Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett
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Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett
294eBook
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Overview
What effect has the black literary imagination attempted to have on, in Toni Morrison's words, "a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free"? How has black literature challenged the notion that reading is a race-neutral act? Race and the Literary Encounter takes as its focus several modern and contemporary African American narratives that not only narrate scenes of reading but also attempt to intervene in them. The texts interrupt, manage, and manipulate, employing thematic, formal, and performative strategies in order to multiply meanings for multiple readers, teach new ways of reading, and enable the emergence of antiracist reading subjects. Analyzing works by James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Percival Everett, Sapphire, and Toni Morrison, Lesley Larkin covers a century of African American literature in search of the concepts and strategies that black writers have developed in order to address and theorize a diverse audience, and outlines the special contributions modern and contemporary African American literature makes to the fields of reader ethics and antiracist literary pedagogy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Blacks in the Diaspora |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Lesley Larkin is Associate Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. Her research on race and reader ethics has appeared in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, MELUS, and Callaloo.
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Race and the Literary Encounter
Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett
By Lesley Larkin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Lesley LarkinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01789-5
CHAPTER 1
Unbinding the Double Audience
James Weldon Johnson
IN HIS JULY 1938 OBITUARY FOR JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, published in the prominent black newspaper the New York Age, Howard sociologist Kelly Miller charged the beloved author and political leader with having built his literary reputation by pandering to white readers. In Miller's view, despite a mediocre and occasional literary oeuvre, Johnson achieved artistic distinction because his works avoided controversy and failed to challenge the "racial sensibility" of an overwhelmingly white audience. Johnson's "fame," Miller argued, "rest[ed] chiefly on the appraisal of white people." Despite Johnson's many civic accomplishments (which included his role as the first black executive secretary of the NA ACP and an antilynching crusade), Miller faulted Johnson for molding his art to the expectations and preferences of white readers.
Miller's critique of Johnson is but one moment in a century of debates among black writers about how best to represent black life to a majority white readership. Just a few months earlier, Richard Wright described Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as a literary minstrel show, writing, "Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh" (17). And just over a decade later, James Baldwin accused Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son, of being a "descendant" of Uncle Tom (21). For her part, Hurston accused the publishing industry of refusing to publish works that did not conform to preconceived stereotypes and faulted white readers for having little curiosity about middle-class black people ("What").
Ironically, Miller's critique of Johnson echoed Johnson's own views on dialect poets, expressed in his 1933 autobiography, Along This Way. For Johnson, African American dialect could be used successfully by "folk artists" who "sought only to express themselves for themselves, and to their own group" (159). However, poets "writing in the conventionalized dialect" reproduced stereotypes of black people for a white audience. Their work suffered because they were "really expressing only certain conceptions about Negro life that [their] audience was willing to accept and ready to enjoy; ... [they] wrote mainly for the delectation of ... an outside group." In Johnson's view, the successful inclusion of folk speech in poetic works was a virtual impossibility for black writers.
Johnson covered similar territory in a 1928 article, "Double Audience Makes Road Hard for Negro Authors." Here he argued that unlike white writers, who scarcely considered black readers, black writers were forced to write to both white and black readers, "doubling" their audience and altering the very form of their work. Ironically, in Johnson's view, authors most concerned with not alienating the black middle class in fact wrote to white readers in their attempts to defend and promote their race. At the same time, authors of grittier (urban) or earthier (rural) fiction about working-class or poor characters could be accused of playing to white stereotypes. In other words, black writers faced a singular double bind: whether their material was "exculpatory" or salacious, whether their object was the black middle class or the "folk," whether they employed Standard English or dialect, black writers were always open to the charge of pandering.
Although Johnson argued that authors should choose forms that did not lend themselves to stereotyping, he also made clear that the fact of an overwhelmingly white audience altered the meaning of literary works, regardless of authorial intention. Signaling the role of readers in determining aesthetic and racial meaning, Johnson explained that "no matter how sincere he might be," the dialect poet could be "dominate[d]" by a white audience, and that this dynamic would override the culturally specific meanings of the language used (Along 159). The "first line" of a dialect poem could put a nonblack reader into a racist, stereotyping "frame of mind," even if the objective of the poet was to cast doubt upon such stereotypes (Preface 42). For this reason, Johnson gave up dialect in his own work and sought a literary form less constrained by stereotypical conventions. However, he also implied that poetic form alone might not be sufficient for interrupting the reproduction of racial prejudice at scenes of reading.
Johnson's insight into the double bind of the double audience is an early and sophisticated apprehension of the significant role readers play in producing racial meanings. His work prompts the following questions: How does the fact of a majority white audience affect the meaning of a literary work? How does Johnson's only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, describe the readerly imagination of those who experience "double-consciousness" alongside those who see themselves as "universal or race-free"? How does it dramatize scenes of reading as scenes of racialization whereby the racial identities of readers are consolidated or destabilized? How does it attempt to intervene in scenes of reading in order to reshape the readerly imagination of its readers? What kinds of reading does The Autobiography model and invite? And what kinds of readers does it anticipate and interpellate?
