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At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period

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At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Imani D. Owens All rights reserved ABSTRACT At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period charts discourses of folk culture, empire and modernity in the works of six African American and Caribbean writers. Each of the dissertation’s three sections pairs a writer from the U.S. with a writer from the Anglophone, Francophone or Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Jean Toomer and Eric Walrond; Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén; and Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price- Mars. I argue that these writers engage the concept of modernity precisely by turning to “imperial sites” that are conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of modern progress. With a sustained interest in the masses and vernacular culture, they turn to the remnants of the Southern plantation, the Caribbean “backwoods,” the inner city slums and other “elsewheres” presumably left behind by history. I contend that U.S. empire is a crucial frame for reading the various representations of local folk culture in these works. From the construction of the Panama Canal on the eve of WWI, to the U.S. military occupation of Haiti and ongoing intervention in Cuba, the interwar years are marked by aggressive U.S. expansion into the Caribbean basin. Though it is commonplace to observe that interwar literature is preoccupied with newness and change, less acknowledged is the role of U.S. imperialism in constituting this newness. Caribbean experience is profoundly influenced by these events, and as African Americans sought fuller citizenship they could not ignore the workings of U.S. imperialism just south of the South. Far from being symbols of a bygone time, these imperial sites—and the “folk” who inhabit them—help to produce the modern. At the Crossroads considers the entanglements of U.S. empire and Jim Crow as it traces uses of the folk and vernacular culture across this U.S- Caribbean literary space. The “folk” emerge as a concept that varies across space and time, challenging anew the claims to authenticity, shared origins, and monolithic community that have persistently shaped understandings of the folk’s place in the black tradition. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………ii DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………………….....v CHAPTER ONE At the Crossroads: Discourses of the Folk, Empire, and Modernity…………...1 CHAPTER TWO Death on the Modern Desert: Folk Culture and Modernity in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death…………………………………………………………29 CHAPTER THREE Writing Blues and Son: The Poetics of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén…………………………………………………………………………............................62 CHAPTER FOUR Vodou Politics: Folklore and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti in the work of Jean Price-Mars and Zora Neale Hurston……………………………………………………………103 CONCLUSION Writing Empire in the “Hemispheric South”…………………………………153 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………159 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project benefited from the invaluable guidance and support of my powerhouse dissertation committee, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Robert G. O’Meally. I am immensely grateful for Farah’s mentorship, which began when I was an undergraduate at Rutgers conducting summer research at Columbia through the Leadership Alliance Program. Farah encouraged me to pursue graduate study, and her wisdom and encouragement sustained me through each stage of my graduate career. For me she will continue to serve as a model mentor, scholar, and teacher. I thank Brent for his generosity. Our various meetings over the years helped this project to take shape. Once the dissertation was underway, he read my work with great attention and encouraged me to push the boundaries of my thinking. I thank Bob for taking me under his wing from the very start. To him I owe my introduction to the Center for Jazz Studies as well as the curatorial team at Jazz at Lincoln Center, institutions which greatly enriched my graduate years. On numerous occasions he climbed the precariously tall ladder in his office to lend me a book from the very top shelf—an apt metaphor for his dedicated mentorship and intellectual energy. I am also grateful to Cheryl Wall, my undergraduate advisor, for her steadfast belief in my work and her continued support over the years. I thank you all for your mentorship and for your kindness. This dissertation was made possible through the generous support of the English Department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. I am grateful for the financial support of the Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. The crucial final stages of this project were supported by a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellowship at Colorado College, where I served as a Riley Scholar-in-Residence in the English Department. Colleagues in the English Department provided ii professional advice as well as valuable opportunities to share my work-in-progress. I would like to extend particular thanks to Claire Garcia, Jared Richman, Genny Love, George Butte, and Rashna Singh. I am also grateful to fellow Riley Scholars Manya Whitaker, Ryan Bañagale, Daniel Leon, and Heidi Renée Lewis, for providing inspiration and making me feel at home. Members of the wider academic community at Columbia aided the development of this project. I want to thank readers John Gamber and Kaiama Glover for their feedback and advice in moving the project forward. At various stages of my graduate years Marcellus Blount and Saidiya Hartman provided ongoing support and inspiration. George E. Lewis always expressed interest in my scholarship and reminded me that “writing is fighting.” The Center for Jazz Studies provided many of the highlights of my graduate years, thanks in large part to the excellence of program administrator Yulanda Grant. In the English Department, graduate studies coordinator Virginia Kay helped me to keep on top of numerous deadlines. I am also grateful to Sharon Harris at the Institute for Research in African American Studies for always being attentive to the needs of students and for providing many laughs over the years. I want to thank my friends at Columbia and beyond for their brilliance, collegiality and support. From the very beginning, Victoria Collis, Alvan Ikoku, Patricia Lespinasse, Emily Lordi, and Courtney Thorsson showed me the ropes and helped me to clear each hurdle. Fellow scholars in African American literature provided stimulating conversations and many good times, especially Nijah Cunningham, Jarvis McInnis, and Autumn Womack. My graduate years were also enriched by the friendship of Asia Leeds, Matthew D. Morrison, Jessica Teague and Lindsay Van Tine. To my long-time friends Talesia Felder, Alejandrina Riggins, and Esther Spencer, thank you for putting up with me and cheering me on through the long years of coursework and dissertation writing. The Felders in Brooklyn made sure my heart and belly were iii always full. I am especially grateful to Courtney Bryan and Ketty Thertus, who picked me up after every stumble, celebrated every milestone, and finally helped me to cross the finish line. I feel lucky to have been nurtured by such a wonderful group of friends and colleagues. I owe my most heartfelt thanks to my family, whose love, support and inspiration keep me going. To my brother Shomari, I am inspired by your success and your seemingly tireless drive. Mom, thank you for nurturing me through the inevitable highs and lows of this process. Your generous feedback, late-night pep talks, and home cooked meals have meant everything to me. Dad, you have inspired me more than you know. Thank you for never wavering in your belief in me and my work. I couldn’t have done it without you. iv DEDICATION For my parents. v 1 Chapter One At the Crossroads: Discourses of the Folk, Empire, and Modernity ______________________________________________________________________________ In April 1925, several months before Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro burst onto the literary scene, the Harlem-based British Guianese writer Eric Walrond published a short piece called “The Negro Literati” in Brentano’s Book Chat. In similar language to Locke’s, Walrond describes the artistic milieu as brimming with potential. The only thing inhibiting the would-be Negro artist is the fact that he is “not yet free” in expression: bound by convention and the imperative to favorably represent the race, he is unable to “let himself go.” Fortunately, there was a group of young writers who were “utterly shorn,” of these inhibitions, who wrote not of stilted “high society” but of the “Negro multitude,” or simply “the folk,” as they would come to be known in the parlance of the day. They wrote of the masses “not in a way that would bring them favorably under the eye of Mr. Lorimer (God forbid!) but in such a style that people will stop and remark, ‘Why I thought I knew negroes, but if I am to credit this story here I guess I don’t’ ”(131). Unlike yesterday’s purveyors of local color tales, this group undertook the task of upsetting expectations of representation—a feat that they accomplished as much through ‘style’ as through thematic focus. The members of this “esoteric school” included Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and of course Walrond himself. Walrond closes the piece with the prediction that before long, “the literature of the United States will be colored to an amazing degree by the exploits of these gallant youngsters” (131). Just a year later, Walrond himself answers this call with the publication of his short story collection, Tropic 2 Death.1 In Tropic Death, Walrond again takes up the question of the “the Negro multitude.” But unlike many of his peers, he poses it neither in relationship to the U.S.
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