Copyright by Jeremy Stuart Dean 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Jeremy Stuart Dean Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 Committee: Phillip Barrish, Supervisor Evan Carton Gretchen Murphy Coleman Hutchison Steven Hoelscher MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 by Jeremy Stuart Dean, B.A.; 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 2012 MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 Jeremy Stuart Dean, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Phillip Barrish MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright’s best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile iv delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright’s revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father’s Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty’s post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called “culture of poverty.” Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty’s “hip hop novel” as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 FATHER’S LAWS AND NATIVE SONS: RICHARD WRIGHT’S GENEALOGY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES .........................................................................................24 Introduction ............................................................................................................25 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................40 Unmapping Race Relations in the “Modern Authority” of Native Son .................40 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................70 The Cartographic Violence of A Father’s Law ......................................................70 RECONSTRUCTING THE POSTINDUSTRIAL CITY IN PAUL BEATTY’S THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE .....................................................................................................123 Introduction ..........................................................................................................124 Chapter 3 ..............................................................................................................143 “Looking for the ‘Real’ Nigga” in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle ............143 Chapter 4 ..............................................................................................................175 The Hip Hop Novel and “Keeping it (Sur)real” ..................................................175 WORKS CITED .....................................................................................................225 vi INTRODUCTION 1 The Empirical Fictions of the Chicago School of Sociology Sociology…is the Science that seeks the limits of Chance in human conduct. - W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant” (44) At the height of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the sociologist Robert Ezra Park reviewed a number of early collections of “Negro” spirituals and other anthologies of African American literature for The American Journal of Sociology. One of the original figures in what would later be known as the Chicago School of Sociology— considered the first sociology department in the US—Park firmly believed that the study of black writing was critical to the larger social scientific project of the sociology of race. He writes in a review of Mellows: A Chronicle of Unknown Singers (1925), a collection of slave spirituals: What makes this racial literature interesting, what makes, finally, any literature significant outside the group for which it is primarily written, is the degree to which it gives access to, and knowledge of, lives other than our own, lives that in this case are strangely alien to us, considering their proximity to our own. (821, my emphasis) Having joined the Department of Sociology at Chicago after working as Booker T. Washington’s director of public relations at the Tuskegee Institute, Park had long been interested in the sociological “problem” of race. For him, the cultural work of, as he called it, “racial literature,” was to produce scientific knowledge about minority groups that could be used as evidence in empirical studies of race relations, which became the central focus and the organizing framework for the new science of society at the University of Chicago. Reading black writing gave the social scientist unproblematic and unprecedented “access” to his object of study. As Park observes, “The Negro has always produced poetry of some sort. It has not always been good poetry, but it has been a faithful reflection of his inner life” (821, my emphasis). At least for Park, “Negro poetry” 2 did not have aesthetic value, its worth was to be measured in the degree to which it rendered black social and psychological experience accessible and visible to the student of society.1 Alain Locke, philosopher and literary scholar, framed his famous collection, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), as introducing an African American type as-yet unstudied by the social sciences. As he opens his introductory essay: In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three norms who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling on their laps. The Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-Leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. (3, my emphasis) Park reviewed The New Negro for The American Journal of Sociology in 1926. His praise for the collection follows Locke’s introductory essay, but at the same time realigns African American literature as the proper object of sociological study: “No formal studies, and certainly no statistics that have yet been printed have revealed so much that is significant and important about the Negro and his problem in America as this single volume” (Mellows 824). While to some degree Park dismisses the efficacy of quantitative data in capturing the “Negro problem,” he nonetheless argues that African American 1 Park’s interest in African American literature as an object of sociological study was developed from his University of Chicago predecessors, W.I. Thomas and Florian W. Znaniecki, and their work in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918). Therein they outlined the innovative empirical research methodologies of the Chicago School. The methodological innovation of The Polish Peasant was its use of documentary evidence, like the inclusion of 862 reprinted personal letters, as its primary mode of understanding the modern, urban experience of immigrants. Thomas outlined this method in his “Race Psychology: Standpoint and Questionnaire” (1912) in which he described “undesigned” materials—“letters, dairies, newspapers, court, church, and club records, sermons, addresses, school curricula, and even handbills and almanacs” (770-72)—as ideal sources in the social scientific study of race relations. At the heart of the five-volume The Polish Peasant was a 300-page autobiography by an immigrant, Wladek Wisziewski, that was meant to exemplify the cultural crisis of the urban to rural transition for the typical immigrant. For further discussion of the influence of Thomas and Znaniecki’s