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Beyond the Negro Problem: the Engagement Between Literature and Sociology in the Age of the New Negro Erica Richardson Submitted

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Beyond the Negro Problem: the Engagement Between Literature and Sociology in the Age of the New Negro Erica Richardson Submitted Beyond the Negro Problem: The Engagement between Literature and Sociology in the Age of the New Negro Erica Richardson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Erica Richardson All rights reserved ABSTRACT Beyond the Negro Problem: The Engagement between Literature and Sociology in the Age of the New Negro Erica Richardson In Beyond the Negro Problem, I explore the engagement between black literature, black expressive culture, and sociology from the 1890s to the 1930s in order to consider the possibilities for imagining black social life that emerge through discoursive innovation during a time period of violent constraint. During this period, which followed Emancipation and the failure of Reconstruction, the struggle for black life or assimilation into American society was consolidated, examined, and contemplated as the so-called Negro problem. The Negro problem was a pervasive reality and metaphor that both black authors and social scientists grappled with. I argue that black leaders and intellectuals use different forms of sociology in their writing to respond directly to narratives of black social pathology and to imagine black life beyond the status of being a problem. In each chapter I explore a different engagement of sociology and literary production and each time find that the formations of black possibility that emerge are predicated on issues of gender and sexuality because the predominating foreclosing narratives about black social life tend to gravitate toward these same issues. Moreover, the racial knowledge about African American culture produced by sociology at the onset of modernity is acutely gendered. As my project details, a major consequence of these authors dismantling that racial knowledge is that they envision gendered possibilities that exceed the Negro problem itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iv Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Negro Soldiers and New Negro Proleptics ............................................................. 15 Indexing the Meanings of “Negro Progressive Life” ............................................................... 17 Progress on the Battlefield:Refuting Theodore Roosevelt’s Minstrel Vision of Black Manhood Lagging Behind ......................................................................................................................... 24 New Negro Proleptics: Getting Around to Progress ................................................................. 30 Picturing Progress in the Portraits of Negro Soldiers and the Black Elite ................................ 40 Shared Problems and Different Support: A Reading of a Letter from Charles Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington .............................................................................................................. 48 “Bad Nigger”: A Negro Soldier without the Endorsement of the State in The Marrow of Tradition ................................................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 2.“With Such Force of Logic and Intensity of the Soul” .......................................... 65 Black Clubwomen and Reform Sociology: Some Context ....................................................... 70 Fannie Barrier Williams: Dispossession and Desire for Social Data on Black Women .......... 74 “A Good Deal of the Scientist” and “Lessons of the Home” in the Woman’s Era .................. 83 Josephine Ruffin’s Call for the National Association of Colored Women and Affective Democracy ................................................................................................................................ 92 Writings of Mary Church Terrell: The Essay’s Elitism and the Unrealized Potential of the Short Story .............................................................................................................................. 102 i Legacies of the Black Clubwomen’s Movement in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand ..................... 116 Chapter 3. “Of the Meaning of Progress:” ............................................................................. 125 Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the Negro: The Precarious Implications of Sociology’s Reductive Conceptualizations of the Negro Problem ......................................... 126 W. E. B. Du Bois and the Philadelphia Negro: Throwing Light on the Negro Problem and Black Women .......................................................................................................................... 130 Between Sociological Truth and Gendered Possibility: Josie’s Unconscious Moral Heroism in The Souls of Black Folk .......................................................................................................... 139 Black Maternities and Creating a Narrative of Progress in The Quest for the Silver Fleece . 153 Angelina Weld Grimké’s Reimagining of Wells as the Lynched Father in Rachel ............... 171 The Antinomies of Black Mathematics: Engaging the Red Record of Black Female Sexual Assault and Lynching in Southern Horrors and A Red Record .............................................. 180 The Innumeracy of the Red Record in Rachel ........................................................................ 192 Queer Strategies and Alternative Social Formations in Rachel .............................................. 200 The Introduction of Queer Strategies through the Introduction of Reproductive Choice ...... 202 Queer Strategies and Bad Addition: How Rachel and John Strong Were Never Meant to Add Up ............................................................................................................................................ 204 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 214 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 216 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 218 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. A photograph of First Lieutenant Chas. E. Young. ....................................................... 43 Figure 2. Photographs of Lieutenant John H. Alexander and Hon. J. Frank Wheaton. ................ 45 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finding my own path of exploration through the myriad complexities and possibilities of the Negro problem has been no easy task. I would like to thank a few people who have participated on my committee and aided me in my research. I would like to thank my dissertation chair Saidiya Hartman for pushing me to thoughtfully examine the motivations behind my inquiries. She taught be how to appreciate the extent to which a simple question or observation can reveal the disquieting logics of black social life and our responsibilities as scholars to dwell in that discomfort and articulate its recesses. I would further like to thank my committee sponsor Farah Griffin for encouraging me to close read those recesses and trust in my scholarly and creative instincts. In the original composition of my dissertation committee, I had worked with Katherine Biers. Katherine Biers helped me recognize and own my penchant for historical analysis without obscuring my literary criticism. When Katherine Biers could no longer participate on my committee, I had the privilege of working with Monica Miller who’s critical enthusiasm compelled me to honor my process of detailing and analyzing the possibilities for black life embedded in the texts under discussion even more. Often throughout this project, I bring up close readings that express the full scope of black possibility, but typically present this material at the end of each chapter. I would like to thank Monica Miller challenging me to open with my close readings, especially as I look toward turning thus documents into a book. I am extremely grateful to my outside committee members Brent Edwards and Joseph Sorett for their attentive review of my work. Brent Edwards accounted for the literary tropes and patterns my criticism seemed to focus on as I tracked the engagement of sociology and literature. He helped me recognize the need for perhaps a fuller definition of that engagement for literary iv scholars. Joseph Sorett directed me towards the surrounding religious context as a resource for further analyzing the community building aspects of black social life. Finally, I would like to thank Marcellus Blount for choosing my application for Columbia University’s English PhD program. You believed in a shy country girl and her thoughts. And now they have the opportunity to grow. v DEDICATION For my parents Richard and Teresa Richardson, who supported me in numerous ways throughout this journey, and for my siblings, Cynthia, Julia, and RJ, who kept my spirit up along
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