Suspended Affect and Harlem Renaissance Poetics

Abstract

Suspended Affect and Harlem Renaissance Poetics Sean Weidman (bio) The black is a black man; that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)1 That the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance fashioned the early twentieth-century American literary scene around newly urgent political vestments and newly articulated affects has long been a commonplace of the period's study.2 Poetry formalizes the rhetoric of everyday life, and affect is consistently the engine of renaissance poetry: it activates the felt politicality of modernity's everyday, and its movement in the period's verse centralizes questions of legibility and access around the affective politics of community, those forces of engagement that connected Black Americans to broader sociocultural notions of appropriate and possible modes of feeling. In fact, perhaps no better avenue existed for renaissance witness-bearing and remonstrance than its print culture, which supplied African Americans with new forums for self-definition and the material archives for self-organization, securing them a marketplace that trafficked in discursive resistance to white America's cultural, social, political, and legal constructions of Blackness.3 This movement, as we know, would lay foundations for the civil rights rhetoric in the 1950s and beyond, and by consolidating new attentions to Black America and institutional progress secured through literary circulation, it introduced new cultural programs tied acutely to representation and the politics of feeling—to the affective.4 [End Page 637] Although the literary methods of its representation took many forms, this New Negro Renaissance compelled a renewed interest in historicizing the "Old Negro," a historicity that energized compounding efforts to reimagine the possibilities of modern African American identity and culture.5 Mark A. Sanders argues that given their exclusion from and disenfranchisement within many white social, political, and aesthetic spheres, it was this new era of Black poets who "faced a particular challenge: a crisis in poetic language for addressing African American life."6 With poetic content inspired by new historical repositories of folk culture, several of these renaissance poets "took up the challenge to reconstruct dialect, to reclaim the Black vernacular, [and] to engage in the ongoing cultural war over Black representation" (Sanders, Folk Roots, 99). And whether the blues poetry of Langston Hughes, the sonnet sequences of Claude McKay, or the dialect poems of Sterling Brown, renaissance poets were indeed affective architects, organizing the lived experiences of Black America into new styles and accounts of their modern everyday. In spite of their political and literary achievements, however, those writers knew all too well that they lived in a nation highly resistant to racial equity. Cheryl Wall reminds us plainly that not only was segregation still a matter of everyday law, but that racism's institutional authorization and sociopolitical spillover also effected appalling material conditions and the constant threat of violence for Black Americans.7 I rehearse these familiar but important lessons to say this: when they invoke affect, both early critical race theorists and early scholars of race and modernism are, at times, guilty of supplying these institutions of oppression with too much representational power. This article responds to the ways those early engagements and some of their critical offshoots have too quickly seen Black aesthetics (and renaissance poetics among them) as eager to represent positions of object, of being acted upon by racist institutions—"rooted at the core," as Fanon says in the above epigraph—rather than that of subject, of acting against the dicta of white power. This tendency has the accidental effect of slipping, in minor ways, into current thinking about aesthetic responses to (and within) institutions of oppression, systemic racism, and white brutality. My aim in this article, then, is simply to add to the growing body of work that comprises an explicit revision of the underutilized (or, sometimes, misapplied) antiracist dimensions of affect in aesthetic critique.8 It should not surprise us, after all, just how much of Harlem Renaissance poetry advances experimental forms of affective resistance, just as...