Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: On Antiracism

Abstract

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting:On Antiracism Thadious M. Davis (bio) One of the ways in which racism functions so efficiently and continuously is in its ability to obscure, deny, or ignore what majority culture appropriates and takes from minority cultures. That strategy often results in an accepted popular wisdom that minorities produce and create little of value and that they themselves are largely valueless. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, scholars forged ahead with changing such perceptions and recognizing minority contributions; the more obvious recognitions were in terms of music and popular culture. But it is much different in literary studies. Critics generously observe how majority writers contribute to work of minority authors. Rarely is there a mention of the reverse. How often are students of literature reminded that Toni Morrison wrote her masters thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf? Yet are they routinely told of the white writers who found their inspiration in Morrison's works? I attempted to forward the reverse discourse in "Lingering in the Black: Faulkner's Illegible Modernist Sound Melding" by focusing on how William Faulkner early on found actual models and inspiration in the published works of Black writers and in the sounds those Black writers voiced in their characters and art. In that essay for the 2013 Faulkner conference on "Faulkner and the Black Literatures of America," I also pointed to other modernist literary critics, such as Michael North, Laura Winkiel, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, who have made important forays into explicating patterns of the reverse flow of materials from minority to majority writers. Typically they pursued the ways in which Black orality filtered into the work of white modernism writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. While signaling the significance of these scholarly contributions in reading the relationship of white writers to Black voice and vernacular, I wanted especially to foreground that in his early writings Faulkner had entered an intersubjective space that involved published texts written by [End Page 131] Black authors. Faulkner indeed acknowledged Black storytellers from his youth and admitted to listening and imitating their oral tales, in essence an acceptance of vernacular orality related to his own Southern heritage.1 However, he never acknowledged reading or paying attention to writers at the start of his career, even though later in the 1940s he could not avoid acknowledging that he read Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) at the height of that novel's popularity and subsequently Black Boy (1945) as well.2 An acknowledgment of reading Black contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s would have meant a recognition of their formal contribution to the literary culture within the dominant white establishment, rather than a consignment only to participation in an oral folk culture. It is not merely a question related to earlier notions of access to literacy at stake for Black people; it is instead a matter of admission of racial parity in one form of creative and intellectual work. Or, if not parity, then at least an understanding that Black writers had access, albeit limited access, to some of the very same outlets for their materials as white writers, and perhaps an understanding, too, that in artistic production Black people had literary ability and creativity. Largely self-educated, Faulkner certainly read the popular writers of his day. Aspiring poets, like the young William Faulkner, particularly witnessed the celebration of trendy writers in new little magazines and in book publications. Though today we rarely think of Black writers as being popular or even as being published contemporaneously with Faulkner, often simultaneously in the same magazines and outlets, that was indeed the case. In the 1920s, Jean Toomer's poetry appeared in The Double-Dealer: A National Magazine that also published Hart Crane, H. D., Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Faulkner's own poetic sketches. And in 1925, for example, Countee Cullen won the Witter Brynner Prize in Poetry sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, but he had already won second place in both 1923 and 1924 while an undergraduate. Cullen's poems appeared in Harper's, Poetry, and The Bookman, as well as in Crisis and Opportunity, and Harper...