Copyright by Chiyuma Elliott 2011
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by Chiyuma Elliott 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Chiyuma Elliott Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Blackness and Rural Modernity in the 1920s Committee: Shirley E. Thompson, Supervisor Laurie Green Steven D. Hoelscher Meta D. Jones Jeffrey L. Meikle Blackness and Rural Modernity in the 1920s by Chiyuma Elliott, A.B.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2011 Acknowledgements First thanks are due to my thesis committee at the University of Texas: Shirley E. Thompson (my chair), Laurie Green, Steven Hoelscher, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Jeffrey Meikle. Their willingness to ask tough questions at every stage helped me navigate the complexities of interdisciplinary research and writing, and I am so grateful for their time and attention. My thanks also go to my MFA faculty advisors, who had the foresight to see (even when I could not) how my doctoral work enriched my poetry: Karen Brennan, Heather McHugh, Debra Alberry, David Baker, and C. Dale Young. Grants and fellowships from the Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Texas, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society made much of my archival research possible, and also provided invaluable time to write. My project is better because of the fine librarians and support staffs at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, the New York State Archives, the Special Collections Reading Room at the Library of Congress, the Maryland State Archives, the Georgia State Newspaper Project, and the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, California. The research talks at the Stanford Humanities Center, where I was on staff for five years, gave me a much broader range of reference, and some of my dearest friends: Christen Smith, Johannes Fabian, and Steven Justice (the love of my life). Arnold Rampersad likely has no idea how much I learned from him during his daily hot chocolate break when he was on sabbatical at SHC in 2002-03; he was and is a constant reminder of what I am striving for: scholarly rigor and enduring commitment to the field iv of African American literary studies. This thesis is immeasurably better for Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s intellectual guidance and unflagging support. Thanks are also due to Martha Norkunas (whose “Cultural Representations of the Past” course launched this project); to A. Van Jordan (who introduced me to the work of Oscar Micheaux, and generously shared hard-to-find primary sources); to Cecilia Moore (who responded to my email query about the Cardinal Gibbons Institute with enthusiasm, practical advice, and photocopies of rare articles and archival materials); to Maura Nolan, Dan Blanton, Ann Middleton, Gene Rochlin, and Donald McQuade (for their welcome to Berkeley); and to Sepp Gumbrecht and Laura Selznick (for years of mentorship, friendship, and wonderful book recommendations). Thanks to my family for believing in me. My husband, Steve, moved his desk and bookshelves into the living room so I would have “a room of my own” in which to write—both a practical help and a profound vote of confidence that meant the world to me. v Blackness and Rural Modernity in the 1920s Chiyuma Elliott, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Shirley E. Thompson The New Negro Movement (often called the Harlem Renaissance) made black creative production visible to an extent unprecedented in American History. Complex representations of African Americans started to infiltrate a popular culture previously dominated by stereotypes; people from all walks of life were confronted for the first time with art made by African Americans that asked them to think in new ways about the meaning of race in America. The term Harlem Renaissance conjures up images of urban America, but the creative energies of many New Negro figures were actually focused elsewhere—on rural America. Urbanite Jean Toomer spent time teaching in an agricultural college in the rural South, and wrote award-winning poetry and prose about that experience. Langston Hughes wrote blues lyrics about the struggles of rural migrants in New York that highlighted the complex interconnections of rural and urban experience. And the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux incorporated numerous fictionalized accounts of his own experiences as a homesteader in South Dakota into his race movies and novels. New Negro writers asserted that their art shaped how people understood themselves and were understood by others. Accordingly, this project examines both literary representations, and how literary works related to the real lives and struggles of rural African Americans. My research combines archival, literary, and biographical vi materials to analyze the aesthetic choices of three New Negro authors (Hughes, Micheaux, and Toomer), and explain the interrelated literary and cultural contexts that shaped their depictions of African American rural life. Houston Baker, in his influential 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defined black modernism as an awareness of radical uncertainty in human life. My central contention is that one of the most radical uncertainties in interwar-period America was the changing rural landscape. I revisit the largely-forgotten (though large- scale) social movement to fight rural outmigration by modernizing rural life. And I argue that, rather than accepting the simple binary that took the urban to be modern and the rural backward, African Americans in the 1920s created and experienced complicated formulations of the rural and its connections to modern blackness. vii Table of Contents List of Tables ..................................................................................................x List of Figures............................................................................................... xi Introduction..............................................................................................................2 Chapter 1. Modern By Accident: Jean Toomer, Literary Experiment, and Rural Blackness ......................................................................................................41 Turning South ...............................................................................................48 The Worst of Times ......................................................................................66 Representing Rural Violence ........................................................................98 Conclusion: The Shock of the South ..........................................................107 Chapter 2. Langston Hughes: The Country and the City.....................................113 The Negro Artist and the Rural Mountain ..................................................117 Race, Place and the Blues ...........................................................................123 Genre and Analogy .....................................................................................136 A Note on Blues..........................................................................................146 Folk Blues, Classic Blues ...........................................................................153 Hughes in “Negro” Dialect .........................................................................168 The City in the Country: Rural Literary Reuse...........................................177 Time and Materials .....................................................................................196 Chapter 3. Oscar Micheaux: Rural Life, Audiences, and Aesthetics...................198 Reuse as a Rural Aesthetic..........................................................................210 Down on the Farm ......................................................................................240 Pens and Ploughshares................................................................................260 Big Screens, Small Cities............................................................................269 Fort Valley: Portrait of an Audience...........................................................275 New School Cinema ...................................................................................282 Conclusion: The Past as Visual Prologue ...................................................288 viii Conclusion ...........................................................................................................293 Bibliography ........................................................................................................301 ix LIST OF TABLES Table 1. 1920s Blues Attributes: Folk versus Classic Blues Variants.................158 Table 2: AAVE Features in Hughes’s Blues Poems............................................172 Table 3: Literary Dialect Features in Hughes’s Blues Poems .............................174 Table 4: 1910 European Immigrant Diversity in South Dakota ..........................257 Table 5. Within Our Gates Circulation, January-March, 1920............................271 Table 6. Rosenwald Schools, Teachers’ Residences, and Shop-Classrooms Built in Micheaux’s Film Distribution Circuit.............................................287 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Photograph of Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston in front of a statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, 1927 .......178 Figure 2: “Micheaux