Sliding Positionality in the Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee Jessica Metzler

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee Jessica Metzler Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES GENUINE SPECTACLE: SLIDING POSITIONALITY IN THE WORKS OF PAULINE E. HOPKINS, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND SPIKE LEE By JESSICA METZLER A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Jessica Metzler defended on January 18, 2006. W. T. Lhamon Professor Directing Thesis Leigh Edwards Committee Member Tomeiko Ashford Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For David and Margy Metzler iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank W. T. Lhamon for his generous comments and insightful criticisms of this thesis. I am also grateful for the helpful advice and encouragement I received from Leigh Edwards, Tomeiko Ashford, Hanna Wallinger, Malin Pereira, and John Gruesser. I appreciate as well the time John Graziano, James Hatch, and Annette Fern took to answer my queries. Finally, I wish to thank Beth Howse, Fisk University’s Special Collections Librarian, for her gracious assistance as I completed the archival research that led to this thesis. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables…………………………………………………………………... vi Abstract……………………………………………………………………….... vii INTRODUCTION: Chasing Golden Slippers ..................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: “’Course I knows dem feet!”: Minstrelsy and Subversion in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad.... 4 CHAPTER TWO: “I can’t strain wid nothin’ but my feets”: Humor, Authenticity And Representation in Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone ................................................................... 22 CHAPTER THREE: “Feets do your stuff”: Spike Lee, Essentialism, and Contemporary Blackface .................................................................... 35 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………… 53 NOTES…………. ................................................................................................ 57 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………….. 61 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………… 69 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Production History for Slaves’ Escape.................................................. 55 Table 2: Cast Listings for Slaves’ Escape ........................................................... 56 vi ABSTRACT This thesis, “Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Work of Pauline E. Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee,” addresses the position of Hopkins’s 1879 musical, Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad, Hurston and Hughes’s unproduced 1931 play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, and Lee’s 2000 film, Bamboozled within what scholar W. T. Lhamon has dubbed the “blackface lore cycle.” Viewing these works within the context of this cycle, which swings from virulently racist caricatures of blackness to obsequious imitation and vice versa, allows for an analysis of the sliding cultural currency given to minstrel stereotypes from the late nineteenth century to the present. vii INTRODUCTION Chasing Golden Slippers “The work itself is to me so exhilarating that if I have any regret it is that my face is not black and that with such education and force as I have, I cannot go right out into the open and battle for justice alongside Booker T. Washington”i I recently had the pleasure of presenting a paper on Pauline E. Hopkins at the 2005 Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) conference. During the Q & A session following the panel, a fellow panelist remarked upon what she saw as Hopkins’s reserved, self- effacing personality citing what has become known as the “Trotter letter” among Hopkins scholars. The Trotter letter is an unpublished letter from Hopkins to James Monroe Trotter in which she details the events leading up to her dismissal from the Colored American Magazine when it fell into the hands of Booker T. Washington. The proof the panelist cited in her observation was a portion of the letter in which Hopkins tells of being given flowers and furs from John Freund (one of Washington’s “agents”). Quoting a line from the letter that reads, “As I am not a woman who attracts the attention of the opposite sex in any way, Mr. Freund’s philanthropy with regard to myself puzzled me,” the panelist asserted a belief in Hopkins’s self- deprecating nature (3). Such an observation is interesting when viewed in connection with Hopkins’s formulation of black womanhood in her magazine fiction and her most popular novel, Contending Forces, however it rang hollow for myself and several audience members. While the letter itself provides clues that Hopkins self-effacing modesty might well have been a rhetorical strategy to gain sympathy and credibility rather than a sincere declaration of feelings (the very next sentence in the Trotter letter reads: “I was so dense that I did not for a moment suspect that I was being politely bribed to give up my race work and principles and adopt the plans of the South for the domination of the Blacks”), those of us who were familiar with Hopkins the dramatist and Soprano could not reconcile a reading of Hopkins-as-demure with 1 “Hopkins the diva” we knew. Such are the quandaries of beginning to explore the work of a writer presently undergoing that tedious process known as “re-discovery”—how to gain a complete picture of a widely unstudied literary figure. It is such territory that this project begins to explore while complicating contemporary issues of reception and interpretation. The process of uncovering the connections between works that range from archival manuscripts to contemporary film, specifically the plays Slaves’ Escape by Hopkins and Mule Bone by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and the 2000 film Bamboozled by Spike Lee, reveals that each of these artists are or were “performers” in their own right. Hopkins toured with her family’s acting troupe, starring as the lead Soprano in several productions of Slaves’ Escape, Hurston frequently performed dances culled from her anthropological field work, and Lee appears often in his own films. More saliently, perhaps, all were effective marketers and aggressive self-promoters. It is not surprising then that these works all consciously participate in a theatrical history of racial representation and comment upon a legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Scholars have explored the psychology of donning the “minstrel mask” at length. Eric Lott most famously identifies the impulses that led to blackface performance as “an investiture in black bodies,” maintaining that the “form of blackface . seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line” (6). But what can be said of the impulse to actively engage artistically with the history of nineteenth-century blackface? Hopkins, Hurston and Hughes, and Lee’s motives for such engagement all differ, though they each become concerned with questions of “authenticity” in relation to the act of performing race. The knowledge that race itself is always performative enters these works at various points. The sticky question of cultural complicity also rears its head often. I engage W. T. Lhamon’s formulation of the “blackface lore cycle” as the cyclical, continually shifting cultural currency given to blackface performance over time, as a means of analyzing minstrelsy’s images in these three works. I examine these works both in terms of their relation to this cycle and to each other. Beginning with Hopkins’s Slaves’ Escape, I argue a connection to the blackface lore cycle that is contingent upon deliberate inversions of minstrel show stereotypes. Referencing Eric Lott’s articulation of the “mixed erotic economy” of “love and theft” that fueled the popularity of the minstrel show, I examine Slaves’ Escape as a response to the blackface minstrelsy of post-civil war theater circuits (6). 2 Moving from 1879’s Slaves’ Escape to Hurston and Hughes’s 1931 collaboration, Mule Bone, I examine the authors’ desire to create “authentic” representations of blackness against the “inauthentic” images perpetuated by the minstrel show. Tracing a history of black drama from Slaves’ Escape and the “blacks in blackface” phenomenon of the last half of the nineteenth century, through early black Broadway shows such as “In Dahomey,” to Mule Bone’s attempt to create the first “Negro folk-comedy”ii in the view of its authors, I note the play’s position as a descendant of Hopkins’s project in Slaves’ Escape and its similar figuration in the blackface lore cycle. Exploring the relationship between Mule Bone and discussions of racial representation, I rely upon Michele Wallace’s articulation of the problematics of cultural “borrowing” and Hazel Carby’s explorations of Hurston’s project of “reclaim[ing] an aesthetically purified version of blackness”iii in order to establish the role of “authenticity” in the dramatic racial representations of early twentieth-century black drama. Finally, I turn to Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled as indicative of a contemporary engagement with

Load more