Negotiations and Uses of Space in African American and Immigrant Literatures and Cultures, 1900S-1950S

STRANGERS FROM WITHIN, STRANGERS FROM WITHOUT: NEGOTIATIONS AND USES OF SPACE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND IMMIGRANT LITERATURES AND CULTURES, 1900S-1950S BY AGNIESZKA TUSZYNSKA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Cary Nelson, Chair Professor Robert Dale Parker Associate Professor Stephanie Foote Professor James R. Barrett ii ABSTRACT On June 24, 1916, the New Republic published an editorial that began: "The average Pole or Italian arriving at Ellis Island does not realize that he is the deadly foe of the native Negro . It is a silent conflict on a gigantic scale." While this statement illustrates only a limited view of the cross-cultural encounters that it describes, it is based on historical facts that anchor my dissertation which explores the relationship between cultural constructions of space and literary visions of ethnicity and Americanness in fiction. My parallel readings of African American and immigrant novels show that the disciplinary boundaries which are often drawn between African American literature and white ethnic literatures can be imaginatively negotiated by examining the construction of space and place in black and white-ethnic writing. I argue that both black and immigrant literature of the time casts the relationship between ethnic/racial subjects and spaces as a challenge to the contemporary definition of American identity. My dissertation offers an approach to ethnic literatures that seeks parallels and dialogues among ethnic groups and their literary representations, while simultaneously acknowledging the historically nonnegotiable differences. I turn to geocriticism as my analytical tool, thus focusing on literary spatiality as the key to these cross-ethnic negotiations. iii DEDICATION For Babcia Krysia, who taught me the value of a good story. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Spatializing African American and White Ethnic Literatures …………………..... 1 Chapter I: Migrant Practices as Insurgent Citizenship in Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge………….……......……12 Chapter II: Here Be Dragons: Corporeal Mapping in Nelson Algren's Never Come Morning and Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door....................................66 Chapter III: Signifying on the Margins: Jazz Improvisation in the Marginal Spaces of Ann Petry's The Street, Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues, and Benjamin Appel's Sweet Money Girl……………………..………………………133 Chapter IV: You Cannot Change Your Grandfathers: Louis Adamic's Counternarrative in Grandsons and the Repressed Past in The Great Gatsby …..............................…. 192 Afterword .…..……...………………………………………………………………………….245 Works Cited .…....………...………………………………………………………………..….250 1 Introduction: Spatializing African American and White Ethnic Literatures Our lives have been transformed by the struggle of the margins to come into representation. Stuart Hall “The Local and the Global” The words are maps. Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” This dissertation stems from two originally separate interests that have organically come to bear on each other, eventually to become parts of a single inquiry. The first composite part of this project has its origins in comparative ethnic studies, and more specifically in my study of African American and white ethnic literatures and cultures of the first half of the twentieth century, at which I have arrived through readings in literature—mostly social realist fiction—and in history. The historical fact of the northern American cities and towns in the first few decades of the twentieth century being the scene of an unprecedented influx of southern and eastern Europeans (so called “new immigrants”) and African Americans led me to read black and new immigrant works in a parallel and complementary fashion. The second intellectual pursuit that has informed this dissertation started as a non-academic interest in the concepts of place, space, and belonging –and has its roots in my own journeys across both geographical and socio- educational space. Later, those interests in literary ethnicities and spatiality became one when, after years of reading and writing about African American and immigrant literatures and cultures, I made a discovery that now seems all too obvious; I came to realize that the single most common word I used to describe the subject of my study, “marginalized,” was more than just a metaphor. After all, both white immigrants and black migrants, as new arrivals in the spaces of the American North, contested and negotiated their place in the new setting, confronting one another in the 2 competitive struggle for jobs and housing, and learning how to handle those cross-ethnic relations within the larger context of white, native-born Americans' prejudices. For all, the stakes involved securing both the material space where they built new lives for themselves, and the right to claim a symbolic place in American culture and in the nation. The spatial dimension of marginality, once it occurred to me, became the lens through which I read literary and cultural records of African American and new immigrant experience. I have come to recognize that while literary scholars make frequent use of spatial metaphors such as marginality, relatively few focus on the negotiation of space as a social, political, and cultural process. In the context of ethnic literature, space is more than just a metaphor; it can be theorized as a medium between the ethnic subject and his/her racial and national identity. In the hands of immigrant and African American writers, space becomes a tool to represent both the symbolic and the literal struggle of people to secure their turf and assert their identities. A conventional understanding of new scholarly ideas and approaches rests in the concept of a departure from the previous ones, implying that innovation involves at least a partial rejection of the past. This dissertation, however, follows a different trajectory of novelty. My project celebrates and relies on scholarships and knowledges coming from a number of diverse academic traditions in order to bring them, to use a spatial metaphor, to the same playing field. One such tradition is formed by American studies' explorations of the intersections of race, ethnicity, and class in American literature, culture, and history. Comparative ethnic studies is another interdisciplinary tradition that frames much of my analysis. Finally, I invite different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on place and space into this project, drawing not only on geographic, philosophical, sociological, and historical approaches to spatiality, but also on the 3 recent emergence of the fields of geohumanities and geocriticism. Thus, an attempt at producing the new out of the mixture of the old guides the present study. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to reveal the tension in black and immigrant literatures between material places, on the one hand, and space and place-practices,1 as constructs that participate in shaping ideas and identities, on the other. Inherent in this tension is the understanding that physical places embody ideas and that material places and practices related to them can transform the world of ideas. I argue that we can effectively examine the literary portrayals of early twentieth-century new immigrant and black lives, which, as I reveal, bear striking similarities but also sometimes subtle yet always telling differences, if we read then spatially. Geo-notions are so crucial to such analyses, I argue, because racial and ethnic ideas in the United States have been shaped to a large degree by spatial arrangements, divisions, and exclusions. Moreover, the narratives discussed in the following pages can themselves be conceived of as narrative topographies or, to use Robert Tally's phrase, “literary cartographies.” Tally argues that “literary works serve a cartographic function by creating a figurative or allegorical representation of a social space” (Tally, “On Literary”). I understand the novelists’ acts of drawing such literary cartographies as claims to belonging, claims to ethnic others' place within America's social and literal landscape. Tally's geocritical work, including his elaboration of Fredric Jameson's notion of “cognitive mapping,” which I discuss in the second chapter, is symptomatic of the proliferation of scholarship that has responded to the phenomenon of the “spatial turn” in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. In the last few years, apart from Tally's many essays on literary spatiality and his recent volume, Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (2011), the interest in geo-critical readings has resulted in a 1 I borrow the notion of “place-practices” from Douglas Richardson et al.. 4 mushrooming of publications ranging across the disciplines, including The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2009), Geohumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (2011), and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities (2011). Given this widespread academic interest, Jameson's contention that we “are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time” (Jameson, Political 120) rings truer now than ever. But I show in this study, with the last chapter illustrating the point most prominently,

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