THE SPACE OF THE SOUTH AND SELF- DEFINITION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN RETURN MIGRATION NOVELS OF THE POST- CIVIL RIGHTS ERA _______________________________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by SHELLI ELIZABETH HOMER Dr. Christopher N. Okonkwo, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2014 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled THE SPACE OF THE SOUTH AND SELF-DEFINITION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN RETURN MIGRATION NOVELS OF THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA presented by Shelli Elizabeth Homer, a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _____________________________________________________ Professor Christopher N. Okonkwo _____________________________________________________ Professor Elaine Lawless _____________________________________________________ Professor April C. E. Langley _____________________________________________________ Professor Wilma King ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Elaine Lawless, April C. E. Langley, and Wilma King for their time and valuable feedback throughout my entire degree process. I would like to thank my adviser Christopher N. Okonkwo for his endless encouragement and support through the long process of developing, researching, and writing this dissertation. During the writing of this dissertation, my beloved writing group kept me setting goals and moving forward, and offered much needed moral support; so, thank you for your stability Brianne Jaquette and Meagan Ciesla. There were also countless swimming pool, kickboard conversations with poet Melissa Range that helped me work through my ideas about the South and southern literature. I would also like to acknowledge Matthew D. Brown and Tracy Butts who set me down the path of this dissertation many years ago by introducing me to many of the writers in this study along with the traditions of southern American literature and African American literature. Finally, I want to thank my family for their constant support of my college education over the past twelve years. Thank you to my mother, Renna Pehle, for always being a phone call away and occasionally subsidizing my income. Thank you to my step- dad, Gary Pehle, for a five year subscription for monthly massages to keep my stress levels down as I pursued this degree. Thank you to my brother, Sean Homer, for years of unsolicited advice that have gotten me to this point. Thank you to my sister-in-law, Kathy Keays-Homer, for attending ALL of my graduations; you are pretty special. And, my ii apologies to my dog, Lacey, for missing some walks when I was in the writing zone. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………...……………………………………………….…...ii ABSTRACT…………………………………………………….……………………......v CHAPTERS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..……...1 1. THE BLACK WOMAN’S BODY AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN RAYMOND ANDREWS’S BABY SWEETS AND ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN..……….41 2. URBAN NORTHS AND RURAL SOUTHS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S PRAISESONG FOR THE WIDOW AND TAYARI JONES’S LEAVING ATLANTA………..……................85 3. COMMUNITY-DEFINED IDENTITY AND THE SOUTH IN RANDALL KENAN’S A VISITATION OF SPIRITS AND TINA MCELROY ANSA’S UGLY WAYS……………………..........129 4. INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY FROM THE SOUTH IN GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY AND TONI MORRISON’S HOME………………………………………………….176 CONCLUSION…………………….……………………………………………....218 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………...……………………………….221 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………234 iv ABSTRACT My dissertation examines the representation of the return migration in African American novels across the last five decades and argues that these return migration novels are distinct from earlier migration narratives and, as such, do not fit within the available critical frameworks developed from Great Migration literature. Historically, the return migration occurred throughout the south-to-north Great Migration, but the literature does not present the possibility of a successful return to the South until the mid- 1970s, which is where my project begins. My critical approach brings together W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness and theories of place in order to understand the importance of the region of the South in contemporary African American literature. I argue that the significance of the South in African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era goes beyond its function as the site of the ancestor, as others have posited. The South, in a state of redefinition following the Civil Rights Movement, provides a fluid space where values of community and individualism relative to identity can be reconciled through the return migrant’s connection to that space. My project begins by considering the impact the Civil Rights Movement has on the conceptualization of the return migration. I focus on Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) and Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean County Trilogy, Baby Sweet’s (1983) in particular, which revise the history of the Civil Rights Movement and black women’s actions at the local level. My second chapter looks at the conflation of the urban with the North and the rural with the South in the American imagination. I argue that Paule v Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta (2002) challenge these dichotomies as their characters attempt to reconcile the two disparate spaces in order to understand their place-based identities. The third chapter considers the presence of community in the representation of the South and its impact on the individual’s identity in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways (1991) and Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989). The communities presented in these texts show the struggle between internal desire and external expectations that, I argue, at times hinder characters’ abilities for self-definition. The final chapter and culmination of my project brings together Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) to show successful returns which center on the characters’ abilities to balance the community- defined identity and the individual identity. vi INTRODUCTION Robert Foster found financial success and walked taller in a land more suited to him. But he turned his back on the South and the culture he sprang from. He rarely went back. He plunged himself fully into an alien world that only partly accepted him and went so far as to change his name and assume a different persona to fit in. It left him a rootless soul, cut off from the good things about the place he had left. He put distance between himself and his own children, hiding his southern, perhaps truest self. […] Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She lived longer in the North than in the South but never forsook her origins, never changed the person she was deep inside, never changed her accent […] She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit. […] She lived in the moment, surrendered to whatever the day presented, and remained her true, original self. Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all. - Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns Isabel Wilkerson closes The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) with her reflections on the outcomes of those at the center of her study. In this final analysis, Wilkerson draws attention to the different types of success and failure experienced by her Great Migration subjects. She takes specific notice of the relationship between the spaces of the North and the South and the migrants’ identities. Robert Foster’s success in the North comes at the cost of “hiding his southern, perhaps truest self” by distancing himself from the South, changing his name, and assuming a persona. Ida Mae Gladney, on the other hand, “remained her true, original self” by maintaining her connections to the South and its culture, and melding her experience of the North and the South to her benefit. Gladney’s ability to reconfigure her knowledge of the North and the South and maintain a clear sense of self is not the experience black writers of Great Migration novels generally focus 1 on. Instead, black writers during the Great Migration represent characters that move to the North and attempt to distance themselves from their southern connections due to the very immediate threat of Jim Crow laws and lynchings associated with the South at the time of their writing.1 Foster’s experience, then, is much closer to those Lawrence Rodgers identifies of Great Migration novels in Canaan Bound (1997). Rodgers, like Wilkerson, sees the importance in the connection between place and identity “Because who one is relies on possessing a sense of one’s place in the world […] the process of migration is indelibly tied into the broader quest for identity. The Great Migration novel plumbs the depths of this relationship between geography and identity” (4).The outcomes of Great Migration novels, however, frequently depict the character’s displaced or fractured identity as a result of being unable to find that place in the world. My dissertation looks at African American return migration novels of the post- Civil Rights era in which characters’ returns to the South in the literature parallel a historical reverse migration of African Americans to the South, much like the characters migrating to the North during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century mimic the historical Great Migration to the North, Midwest, and West. Whether the returns are failures or successes, return migration narratives all seek an understanding of the self and a place in which to situate that understanding.