Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism by Walter Benn Michaels

Author:Walter Benn Michaels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting (New York, 1925), 306.Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; reprinted New York, 1968), 267, 261. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses in the text.As Houston A. Baker Jr. puts it, the "inner objective" of The New Negro was "to found a nation of Afro-Americans on the basis of race" (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance [Chicago, 1987], 79).Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, 1981), 58. This essay was first published in 1934 in Nancy Cunard's anthology The Negro.In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, Du Bois contrasts "segregation by color" to the "natural clustering by social grades common to all communities" and complains that "the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close community" (The Souls of Black Folk [New York, 1986], 477). At its most extreme, this produces an almost Page-like description of slavery when, "through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy" (477). Du Bois is not, of course, nostalgic for slavery; he is, however, eager to deploy the "rule of inequality" (421) within the races in the service of insistence on equality between the races.I don't, of course, mean to imply here that only the decision not to pass involves a commitment to racial essence; on the contrary, the very concept of passing—requiring, as it does, the possibility of a difference between one's apparent racial identity and one's real racial identity—involves such a commitment. For if there could be no difference between one's real racial identity and one's apparent racial identity, no one could ever pass: what you passed for would of necessity be what you were.In this judgment, Braithwaite understands himself to be following William Dean Howells, while at the same time he agrees with Dunbar that Howells's enthusiasm for Dunbar's dialect poems was disastrous for Dunbar himself and for the "versifiers" who were his immediate successors. For a related but more complex sense of Dunbar's practice in the dialect poems, see Shelly Eversley's dissertation-in-progress (Johns Hopkins).Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (New York, 1969), 240, 244.In The Signifying Monkey (New York, 1988), Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues for the particular importance of "a dialect-informed free indirect discourse" in Their Eyes Were Watching God, characterizing it "as a mediating third term that aspires to resolve the tension between standard English and black vernacular" (215). To put the point this way is to think of Hurston as feeling pressure to choose between the standard and the dialect (as if between middle class or "white" and lower class or "Nigger") and resorting to free indirect speech as "a third language" that, combining the dialect with the standard, becomes the "ultimate sign of the dignity and strength of the black voice" (215). If, however, the point in Hurston is not to incorporate dialect into the standard but to make

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