Sterling Brown: An Ethnographic Odyssey

Abstract

Abstract I would like to propose a method for reading the poetry of Sterling A. Brown in light of Brown’s complete oeuvre. My proposed method is informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, including recent ethnographic theory and qualitative research methodology and an emerging cultural studies discourse that I and others term black cultural critique. This approach is not intended to overlook any aspect of the aesthetic values or artistic achievement of Brown’s poetic output. Rather, this approach intends to offer an additional, interdisciplinary, theoretical con- text in which to appreciate Brown’s poetic achievement. My thesis is that Sterling Brown was a postmodern ethnographer who by the 1940s had pioneered solutions to three major problems with which today’s cultural anthropologists are grappling: (1) what form ethnographic writing should take, (2) what meth- odology can result in competent ethnographies of non-hegemonic, oral-based cultures, and (3) how the authority of native informants can be acknowledged in ethnographies.