Bad modernisms by Mao Douglas

Author:Mao, Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Monica L. Miller

The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist

Listening and Looking for Black Modernism

In his first disquisition on African American modernism, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1989), Houston Baker sets out to save black America’s first modernist movement, the Harlem Renaissance, from consideration as a modernist failure. In order to do so, he identifies Afro-American modernism as a movement separate from modernism, a move that he later revises and with which I will disagree. For Baker, in 1989, modernism is associated with the following “successful” “objects or processes”: the “collaged allusiveness of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, the cubist reveries of Picasso, the imagism of Pound, the subversive politics of the surrealists.”1 Because modernism is so much the product of a “bourgeois, characteristically twentieth-century, white Western mentality,” it is a record of the breakdown of the cultural confidence of “an assumed supremacy of boorishly racist, indisputably sexist, and unbelievably wealthy Anglo-Saxon males,” rather than a “threat” to “the towers of civilization.”2 This modernism is not only elitist and inviolable but, as such, irrelevant to the cultural condition of those, such as African Americans, for whom there is not the luxury or “need to pose, in ironical Auden-esque ways, questions such as ’Are we happy? Are we content? Are we free? ”3 In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker insists that in order to recognize the way in which the Harlem Renaissance’s artists and intellectuals may have had success in “defining themselves in ’modern’ terms,” we must “listen” for the modern in the Harlem Renaissance, the emergence and critical use of “modern Afro-American sound, as a function of a specifically Afro-American discursive practice.”4 For Baker, this sound of Afro-American modernism emerges as black artists learn the “mastery of form” and “the deformation of mastery,” the former beginning with black-authored confrontations with the representational strategies of blackface minstrelsy, the latter with a turn to indigenous art forms, particularly the blues, as a basis for an “authentic” black modern identity.

In his most recent discourse on modernism, Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (2001), Baker changes his mind about that which would be the “marker” of black modernism and, as a result, the very definition of modernism itself He will no longer listen for a separate black modernism or that which sounds or seems authentically or “specifically” black,5 but will rather look for modernism in examples of “the achievement of a life-enhancing and empowering public sphere mobility and economic mobility of the black majority.”6 This change in his definition of modernism, from the sociocultural to the more political, and the change in his methodology in seeking it, from listening to looking, bring him, surprisingly, to the figure of the black dandy. In particular, he finds this revised black modernism in the dandyism and performativity of Booker T. Washington. Baker reads Washington’s dandyism—his performativity and ambivalence—as dangerous and even “treacherous.”7 For him dandyism can be only this because Washington “performs” in his white father’s “weeds,” “the black dandy (kid-gloved ghost of the ‘educated black man’ in the white imaginary) .

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