Race, Region, and the Black Midwest in the Dunbar Decades

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, I show how Paul Laurence Dunbar, today most associated with plantation poetry, successfully utilized Midwestern identity as an alternative site for Black expression and cultural affiliation. Writing in Midwestern dialects and tropes, Dunbar was able to become widely recognized as a Midwestern writer and in doing so compel white readers to place regional belonging over racial alterity as a framework for interpreting cultural difference even at the height of Jim Crow. Moreover, I argue that Dunbar intermixed regional conventions with racial ones, leveraging their commonalities to depict a Black Midwest. For a new wave of Black writers and reading communities in the region, Dunbar became a pivotal model of the possibilities of Black Midwestern cultural life. Reading Dunbar regionally illuminates a more dynamic relationship between popular conceptions of race and of region, rich with possible alternative aesthetic affinities and circulatory potential. [T]he wide-reaching success of Dunbar’s [Midwestern writing] shows that. . . . [u]nder the right print conditions, regional belonging could take precedence over racial alterity.