(MIS)READING RACIAL AUTHENTICITY
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, first published in 1912, follows its narrator's lifelong struggle to acquire a stable identity. Raised in New England by a light-skinned black mother and supported financially by a mostly absent white father, as a child the narrator believes himself to be white. He and his mother are not actually passing in their predominantly white community. But he remains unaware of his heritage until the school principal publicly identifies him as not-white, sending him rushing home to examine his face in the mirror, stare hard at his mother, and reevaluate a store of memories coded as "race-free." This turning point sets the narrator on a journey to discover who he really is. He reads books, travels, becomes a gambler and a musician, courts black and white women, and lives among people of different races, classes, and cultures in the North, the South, and Europe. After an extended period abroad, where he is tempted to disavow his blackness, he instead claims it and returns to the United States to study the folk music of his people. His resolve evaporates, however, after he witnesses a lynching. Determined not to become the victim of such violence, he decides to "change my name, raise a moustache, and let the world take me for what it would" (190). Leaving behind "not-white" for "not-black," the narrator becomes a successful businessman, marries a white woman, and fathers two children who, he insists, will never know his secret.
Johnson first published The Autobiography anonymously in 1912: "When the book was published," Johnson explained, "most of the reviewers ... accepted it as a human document. This was a tribute to the writing, for I had done the book with the intention of its being so taken" (Along 238). His decision was strategic, considering the scant popular or critical attention given black authors in the 1910s. Autobiography, following in the tradition of the slave narrative, was the prose form most likely to gain a reading, and anonymity added both mystery and (apparent) authenticity to Johnson's story. Johnson's use of the term "human document" also signaled his narrative's debt to sociology, a new academic discipline whose practitioners solicited narrative data from human subjects in order to study social phenomena, including racism.
Johnson's novel was marketed as both an autobiography and a sociological/psychological study, a "composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race," in the words of its 1912 preface (credited to the "Editors" but written by Johnson) (xxxix). Borrowing a line from the novel, the preface offers to escort white readers across the color line with a chameleonic narrator: "In these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the reader is given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America, is initiated into the freemasonry, as it were, of the race" (xl). Brander Matthews believed it succeeded, writing in 1913, "It has significance for all of us who want to understand our fellow citizens of darker hue." Matthews saw Johnson as a "psychologist" of black experience, rather than a dramatist, and identified the primary audience of the novel as white (22). After its first release, the book created a stir in the black middle class, among whom "there was speculation ... as to who the writer might be"; there were also poseurs who claimed – one even to Johnson himself – to be the "real" Ex-Coloured Man (Along 238–239).
Despite this stir, The Autobiography failed to achieve wide circulation until its reissue during the Harlem Renaissance and under Johnson's name. The 1927 edition benefited from increased white interest in black cultural forms and in the sociology of race and racism. Echoing the paratextual conventions of slave narrative, the second edition's authenticity was vouched for by well-known writer and New Negro patron Carl Van Vechten. Although Van Vechten's introduction made clear that the story was not factually true, he claimed for it sociological and psychological truth: "It reads like a composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern times" (xxxiv) and is "an invaluable sourcebook for the study of Negro psychology" (xxxv). Van Vechten's appraisal echoes Chicago School sociology's view of first-person narratives – non-fictional or fictional – as effective tools for overcoming race prejudice (Cappetti 20–33). Johnson's biracial narrator also anticipated Robert Park's theory of the "marginal man," a modern figure whose hybrid status reflected the contradictions of urbanization. According to Park, the study of marginal men offered the most useful data on both minority experiences and large-scale social changes: "It is in the mind of the marginal man – where the changes and fusions of culture are going on – that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress" (356).
For early twentieth-century readers, the Ex-Coloured Man, affiliated with both the white and black "races" and conversant in sociological concepts, is the perfect informant. Not only does he "believe it to be a fact that the coloured people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them" (22), echoing W. E. B. Du Bois's attribution of "second-sight" to African Americans, but he also insists that his mixed background gives him a special advantage: "The novelty of my position caused me to observe and consider things which, I think, entirely escaped the young [black] men I associated with" (74). Johnson's near-white interpreter of black experience gains privileged access to black authenticity by virtue of his biological claim and to a white audience by virtue of the undetectability of this claim. The narrative often reads like the tale of a white person passing for black, as the narrator himself suspects by the end of his story: "Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life" (210). The narrator's distance from the very authenticity he claims was, ironically, a mechanism of authentication for many early twentieth-century white readers.
