologist by training, Hurston wrestled with the variety of locations from which blackness could be understood, both that of the observer and the observed, facing both the white and black male modernists of her generation with an alternative language and performance of black female sassiness: “When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City … in a most aristocratic manner … The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race or time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.”
The key issue at stake for understanding the import of African-American modernisms lies in differentiating between a notion of race and blackness as expressed in discrete cultural and ethnic forms, and an understanding of racial discourse as a form of politics that generates cultural texts and artifacts. In both of these understandings of race the visual plays a key role, but in the latter, the active relationship between audience and artist, spectator and performer, is understood as the site from which meaning is generated. Race understood as an ethnic and cultural discourse presumes that meanings are generated from within the body and bodies of a people. Race as a politics of intercultural interaction implies that collective identities – national, religious, racial, classed, gendered – are assigned meanings generated out of peoples’ interactive histories.
Since the publication of key works by Ann Douglas and George Hutchinson, it is no longer a novel idea to suggest that the Harlem Renaissance be seen in black and white as a multiracial artistic formation. Similarly, in modernist studies some have argued, “any critical account of modernism that ignores the impact of black culture fails to grasp the complexity of modernity … as chiaroscuro,” as from its inception the site of “intercultural and interracial collaboration” (Coyle 2001: 250). In the more positive forms of this discussion, artists engage in mutual acts of racial masquerade and cultural borrowing; in the more negative, racial performativity becomes the site where the white gaze positions black artists as others.
African-American modernisms also inhabit a different social space, however, for it is here that we see black subjects not only as actors and roles, but also as social audiences for white America. African-American modernisms reveal the active presence of a black audience for white racial attitudes and cultural artifacts, despite the evidence of their invisibility to white modernists. Intercultural interactions, the idea that cultures perform in each other’s presence, implies not just a vision of artists working together in interracial collaboration. Less often explored, the intercultural can also be defined through the self-conscious awareness of one group of artists that the racial other is also a member of their audience, resituating and redefining their acts of performed racial spectatorship. To describe black culture in Harlem during the modernist period as specular is precisely to evoke the double meanings of the term, as captured in the images of the glass mirror or the white mask. Blackness becomes a metaphor for something you can see yourself through, an image of yourself as an audience reflected back to you. Few white artists dared to cross the threshold of imagining a black audience, or incorporating the notion of a black audience, into their work, whether through fear or simply the socially prescribed belief that no such threshold existed to be crossed and no such black audience existed.
If this essay began with the question “What was blackness in the early twentieth century?” it ends by asking: what then is African-American modernism as scholars look back at the beginning of the twenty-first? How are we to understand the modern American novel in light of the concerns first raised by the editors of the Crisis survey? How do those concerns look when placed side by side with other intrablack tensions, and ethnic and sexual tendencies, traveling at the margins of a modern urban discourse of blackness and shaping the art of the period? The black artist in the social world is shaped by a limited number of choices, a type of constrained mobility that reveals itself both in the tropes and formal features of a given text or literary work, and in the artist’s gendered performance as its own black “idiom of style.” Whether the maligned minstrel “darky,” the urban, self-determined New Negro, the migratory, laboring peasant, or the dark woman of color, the modes of black art and identity available to African-American modernisms resulted not from a new freedom of black expression, but from an ever-evolving set of cultural constraints.
Interacting with the constraints on black expression imposed from without – the hegemonic gaze of a white subject – were the constraints produced from within – the black artist’s effort to create ever more options for the performance of gendered, sexed, raced, and classed identities in a shifting new world of the twentieth century. As Toni Morrison observed in Playing in the Dark, the question of how we see blackness, artistically, culturally, visually, socially, politically, economically, is often the shadowy underside of an experience of whiteness, a shadow haunting our willingness to interrogate the racial underpinnings of how we see ourselves. African-American modernisms represent those moments when black artists in the Americas wrestled, and encouraged their white modernist counterparts to wrestle, with the meaning of their own racial identity – and with the way languages and images of race had trapped them in prescribed ways of answering the question: “How shall the Negro be portrayed?”
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Allen, Ernest, Jr. (1991). The New Negro: Explorations in identity and social consciousness, 1910–1922. In Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (eds), 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art and the New Theatre in America (pp. 48–68). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Carby, Hazel V. (1998). Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chude-Sokei, Louis. (2005). The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Coyle, Michael (ed.). (2001). Ezra Pound and African American Modernism. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation.
The Crisis. (1926). The Negro in art: How shall he be portrayed? March: 219–20, November: 28–9.
Douglas, Ann. (1996). Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1969). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books.
Duberman, Martin B. (1989). Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: Knopf.
Ellison, Ralph. (1994). Twentieth-century fiction and the black mask of humanity. In Shadow and Act (pp. 24–44). New York: Quality Paperback Book Club and Random House, Inc.
Fraden, Rena. (1996). Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (1988). The trope of a New Negro and the reconstruction of the image of the black. Representations 24: 129–55.
Glissant, Edouard. (1989). Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Hughes, Langston. (1975). The Negro artist and the racial mountain. In Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow (eds), The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology (pp. 471–6). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hull, Gloria T. (1987). Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. (1928). How it feels to be colored me. The World Tomorrow 11: 215–16.
Hutchinson, George. (1997). The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kasinitz, Philip. (1992). Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Krasner, David. (2002). A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Locke, Alain (ed.). (1992). The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Atheneum.
McKay, Claude. (1970). A Long Way from Home. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Morrison, Toni. (1993). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage.
Nugent, Richard Bruce. (2002). Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Parascandola, Louis J. (ed.). (1998). Introduction. In Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader (pp. 11–42). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Phillips, Caryl. (2005). Dancing in the Dark. New York: Knopf.
Roach, Joseph. (1996). Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.
Walrond, Eric. (1998). Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader, ed. Louis J. Parascandola. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Watkins-Owens, Irma. (1996). Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wright, Richard. (1953). Introduction. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (pp. v–viii). New York: McGraw Hill.