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Questionnaire Responses Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Questionnaire Responses Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Modernism/modernity, Volume 20, Number 3, September 2013, pp. 454-457 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0093 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/525162 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 13:06 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] MODERNISM / modernity 454 What question is missing from this survey? I would be interested to see a renewal of the “Criteria of Negro Art” symposium, perhaps one in which contemporary black writers and artists are included, not just modernist and Harlem Renaissance scholars. I may be wrong (and I hope you will edit out my error if I am), but it’s been a full twenty-five years since Henry Louis Gates revived the debate in a special issue of the Black American Literature Forum. Since that time, the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval has fundamentally reshaped the publishing industry—a far cry from the time when the authenticating preface written by white men was the condition on which aspiring black authors could see their work published (I am thinking here of Waldo Frank’s introduction to Cane or of Carl Van Vechten’s preface to the reissue of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.) And as I write this, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has recently given prominence and authority to a nasty screed challenging the academic merit of black studies as an enterprise altogether. Such cultural and political developments suggest the ongoing significance of those questions posed to early twentieth-century writers in the pages of The Crisis. Kathleen Pfeiffer is a professor and the chair of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She has edited reissues of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and Waldo Frank’s Holiday and has published work in numerous journals, including African American Review and Legacy. Her most recent book is Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank (2010). Cherene Sherrard-Johnson How have your ideas about the Harlem Renaissance evolved since you first began writing about it? When I first began studying the Harlem Renaissance as a multidisciplinary move- ment the emphasis was primarily on the relationship between jazz, the blues, and poetics of the era. Richard Powell’s exhibition catalogue Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997) and the associated exhibit highlighted the visual and performance culture of the era, but the interdisciplinary work had not yet been un- dertaken in literary studies. Thanks to scholars working in and across genres, the study of Harlem Renaissance literature is now indivisible from an understanding of visual culture, high art, popular art, and race movies. Interartistic engagement has enabled scholars to excavate the dynamic nature of Afro-modernism as in constant conversation with what we once understood to be mainstream European and American modernism. My first book, Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literature Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007), argued for an approach that places visual artists and writers in a dialogic relationship by tracing the iconography of the mulatta, which was grafted on and through the ideology of New Negro womanhood. Coterminous studies like Martha Nadell’s Enter New Negro: Images of Race in American Culture (2004) questionnaire responses and Anne Caroll’s Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in 455 the Harlem Renaissance (2007) have created a flexible framework for analyzing cross- genre collaborations. There are still pedagogical challenges to teaching the Harlem Renaissance as a multiarts movement; however, the critical scaffolding continues to be buttressed by a variety of republications, anthologies, and digital archives. Moreover, an unprecedented number of biographies of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists produced in the last two decades have expanded the literary history of the era beyond the literature reviews compiled by Nathan Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance (1987) and David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue (1997), the foundational studies. What figures, connections, or areas of inquiry require further attention or reflection? The Harlem Renaissance should be a touchstone of black performance studies, yet this remains an area that merits further investigation. New historiographies of vaudeville and the chitlin’ circuit illustrate how black theater shaped collective poli- tics and communal interaction in Harlem and, as larger productions like Porgy and Shuffle Along toured, how it fostered international viewing audiences. Working this angle of the field spotlights personas like actress/aspiring writer Dorothy Peterson or the blackface performer Bert Williams. At the 2012 C19 Americanists conference in Berkeley, Shirleen Robinson gave a fabulous paper centered on a microhistory of a mining town where Bert Williams performed and the mob violence that followed his show. Drawing on performance theory to examine unexplored archives, Robinson models an emergent methodology that will invigorate our understanding of the gen- esis of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement. This integrated type of critical inquiry also invites the revisitation of incongruent texts like Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), Marita Bonner’s avant-garde surrealist drama The Purple Flower (1927), and librarian Regina Andrews’s lynching play Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (1931). What aspects of the Harlem Renaissance are we missing or ignoring? Pursuant to the publication of Cheryl Wall’s seminal Women of the Harlem Renais- sance (1995), scholars have endeavored to contextualize, interrogate, and republish women’s writing; however, critical focus has centered primarily on novelists. Women’s poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is persistently characterized as didactic, formalist, and transparent. Fortunately, critics have finally begun to explore the diverse poetics of black female poets made available in anthologies like Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989), edited by Maureen Honey. Critics like Margo Crawford, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley interrogate the poetics and politics of gender articulated in the form, subject, and subtext of poets like Anne Spencer, and those who never published a single collection but whose anthologized verse illustrates a collective repository that cannot be excluded or overshadowed by the popularity and visibility of Langston Hughes or Claude McKay. MODERNISM / modernity 456 How do you understand the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, and/or modernity? It is essential that we understand the relationship between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance as mutually constitutive. Too many studies have sought to examine the ways minority artists contributed to mainstream modernism or formed their own separate “modernisms.” While it is useful to consider “Afro-modernism” as a particular engagement or distinctive movement, more nuanced considerations imagine a fluid exchange of formal and avant-garde aesthetics that move beyond citation of Pablo Picasso’s deployment of African sculpture or Gertrude Stein’s inventive dialect in Melanctha (1909). One example has been the galvanization of scholars around Jessie Redmon Fauset as a “middlebrow” modern that trumps ethnically demarcated and aesthetically elitist boundaries within the field. An intriguing feature of the last two decades of scholarship has been the promo- tion of Jean Toomer as an exemplar of Harlem Renaissance modernism. Given that he published one slim, dazzling book, the number of critical essays and single author studies devoted to Cane (1923) and to Toomer’s unpublished writings is astounding. He is often the vehicle for reconsidering the era’s interracial modernism and its role within the field of mixed-raced studies. With his ambivalent identifications and aes- thetics, Toomer seems to be a perfect ambassador for the neither/nor advocates of the era and a scapegoat for those hoping to identify a clear break between the politics and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance. I’m concerned that the exaltation of Toomer as an outsider-within represents a kind of retrenching of male authors as model modernists and innovators that continues to relegate female writers like Jessie Fauset, Marita Bonner, and Dorothy West to the rear guard, the notable exception being Nella Larsen, whose critical following approaches Toomer’s. Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) appear so often on Harlem Renais- sance and twentieth-century American literature syllabi that they rival the popularity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which following its “rediscovery” became the most taught and recognized novel of the era. What do you think is the most interesting or challenging work being conducted in this field and why? Since the publication of Brent Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the flowering of black internationalist scholarship within African diaspora studies has broadened the scope of the Harlem Renaissance. Studies that decenter Harlem’s geographic prominence lend credence to the argument for renaming the Harlem Renaissance the New Negro or first Black Arts movement in recognition of multiple geographic sites of intense ar- tistic production and intellectual exchange. The “satellite salons”
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