Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Marshall Circle: Racial Representation from Blackface to Black Naturalism

Abstract

No period in American cultural history was more mercurial, and at the present time, no period is less understood than the nadir, which stretched from the end of Reconstruction to World War I. (1) With the exception of touring spiritual choirs celebrated for their natural power, artists were largely invisible to white Americans until the mid-1890s when ragtime exploded, minstrel stars sold millions of copies of their sheet music, and Paul Laurence rose to national prominence. (2) A pioneering novelist who was hailed as the black poet laureate and prince of 'coon' song writers (Paul Laurence Dunbar n. pag.), represents perhaps the best starting place for a reassessment of the nadir. Using Dunbar's varied, often misunderstood career as a lens, this essay studies the fraught relationship between turn-of-the-century art and racism. was enmeshed like no other nadir-period artist in the politics and possibilities of racial representation. Despite burgeoning scholarly interest in minstrelsy, the standard history of Dunbar's songwriting career is plagued with errors and misconceptions. (3) This is unfortunate because the full complexity of Dunbar's dynamic approach to racial representation is only accessible through a careful excavation of his work with Bert Williams, George Walker, and the other members of what I call the Marshall Circle--the talented group of African American and African Caribbean performers who gathered at the black-owned Marshall Hotel. (4) By exploring the continuities and discontinuities of Dunbar's racial representations, I hope to provide insight into the racist forms that turn-of-the-century artists inherited, the new modes of cultural expression that they struggled to produce, and the political tensions between the two. My analysis begins with a simple claim: Racist expectations did not trap Dunbar; rather, they prompted his remarkable movement across genres and forms. By working within and against conventional representations in poetry and song, reached diverse audiences, achieved politically representative success, and contributed to emergent cultural forms. I will examine how different orientations to the dominant politics of respectability imbued plantation verse and coon songs with distinct, uneven cultural possibilities. My essay culminates in a discussion of Dunbar's 1902 novel, Sport of the Gods. Dunbar's contribution to the nascent naturalist tradition doubles as his state-of-the-nadir address on representation in art and politics. Overlooked archival evidence suggests that drafted Sport in the wake of the 1900 theater-district riot, which targeted Williams, Walker, and the Marshall Circle. Featuring a veiled homage to Williams, Sport delineates the forces that impinge on identity, while retaining a slender hope that vital art can emerge from violently racist environments. But the novel also underscores a painful reality. could never quite unify the diverse approaches to racial representation that he spent his brief, brilliant career developing because diverse turn-of-the-century cultural forms were generated from quite distinct orientations to contemporaneous political and social conditions. Being the Black Poet Laureate: Signifying and Re-Presenting Blackness 1898 Wilmington Massacre, which marked the violent suppression of democracy in the South, was the era's watershed event, but it was the North's tacit approval that led to remark: The race spirit in the United States is not local but general in his most militant essay, Recession Never (36). Although the nadir in the North never reached Southern depths of legal disenfranchisement, it was marked by both overt and implicit racial hostility. national ascendance of Southern white perspectives on race would find expression in intensified racial violence. In August 1900, a brutal Manhattan race riot crystallized the nadir's national scope. …