At the same time, Johnson relentlessly draws attention to the narrator's unreliability as an "interpreter" of black culture. The narrator himself presents dissimulation as a defining quality of the relation of black people to white: "I have often watched with interest and sometimes with amazement even ignorant coloured men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men" (22). If black people are always "playing a role," to use Ralph Ellison's ironic phrase from Invisible Man (1952), then how can a white audience know when they are getting a true story from a black spokesperson? This complication is evident in The Autobiography's first paragraph. The narrative is framed as a confession: "I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyse the motives which prompt me to do it" (3). The narrator compares this confession to the "impulse" of "the unfound-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence." Using imagery that evokes the national "pastime" of lynching, the Ex-Coloured Man goes on: "I know that I am playing with fire, and I feel the thrill which accompanies that most fascinating pastime." And drawing ironically from a racist discourse of black primitiveness, he refers to himself as "savage and diabolical," only to claim by the end of the paragraph that he is playing "a practical joke on society" (3). A confessor, a thrill-seeker, a criminal, and a trickster, the Ex-Coloured Man undercuts the authenticity of his narrative from the outset.
The instability introduced in the first pages of the novel extends to the many scenes of racial spectatorship that follow. The purported function of these scenes is to introduce white readers to authentic black culture and experience. But they also illustrate how the reception of black cultural forms contributes to the formation of middle-class, liberal, white masculinity. In the early twentieth century, white audiences of the sophisticated (jazz), the comic (blackface minstrelsy), and the horrific (lynching), admired, mocked, destroyed, and consumed blackness, all the while confirming their own whiteness. The Autobiography transcribes such scenes thematically and formally. It also aligns perusal of its pages with the various modes of racial spectatorship it describes, enabling a productive identificatory crisis for at least some members of its "double audience," including black middle-class readers who might be in danger of being seduced by white middle-class values.
FORMING WHITE IDENTITIES THROUGH RACIAL SPECTATORSHIP
Passing as an account of "authentic" blackness, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is actually an account of the formation of bourgeois white masculinity, from its inculcation in school, to its confirmation through cultural consumption, to its violent policing. Importantly, these processes also involve scenes of reading. Sometimes the reading is literal, as when, having learned precious little about black history at school, the narrator takes it upon himself to read as many books on the subject as possible. Most of the time, however, reading in The Autobiography is more properly construed as spectatorship, as the narrator finds himself alternately a participant in and an audience to racial performances, from the merely entertaining to the graphically violent. Many of the turning points in the narrator's life hinge on such scenes, the climactic instance being the lynching that drives the narrator across the color line for the last time.
When Johnson wrote The Autobiography, the most salient scenes of racial spectatorship were blackface minstrelsy and lynching, both of which can be understood as racial "performances" by which modern white masculinities developed in relation to what Michael Rogin calls "the surplus symbolic value of blacks" (14). By the second publication of Johnson's novel in 1927, audiences had seen white actors in blackface in The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first blockbuster film, and The Jazz Singer (1927), the first "talking picture." They had also seen the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and consistently high levels of lynching across the country, images of which were circulated widely, "extend[ing] the violence beyond the frame of the actual event" (A. Wood 195). Witnessing a lynching, either in person or in a photograph, served to interpellate white audiences into a group identification that militated against transracial class-based alliances. The solicitation of this identification began in childhood when "a white child was invited to identify either with the powerful 'white race' or the abject and dehumanized 'black race'" (Apel 42). Collective white subjectivity relied upon psychic racial/ sexual transactions with lynching's debased victim. Paradoxically, black men were compulsively coded as both hypermasculinized predators and feminized prey in a compulsive circle of racial and sexual discipline that shored up normatively gendered white identities.
Images and accounts of lynchings published in Northern newspapers and magazines increased support for antilynching legislation and contributed to the development of white liberal identities. Antilynching activists frequently described the perpetrators of lynching as "the mob," even though this phrase suggests spontaneous group violence belied by the careful planning and organization that often preceded lynchings (A. Wood 195; Pinar 53). The mob description allowed antilynching activists to emphasize their freedom from group identification. Antilynching discourse also described white perpetrators and audiences as the psychological victims of racial violence. As Johnson himself put it, "Lynching in the United States has resolved itself into a problem of saving black America's body and white America's soul" (qtd. in W. White 33). Such framing invited political support that did not require identification with black victims and could allow for active disidentification and even "sadistic voyeurism" (Apel 9).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Race and the Literary Encounter by Lesley Larkin. Copyright © 2015 Lesley Larkin. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Scenes of Reading, Scenes of Racialization: Modern and Contemporary Black Literature
1. Unbinding the Double Audience: James Weldon Johnson
2. Speakerly Reading: Zora Neale Hurston
3. Close Reading "You": Ralph Ellison
4. Erasing Precious: Sapphire and Percival Everett
5. Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid
Epilogue: Toward a Theory and Pedagogy of Responsible Reading: Toni Morrison
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"An illuminating study that promises to make significant inroads in the field of African American literary criticism and American studies. Larkin poses a series of provocative queries about the 'politics' of writing, reading, and interpreting 20th century literature by African and Caribbean American writers."
An illuminating study that promises to make significant inroads in the field of African American literary criticism and American studies. Larkin poses a series of provocative queries about the 'politics' of writing, reading, and interpreting 20th century literature by African and Caribbean American writers.
An illuminating study that promises to make significant inroads in the field of African American literary criticism and American studies. Larkin poses a series of provocative queries about the 'politics' of writing, reading, and interpreting 20th century literature by African and Caribbean American writers.