Myers Dissertation FINAL
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WORLDS BEYOND BROWN: BLACK TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND SELF- NARRATION IN THE ERA OF INTEGRATION Shaundra J. Myers, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Professor Mary Helen Washington, Department of English “Worlds beyond Brown” examines competing constructions of black subjectivity that emerge, on the one hand, in U.S. legal and cultural discourses and, on the other, in black transnational self-narratives written in the putatively post- integration era. I contextually analyze how nation-based discourses—such as Constitutional laws and rulings, mainstream magazine culture, and the Federal Writers’ Project—have, in the name of integration, expanded yet at the same time contracted the freedoms of black subjectivity. I show how African American writers have then negotiated the resulting contradictions of national identity by suggesting the possibilities of alternative selves less bound by the nation and its racial categories and practices. Here I track the persistence of segregation’s racial categories and relationships across an era of integration as well as African American literary negotiations of the consequent discrepancies of identity. I mine James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes (1998), Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994) for their theoretical insights into the making and remaking of black subjectivity as a practice of the nation. These texts suggest how we might fashion identities that resist the fixed racial formulas of the United States—its racial binaries, its racial hierarchies, and its contradictory discourses of freedom and dispossession. Just as these black transnational narratives challenge nationalist constructions of a black geography and black identity, they also necessarily contest and revise the historical frames that facilitate these nation-based geographies and subjectivities. In doing so, these texts disrupt the historical borders that help constitute the dominant narratives of the civil rights movement and standard periodizations, such as segregation and integration, that have been used to tell a seemingly fixed story of inevitable racial progress within the nation. Together, these chapters identify legal and cultural sites—U.S. court rulings, the New Yorker, and the Federal Writers’ Project—of nationalist discourses of geography, identity, and history and show how black transnational texts respond by undermining the fixity of these discourses and imagining competing constructions of black spaces, subjectivities, and time. WORLDS BEYOND BROWN: BLACK TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND SELF-NARRATION IN THE ERA OF INTEGRATION By Shaundra J. Myers Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Advisory Committee: Professor Mary Helen Washington, Chair Professor Kandice Chuh Professor Theresa Coletti Professor Robert Levine Professor Deborah Rosenfelt © Copyright by Shaundra J. Myers 2011 Dedication For my great-grandmother B.H.P. and my grandmothers, J.M.B. and K.B.T. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation concludes with a list of the scholarly works to which I am indebted, but here I cite those whose support, generosity, and guidance have sustained me throughout this project. From our very first meeting at the Heart’s Day Conference honoring Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Mary Helen Washington has been an encourager and a model of the passionate scholar that I strive to be. I thank her for her thoughtful and rigorous feedback and the discussions, debates, and engaging conversations over her kitchen table over the years—dialogues that always pushed me further in this project and as a teacher. This dissertation bears the marks of her literary historical knowledge, insights, and relentless questions. In particular, my research on the Cold War travel restrictions and passport revocations of the 1950s for Mary Helen’s seminar “African American Literature in the Cold War” was critical to the development of this project. Discovering the intersections of the Cold War and integration had the effect of defamiliarizing integration for me, and I then wanted to make this act of denaturalization a central part of my project. I was fortunate to have not one, but two ideal readers. I am grateful to Kandice Chuh for continuously pressing me to think more broadly, to theorize more vigorously—to, simply, imagine otherwise. My coursework with Kandice on critical race and other literary theories provided much of the groundwork for this project. Sessions and correspondence with her were always reinvigorating; she has always pushed me to stake out new territory both academically and personally. I especially iii want to thank her for always going above and beyond—for doing what was unrequired—as a mentor and a friend. I also thank my other readers: Theresa Coletti for carefully and helpfully reading my work with an eagle eye and for valuable dissertation workshops, Bob Levine for incisive questions and effective advice on the structure and organization of this project, and Deborah Rosenfelt for an alternative disciplinary perspective and challenging queries. I am also grateful to other current and former University of Maryland professors and staff for their support: Zita Nunes, Nicole King, Martha Nell Smith, Neil Fraistat, Marilee Lindeman, and Manju Suri. I completed this project with generous financial support from the following institutions and grants: the Department of English, the University of Maryland; the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship; the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship; and the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship. Part of the joy of this project was my circle of peers who have given me intellectual, emotional, and spiritual support from the beginning through the end of this journey: Kaylen Tucker, Christie Redding Williams, Robin Smiles, Shirley Moody Turner, and Kenyatta Albeny. I appreciate also the invaluable dissertation workshops and/or discussions that I shared with Laura Williams, Marie Troppe, and Jesse James Scott. I am also indebted to friends and colleagues whose encouragement never waned: Donn and Tamelyn Worgs and family, Elaine Bonner-Tompkins and family, Leslie Robinson, Diane Smith, Cathy Blickendorfer, the ASM Journals staff, Ronald Brooks, Laura House, Hugh Morgan, and the Joy Love Club. iv I especially thank Monica Myers, Betty Myers, Betty “the Great” Burrell, Rosalind Myers, Angelique Strong Marks and family, Alberta Croom, Marquis, Colin, and Carsten Reams, Chuck D. and family, and my family in Louisiana, Texas, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh; their enormous love and caring have “kept me” over the long haul. I am grateful to Frederick Myers for his constant advice, encouragement, and willingness to read and discuss my work. I cannot thank my parents, Joe and Gloria Thomas, and sister, Shar, enough for their love, which has been my wealth in life. I thank them for their constant prayers and for always believing in me and cheering me on. Caleb has taught me how to be devoted to a project yet remain present, and I am grateful. Finally, I thank my husband, Glenn, who through his quiet and steady ways reminds me how to make possible things that seem quite impossible. He made library and copy shop runs and allowed me to carve out a quiet space for work during hectic times. I thank him for his large unselfish acts that have helped me pursue my professional and personal goals as well as for his laughter and small, thoughtful gestures that help elevate the everyday to the splendid. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction..............................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Derailing the Color Line: Transnational Mobilization in James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes.........................................................................34 Chapter 3: Spectacular Absences: The Restricted Black Spectator in Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal .....................................................................................77 Chapter 4: Dictation of Diaspora: Voicing Alternative Histories in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana ............................................................................................. 131 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 168 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 175 vi Chapter 1: Introduction In 1956, two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education and eight years after President Truman issued an executive order intended to end segregation in the armed forces, Langston Hughes published his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, a text full of scenes of racial integration. In one particular story, he tells of two Americans, both soldiers— one black and the other white—who died together on the battlefield trying to rescue a wounded fellow soldier. The surviving men in the company, Hughes recalls, buried the two fallen soldiers together in a place called “No-Man’s-Land.” This story appears a fitting contribution within an era in which integration headed the domestic agendas of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Supreme Court, and the White House—fitting but for the fact that Hughes’ story is not about the then newly integrated U.S. Army. The story is about his experiences as a foreign