(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry

Abstract

(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry Brian Russell Roberts (bio) A Generation of Columbuses and the Islands of the Sea African american writer Wallace Thurman has been known as the "enfant terrible" of the Harlem Renaissance. After the Salt Lake City native arrived in Harlem in 1925, he quickly assumed the role of bombastic spokesperson for the Renaissance's younger artists. By November of 1926, he had edited the first and only issue of the magazine Fire!!, a publication that (as Langston Hughes remembered) sought to "burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas" of such influential race magazines as the Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger (Big Sea 235-36). Further shoring up Thurman's image as the Renaissance's young artist agonistes, he loudly rejected W. E. B. Du Bois's call to use black expressive culture as propaganda and publicly criticized Alain Locke's landmark anthology, The New Negro (1925), as a collection revealing "the Negro literary renaissance" as merely "a new source of revenue" for white publishers and a "fad" for "white intellectuals" ("High Low" 219; Henderson 295). Indicative of his sense of radical departure from the aesthetic and propagandistic programs of the Renaissance's old guard, Thurman in 1928 claimed that the voices of "articulate negroes [sic] of the past" were "so busy justifying their presence [within an] inimical environment that [End Page 91] they ceased to be human beings." In opposition to such ostensibly retrograde figures, Thurman wrote that he saw himself as part of a generation of "Columbuses . . . discovering things about themselves and about their environment which it seems to them their elders have been at pains to hide" (qtd. in van Notten 141-42). When read within the context of modern African American literature, Thurman's willingness to consign previous African American writers to the dustbin of history is far from exceptional. A generation earlier, Du Bois had made a similar move in wresting the mantel of race leadership from Booker T. Washington (Souls 33-44). And less than ten years after Thurman claimed previous black voices had conciliated to the point that they "ceased to be human," Richard Wright dismissed the black writers who preceded him as having devolved into "French poodles who do clever tricks" for white Americans ("Blueprint" 53). In many ways Thurman fits neatly into an oedipal procession of black male US writers and cultural figures of the twentieth century. Yet I would argue that Thurman's situation within this procession is also exceptional—in no small part because of the metaphor through which he conceived of his oppositional relationship with older and better established writers. Thurman narrated himself as one of a generation of "Columbuses" in search of terrae incognitae. Within the economy of his Columbian narrative, he and his generation were voyagers seeking unexplored islands (psychological, racial, and aesthetic) that long had been hidden within a forbidding sea of cultural mores and prescriptive statements on the nature of valid African American racial artistry and propaganda. We have access to one of Thurman's most significant voyages of discovery in his novel The Blacker the Berry, which since its 1929 publication has been famous for sailing past the well-colonized project of critiquing the US's interracial prejudice and landing instead upon what had remained the unsettled (and unsettling) terrain of color prejudice within the African American community. Remarking upon the novelty of this focus has been a commonplace in discussions of The Blacker the Berry. 1 What has gone unremarked, however, is that in setting out as a Columbus to discover the hidden islands of color prejudice within black US society and communities, Thurman fittingly wrote a novel that draws upon and seeks to reconstellate a distinctly insular (i.e., island-based) topography. Though its immediate geography is confined to the continental United States, The Blacker the Berry's geospatial awareness [End Page 92] extends from the Philippines in the East to the Caribbean in the West, all the while testing the linkages between these island chains and the archipelago of black individuals and communities scattered throughout the big sea...