UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Feeling the Crowd: Affective Responses to Collective Violence in African American Fiction Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gx4t0gz Author Underwood, Brandy Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Feeling the Crowd: Affective Responses to Crowd Violence in Africa American Fiction A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Brandy Underwood 2017 © Copyright by Brandy Underwood 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Feeling the Crowd: Affective Responses to Crowd Violence in African American Fiction by Brandy Underwood Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Richard A. Yarborough, Chair “Feeling the Crowd” uses affect theory to analyze representations of middle-class responses to the modern black violent crowd in African American fiction. My project demonstrates that writers ranging from Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) to Walter Mosley in Little Scarlet (2005) have continuously portrayed black middle-class anxiety in relation to perceived leadership gaps in the collective African American community brought to light by images of black collective violence. Echoing Hazel Carby’s Race Men and Erica Edwards’s Charisma and the Fiction of Black Leadership, I argue that these writers problematize gendered notions of black leadership while they explore anxieties triggered by crowds. I turn to recent work in affect studies to explore these class-based anxieties, in particular Sianne Ngai’s Ugly ii Feelings, which offers a critical lexicon that allows me to attend to both the individual emotions and the collective affective responses that characterize my subject. While past scholarship on the black crowd in literature tends to focus solely on the collective body, my work, which attempts to recover lesser known novels in conjunction with more canonical texts, offers a fresh approach that considers the individual response to such violence. In the dissertation, each chapter examines a particular time period, with the first devoted to Ellison’s reimagining of a Harlem Riot, which I suggest is depicted as an amalgamation of events that transpired in 1935 and 1943. My second chapter shifts to the 1960s social unrest depicted by Chester Himes, John A. Williams, Sam Greenlee, and Walter Mosley. The third chapter considers the post-1992 fiction written by Los Angeles-based women writers Bebe Moore Campbell and Paula Woods. Finally, my last chapter continues to focus on Los Angeles as it considers the juxtaposition of black collective violence with multiple references to the jazz musician Eric Dolphy in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996). iii The dissertation of Brandy Underwood is approved. Sarah Tindal Kareem Robin Davis Gibran Kelley Uri Gervase McMillan Harryette R. Mullen Richard A. Yarborough, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv For Jonathan and Isabelle Segal v CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Vita viii INTRODUCTION: Feeling the Crowd 1 1. CROWD CONTROL: Class Anxieties and Speechmaking in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 24 2. THE TURBULENT SIXTIES: Class Divisions and Leadership Gaps in African American Fiction 70 3. A WOMAN’S WORK: Crowds and Ordinary Affects in Bebe Moore Campbell’s Brothers and Sisters and Paula Woods’s Inner City Blues 122 4. LET THE JAZZ SEEP INTO YOUR PORES: Witnessing Crowd Violence in 1992 Los Angeles While Listening to Eric Dolphy in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle 155 Works Consulted 189 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members—Sarah Kareem, Robin Kelley, Uri McMillan, Harryette Mullen, and Richard Yarborough—for all their support and advice. Sarah Kareem’s insightful remarks were helpful at key moments throughout my graduate education. Robin Kelley’s valuable feedback expanded the scope of the project and made it better. Uri McMillan’s advice pushed my work to the next level. Harryette Mullen’s encouragement provided me with the support that I needed to complete this dissertation. Finally, I want to thank Richard Yarborough for his excellent mentorship and guidance. I would also like to thank Yogita Goyal, Caroline Streeter, Michael Cohen, and Arthur Little, as well as Jeanette Gilkison and Michael Lambert. My project has been shaped by the vibrant intellectual community at UCLA. Marilu Medrano’s graduate student working group provided a valuable network as I began this dissertation. I would like to give a special thanks to my colleagues Dennis Tyler, Kimberly Mack, Erica Onugha, and Therí Pickens for their friendship over the years. This dissertation has benefited from the generous financial support of the UCLA English Department, the UCLA Graduate Division, and the Eugene V. Cota Robles Fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Segal for his endless encouragement. I could not have accomplished all that I have without his thoughtful advice and good humor. To Isabelle Clare Segal, thank you for coming along at just the right moment and helping me see this project to its fruition. Many thanks to Dana Underwood, Jeremy Underwood, Amanda Underwood, the rest of the Underwood family, and the Segal family. To my parents—Clarence and Regina Underwood—thank you for always offering me the opportunity to return home to refuel and prepare for the next step in this ongoing journey. vii VITA 1998 B.A., English University of California, Berkeley 2001 M.A., International Relations Syracuse University 2008 M.A., English University of California, Riverside 2008 Eugene V. Cota Robles Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2009 Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2009-2017 Teaching Assistant/Associate Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2014 English Department Dissertation Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2015 Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles PRESENTATIONS “Visual Memory in J. California Cooper’s Family.” The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Honolulu, November 2017 “Re-Imagining Violence: Affect, African American Postmemory, and Crowd Violence in Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet.” The Collegium for African American Research, Liverpool, June 2015 Moderator. Panel: Consumers as/of Students. Forms of Feeling: Friends of English Southland Graduate Conference UCLA. June 2015 “Swing Low: The New World Symphony and Middle-Class Anxieties in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” American Literature Association, Boston, May 2015 "Free Falling: Shifting Mobility and Class Anxieties in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Athens, Georgia, April 2015 viii INTRODUCTION: Feeling the Crowd “When to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms, —a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these attitudes at various times can be traced in the history of the American Negro, and in the evolution of his successive leaders.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk1 By reimagining the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina race riots, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is one of the first of several African American novels to depict the violent crowd. The novel’s tragic riot scene questions whether black communities can strive in America’s stifling turn-of-the century racial milieu; the violent crowd represents the chaotic breakdown of a fragile social system. In Chesnutt’s novel, the protagonist, Dr. Miller, returns to Wellington—a fictionalized version of Wilmington—during a time widely considered the Black Nadir. In this moment of intense racial conflict, the young doctor intends to establish his medical practice in his southern home after studying abroad in Paris and Vienna. Black businesses and politicians thrived in Wilmington during the post-reconstruction era, yet, just as Chesnutt’s fiction demonstrates, an angry group of white men initiated a riot that shattered racial harmony and marked a decline in African American prosperity in the city. Chesnutt’s riot functions as a key event in the novel; here, the crowd is described as a living, evolving thing: “The proceedings of the day—planned originally as a ‘demonstration,’ dignified subsequently as a ‘revolution’…had by seven o’clock in the afternoon developed into a murderous riot” (298). From “demonstration” to “revolution” to “riot,” the crowd transforms from a quotidian political protest to a deadly scene. Nevertheless, the novel shows how all the stages of the white crowd are shielded from any prosecution by the law—here, violence is legitimized. That is not 1 generally the case with the depictions of black violent crowds in the African American novels that followed Chesnutt’s Marrow. Chesnutt’s protagonist privileges the private sphere over the public sphere—where the races clash in a bloody battle over civic power. When Dr. Miller learns about the white mob that has invaded his community with the goal of threatening black residents, he chooses to risk his life to try to save his family. From the start, Dr. Miller and his wife, Janet, find it difficult to rejoin a segregated society; they struggle to fit in only to see their own young, innocent son killed by a stray bullet when the rioting gets out of control. His death symbolizes the limited future for the black community in a racially divided society. At a key moment, Dr. Miller faces the agonizing question of whether he should take on a leadership position and physically defend the black community or protect his established privilege. When a small group of black men tries to form a group to fight back against the angry mob, they ask Miller and his companion, a black lawyer named Watson, to serve as their leaders and both men decline.