Where Confusion Is: Transnationalism in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset

Abstract

It has been fifteen years since Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic introduced new paradigm for conceptualizing black diaspora. While Gilroy's work initiated surge of critical interest in Caribbean and Latin America, these regions remain on fringes of literary discourse, particularly discourse surrounding Harlem Renaissance. The considerable cultural, economic, and bodily traffic linking Harlem Europe during 1920s and '30s continues be principal area of focus, and justifiably so, as lingering notion that American expatriate movement was white and largely male phenomenon deserves sustained challenge. (1) From Copenhagen of Nella Larsen's Quicksand specter of wartime France in Claude McKay's Home Harlem, writers, like their white contemporaries, cast European continent as place go when is not enough (Women 98). Unfortunately, project of reconsidering America's Lost Generation often presents Europe as only place go. This Eurocentric vision of black movement is problematic for number of reasons. Not only does it tend reify worn binary of Europe against America, but it also excludes those artists who, upon finding transatlantic model insufficient or inaccessible, choose alternate discursive strategies that feature non-European locales. I want suggest that Harlem midwife Jessie Redmon Fauset is one such artist. Her fiction, (in)famously described by McKay as being fastidious and precious, may be an unusual point of departure for discussion of transnational African American literature (qtd. in McDowell 30). Fauset's works are consummate drawing-room dramas, but critical community has been relatively slow and at times unwilling recognize their broader significance. Cheryl Wall's retrospective article and Heresies: Engendering Harlem Renaissance discusses this very phenomenon: When Harlem was rediscovered by historians in 1970s, [Alain] Locke's vision shaped formal record of past. Jessie Fauset merited little more than equivalent of footnote (Histories 63). Locke's desire to offer through art an emancipating vision America (qtd. in Histories 63) ensured that bourgeois novel of manners would be overshadowed by more outre fiction of period. Yet recent projects have complicated Fauset's abiding reputation as chronicler of black middle class--a woman, Wall elsewhere suggests, whose work is crippled by domesticity (Women 84). The fruits of reappraisal are promising: critics are reading her characters as experiments in hybridity, questioning her allegedly unequivocal support for black bourgeoisie, and bringing quiet irony in her narratives fore. Deborah McDowell's scholarship has been especially instrumental in this regard, for she has argued that Fauset transforms convention into cunning strategy: the novel of manners, she writes, can be seen as a deflecting mask for [Fauset's] more challenging concerns (qtd. in Wall, Women 66). (2) Especially salient here is growing interest in Fauset's pan-Africanism and its effects upon her visions of nationalism and national identity. Fauset's writing reveals her belief in possibility of acquiring transnational world that is anchored in African American home (Allen 55). This type of citizenship proffers novel take on expatriation; it requires multiple foreign locations and multiple narrative strategies, all of which operate in concert produce subtle reconfiguration of domesticity. And while Europe may be most obvious of these locations, we must recognize that Fauset's work cannot be read solely in terms of transatlantic exchange. The project of recuperating marginalized women writers often disturbs sacrosanct geographic borders as well as gendered ones, and case of Jessie Fauset is no exception. …