Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics

RHYTHMIC LITERACY: POETRY, READING AND PUBLIC VOICES IN BLACK ATLANTIC POETICS A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Janet Neigh May, 2010 Examining Committee Members: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, English Suzanne Gauch, English Jena Osman, English Harvey Neptune, History Jahan Ramazani, External Member, English, University of Virginia ii © Copyright 2010 by Janet Neigh All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. Growing up in the U.S and Jamaica in the early twentieth century, Hughes and Bennett were both subjected to a similar Anglophone transatlantic schoolroom poetry tradition, which they contend with as one of their only available poetic models. I argue that memorization and recitation practices play a formative role in the development of their poetic projects. As an enactment and metaphor for the dynamics of colonial control, this form of mimicry demonstrates to them the power of embodied performance to reclaim language from dominant forces. This dissertation reveals how black Atlantic poetics refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth-century U.S and British colonial education for the purposes of decolonization. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Critical Perspectives on Louise Bennett , a special issue of The Journal of West Indian Literature 17:2 (2009): 5-19. I would like to thank my committee for all their help, guidance and enthusiasm for this project: Suzanne Gauch, Jena Osman, Harvey Neptune, and Jahan Ramazani; an extra special thanks to my main advisor Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her lightening speed and her unwavering support every step of the way. For generous financial support thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and at Temple: The Department of English, The Center for the Humanities, and The College of Liberal Arts. Thanks to my family, as well as to my friends who are family: James De Lorenzi, Christa Di Marco, Sarah Dowling, Lentil, Jennifer Maloy, Jed Palmer, Dan Schank, Andrea Strudensky, and Sarah Turner. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT ...................................................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................v CHAPTER PART I: MOVEMENTS OF WRITING ..........................................................................1 1. THE LICKLE SPACE OF THE TRAMCAR IN LOUISE BENNETT’S FEMINIST POSTCOLONIAL POETICS .............................................................9 2. DIASPORIC CONNECTIVITY IN LANGSTON HUGHES’S BROADCAST POETICS.....................................................................................47 PART II: MOVEMENTS OF READING ......................................................................82 3. THE RHYTHMIC LITERACY PEDAGOGY OF LANGSTON HUGHES ..............................................................................................................94 4. RECALLING ELOCUTION LESSIONS IN CREOLE POETRY READING ..........................................................................................................136 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................169 vi INTRODUCTION In 1954, the African American Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and the Jamaican Louise Bennett (1919-2006) were both guests on an episode of Alma John’s daytime radio program, The Homemaker’s Club , broadcast on WWRL, a black New York radio station. This broadcast in the early 1950s forms an ideal place for these two iconic 20 th century black Atlantic poets to come together, encapsulating their shared preoccupations with emerging technologies, poetic performance and social voice. In a very practical way, the broadcast illustrates the degree to which radio facilitated Afro-diasporic community at mid-century. What did they talk about? What poems did they read? How did their poems sound when they read them aloud next to each other? What kind of rhythmic exchange did their listeners hear across the airwaves? Even though this is the only record of Hughes and Bennett performing their poetry together, this dissertation historically substantiates a socio-aesthetic proximity between the vernacular poetry each produced in the 1940s. Positioned on the border of a number of different fields - modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, Caribbean literature, African American literature, black Atlantic studies, modernist studies and globalization and diaspora studies – this comparative analysis of two poets offers a fuller understanding of how poetry decolonizes language practices. While Bennett and Hughes met only briefly during their lifetimes, their poetry shares many formal and thematic affinities, previously unstudied by critics. The following chapters examine how they both respond in similar ways to the social unrest of their shared historical moment in the 1940s by reinventing the pedagogical role of the poet and the discursive space of a poem. Many of their texts from this period address the vii impact of urbanism, migration, and literacy education on subjects’ ability to form communities and claim a voice in the public sphere. Bennett and Hughes both primarily define themselves as poets although poetry exists for them in a range of other discursive gestures, genres and performance strategies. As a medium, poetry encourages a sociality of reading more amenable to collective action than other print genres, and I argue that this is what gives it a central place in their multi-genre artistic projects. Bennett began her writing career in the late 1930s, and while Victorian aesthetics dominated Jamaican poetry during this time, her unique approach combines traditional forms with a modern concern for voice. She merges the English ballad with Jamaican Creole to represent working-class women’s voices that articulate the social instabilities of daily life in Jamaica at the end of British colonial rule. In the 1940s, Hughes was at the midway point in his career. While the Harlem Renaissance is typically assumed to be Hughes’s most productive period of poetry publishing, he actually wrote and published more poetry in the 1940s than in any other decade of his career. Like Bennett, he experiments with poetic personae to depict the voices of Harlem residents who express rising social tensions during and just after WWII. Studying how Hughes and Bennett experiment with the technique of poetic personae to represent social voice, I argue that 1) their poetry produces voice as discourse to imagine community beyond nation, and 2) that they foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. While their work is often celebrated for its representation of oral language and culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to their use of poetry to promote reading as a form of social empowerment. Poetic personae, in their texts, do not viii merely serve as documentary social realism, but act as scripts of social voice for their readers to enact and perform. The second half of this dissertation examines how rhythmic literacy refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth century U.S and colonial education in Jamaica for the purposes of decolonization. 1 Caribbean critics, namely Kamau Brathwaite and Edouard Glissant, have established how the formal characteristics of poetry are well-suited for expressing and exploring processes of creolization in the region. 2 In a more international context, Jahan Ramazani posits Anglophone postcolonial poetics as a discourse of social and linguistic hybridity ( The Hybrid 179-80). Building on the work of these scholars, this project considers how Creole poetry engenders new forms of reading and interpretation. Beyond merely symbolizing creolization, hybridity and non-Western cultural traditions, Bennett and Hughes’s rhythmic literacy illuminates how the physical and social contours of reading play a central role in the remaking of cultural forms and knowledges. In his revisionary history, The Developments of Creole

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