Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in Wentieth-T and Early Twenty-First- Century African American Literature
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2011 Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in wentieth-T and Early Twenty-First- Century African American Literature LaRonda Meeshay Sanders-Senu [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons Recommended Citation Sanders-Senu, LaRonda Meeshay, "Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in wentieth-T and Early Twenty-First-Century African American Literature. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2011. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1021 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by LaRonda Meeshay Sanders-Senu entitled "Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century African American Literature." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Thomas Haddox, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Katy Chiles, Asafa Jalata, Josphat Ndigirigi Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by LaRonda Meeshay Sanders-Senu entitled “Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century African American Literature.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. ______________________________ Thomas Haddox , Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: ______________________________ Katy Chiles ______________________________ Asafa Jalta ______________________________ Josphat Ndigirigi Accepted for the Council ______________________________ Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Toward a Progressive African Americanism: Africanism and Intraracial Class Conflict in Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century African American Literature A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville LaRonda Meeshay Sanders-Senu May 2011 Copyright © 2011 by LaRonda Meeshay Sanders-Senu All rights reserved. ii I dedicate this book to my babies big and small—LaBrea, Juaneya, Abria, Keilyn, Jada, Janiya, Bryson, B.J., and LaPrecious. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Haddox for his patience and support with this project and all of the other endeavors with which he has helped me. Your incisive and challenging questions have made me examine and reexamine my ideals. You have helped me become a better scholar. I am very grateful for all that you have done. I would like to thank the other members of my committee, Dr. Katy Chiles, Dr. Asafa Jalata, and Dr. Josphat Ndigirigi. I appreciate your comments. I am grateful for your support. Thank you Dr. Bill Hardwig for the advice and your open door. I am very grateful for my family and friends. I appreciate your understanding my absence on holidays and events, fewer visits, and shorter phone conversations. You don’t know how much that means to me. To my husband Frank, thank you for understanding that I live in the crazy world of academia. Thanks for always seeing the bigger picture. iv ABSTRACT In this work, I explore how African American authors and texts have contributed to or confronted what Toni Morrison calls “Africanism” in Playing in the Dark. I argue that the construction of blackness by non-black people and its consequent racial stigma, imbuing skin color with mental and physical inferiority, functions in an intraracial context to obscure the solidarity of all African Americans irrespective of their socioeconomic status. My work spans the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, investigating representations of the middle class who seek to deny or ignore the impact that a Eurocentric value system has on their lives and the lives of the black majority. These texts also illustrate the struggle to reconcile social mobility and economic progress with the persistence of the cultural trauma of slavery and racial stigma, as well as the struggle between exclusionary claims of African American authenticity and more complicated middle-class and black majority constructions of African American identity. I correct claims that the tension between African American authenticity and educational and economic progress is a new phenomenon, demonstrating that this tension extends back to the beginning of the twentieth century and arguably even to the period of Reconstruction. My dissertation also reveals the mythical nature of the postracial ideal, suggesting that contemporary African American investment in postracial ideology is the product of a desire to reflect and obtain an elusive “Americanism” that has never been unreservedly available to African Americans. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I Class Consciousness and Honor: Africanist Appropriations in Chesnutt and Griggs 24 CHAPTER II Beyond the Mirror Image: Dueling Race and Class in Black No More and If He Hollers Let Him Go 78 CHAPTER III Power (Re)Possessed: Black Power and Class Conflict in The Man Who Cried I Am and The Bluest Eye 147 CHAPTER IV The Ambivalent Path: Race, Materialism, and Conflicted African Americanism in Morrison and Naylor 201 CHAPTER V Validating the Myth or Simplifying Reality: Racism and Postracialism in Erasure and Rebel Yell 269 WORKS CITED 312 VITA 329 vi Introduction With increasing evidence of African American economic, social, and educational progress, the traditional African American narrative that is informed by America’s racist history—beginning with slavery and continuing with Jim Crow—is being questioned by African American scholars and authors. African Americans are asking themselves: in what ways do racial consciousness and the vestiges of slavery impact the contemporary lives of African Americans? While some, such as author Charles Johnson in his American Scholar article “The End of the Black American Narrative” and many conservative African American critics such as John McWhorter and Shelby Steele, insist that it is time to focus on new narratives that reflect the social progress that America and African Americans have made, I contend that the lingering vestiges of American racism and the stigma that remains attached to the black body continues to be essential to any new African American narrative. I also contend that a look at African American literature throughout the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries illustrates the complex task of reconciling such a stigma with American social progress. In The Anatomy of Racial Equality, Glenn Loury aptly describes “the territory of racial stigma of dishonorable meanings socially inscribed on arbitrary bodily marks, of ‘spoiled collective identities’” (59). Instead of focusing on the impact of America’s white hegemonic ideology outside of the African American community, this work seeks to examine how racial stigma, which is the result of white hegemony, functions within the African American class structure. The literature that I will explore investigates the impact that a Eurocentric value system has on the lives of African Americans. Within my literary analysis, I will use Toni Morrison’s Playing 1 in the Dark and her discussion of Africanism as springboards from which I will explore these texts. Let me clarify that I and Morrison use the term Africanism much differently from other scholars of Africa and the African Diaspora. The term Africa itself is a troubled term because, as V.Y. Mudimbe notes, it was taken from the Afri ethnic group in Northern Africa and then applied to the entire continent by the conquering Romans (The Idea 26-27). The idea of naming and being named has been an important topic for colonized Africans and African Americans who had their cultural and social identity stripped away. The naming of Africa by Europeans denotes a lack of subjectivity for the people of the continent and perpetuates the tendency of racial stereotyping that was accepted by missionaries, anthropologists, and colonizers alike. Such an attitude that allows one group to name and classify complex and diverse groups of people under one totalizing heading reflects the denigration of African culture, history, tradition, and capabilities that has taken place for centuries. Africanism was used simply as a term denoting knowledge of Africa and the people of Africa, even with a white hegemonic value system pervading such “knowledge” (Mudimbe,