Black Modernist Research Articles

FASHIONING MODERNISM

: This essay asks why modernist art history has been unable to account for the career of the African American painter Rose Piper. One of the most gifted painters of her generation, Piper was also among the least prolific. Her career is bookended by two important solo exhibitions. The gap between these shows, filled by a career in textile design, is typically narrated in terms of the degeneration of promise and the wasting of creative talent. Piper’s designs mark a break in the progressive arc of her life. They split her late paintings from the early ones and have seemed to shut off the potential for sensitive criticism. But her modernism refuses such distinctions. Piper used her early paintings to interrogate reification, commodification, and economic compulsion as they interacted with questions of racial oppression. These images interrogated the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the options remaining open for black modernist art. Her late paintings, produced after thirty years at work in the textile industry, need to be read as the culmination of this project rather than as an unfortunate diversion. In them, she directed the technical and institutional knowledge gleaned from her career as a designer towards a searching, self-reflexive critique of race, gender, and the commodity form. These images open the way to a renewal of black modernism.

DOUBLINGS AND DISSOCIATION IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING AND HELEN OYEYEMI’S BOY, SNOW, BIRD

In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929) and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). Oyeyemi claims Larsen’s novel as an influential forbear. When the protagonist of Larsen’s Passing, Irene, is in the presence of her friend Clare, she acts, speaks, and expresses her feelings in a far different mode from her usual rigid conformity to ladylike propriety. She seems, indeed, to be a different person. Although critics have long seen Clare as an alter ego for Irene, I argue instead that it is Clare’s presence that brings out in Irene an alter ego, a new personality structure. Using as a theoretical framework Philip Bromberg’s model of subjectivity as a series of alternating self-states – each distinct and discontinuous with the others – I argue that Larsen is giving the nineteenth-century alter ego of literary tradition a new depth by dramatizing the way a subject changes personality to a different self as a result of a close relationship with a particular other. Irene’s subjectivity is further complicated by her enactment of upper-class “lady” in her every gesture, tone, and word. The performed identity of (white) “lady” is at odds with the everyday reality of Irene’s social position as middle-class black wife and mother. Attention to the multiplicity of Irene’s competing self-states, and her growing loss of control over them, can help us to understand the ambiguous final scene in which Irene (apparently) pushes Clare out of a sixth-floor window to her death. In Boy, Snow, Bird alter egos proliferate. To manage the relentless physical and mental abuse that the character narrator Boy endures from her father, Boy finds escape in colloquies with her mirror image. The mirror image is separate from Boy (she does not recognize it as her own reflection) and has its own agenda, sometimes replacing Boy’s subjectivity with its own. Later in the novel, we learn that Frances, Boy’s mother, after suffering a violent rape, saw in her mirror a male figure and transformed herself into that male identity. [The novel seems to ask readers to think of both instances of wounded identity and the adoption of alter egos in relationship to each other.] This is not Bromberg’s “normal” dissociation as an alternation of self-states, but a lasting and severe dissociation as a last defense against trauma. Boy and Frances are using the mirror double as an escape from unbearable reality. When, to her surprise, Boy gives birth to an African American baby, the intense anxiety about her child’s future in the racist United States causes a different kind of splitting: she feels herself transforming into the wicked stepmother of the fairy tale “Snow White.” She indeed becomes cruel, unfeeling, and damaging to her innocent stepdaughter Snow. In both novels, the complex depiction of alter egos reflects the psychic complications of subjects trying to survive in the racist social order of the United States.

The Renaissance Revisited

The Renaissance Revisited

Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism ed. by Carla Kaplan

Reviewed by: Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism ed. by Carla Kaplan Sharon L. Jones KAPLAN, CARLA, ed. Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. 284 pp. $18.12 paperback. With Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, editor Carla Kaplan presents Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) as a ground-breaking text [End Page 312] due to protagonist Helga Crane. Kaplan writes that Helga is "one of the first truly 'intersectional' figures of women's literature, a character for whom the various strands of race, gender, class, and sexuality can never be disentangled (since all contribute to her misery)" (xxi). Readers will gain new insights about Larsen, an African American writer best known for the novellas Quicksand and Passing (1929), in relation to the past and the present. Kaplan's "Introduction: A 'Queer Dark Creature'" contextualizes Larsen's life and writing before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance and Modernist period. According to Kaplan, "Quicksand propelled her into celebrity as one of only two black women—Jessie Fauset was the other—considered major fiction writers" (ix). Kaplan asserts that Quicksand differs from other texts by Black Modernist writers, stating "Quicksand is one of the grimmest novels in modern black letters, a 'queer dark creature' unequalled (until Richard Wright's Native Son, in 1940) in its pessimism" (ix). According to Kaplan, "Most importantly, Larsen's work is now prized for its portrayal of black female subjectivity, its depiction of the consequences of repressing women's sexuality, and for its representation of the social and psychological vertigo caused when identity categories break down" (xxxii–xxxiii). "A Note on the Text" includes textual history and biographical details about Larsen and is followed by "The Text of Quicksand." Quicksand focuses on its biracial protagonist, who faces challenges related to sexism, socio-economic status, and racial identity while living in different regions of the US and abroad (including Denmark). By the text's end, Helga Crane struggles to cope with being a wife and mother in a southern US town where she feels stifled. The useful footnotes to Quicksand include information relevant to characters, settings, symbols, and plot. "Contemporary Reviews" provides perspectives from critics about Quicksand and other texts. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois's favorable 1928 review "Two Novels" in Crisis compares Quicksand to There Is Confusion by Jessie Fauset and examines the role of Black womanhood in Quicksand. In contrast, Wallace Thurman's 1928 review "High, Low, Past and Present" in Pittsburgh Courier acknowledges Du Bois's praise of Quicksand but criticizes the unsympathetic portrayal of Helga Crane and Quicksand's ending. "Nella Larsen's Writings" features Larsen's mixed 1929 "Review of Black Sadie" in Opportunity in which Larsen criticizes T. Bowyer Campbell's Black Sadie for its repetitiveness yet praises its depiction of a Black woman achieving success. This section also features Larsen's 1930 short story "Sanctuary" (Forum), which focuses on a character harbored by the mother of a person he killed. "Correspondence" includes letters to other writers, including Carl Van Vechten as well as Gertrude Stein. The letters to Van Vechten comment on Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Ethel Waters, and Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep. The letters to Stein mention Carl Van Vechten and Paris. "Cultural Contexts" includes texts offering cultural commentary. Notable examples include Marita Bonner's 1925 "On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored" in The Crisis, which critiques racism and sexism, and Langston Hughes's 1925 poem "Cross" (The Crisis), which examines racial identity. An excerpt from "Cross" appears before Quicksand's first chapter, so the complete poem in "Cultural Contexts" could facilitate a deeper understanding of the poem's relevance to Quicksand. Sheila Kaye-Smith's 1922 "Mrs. Adis" from The Century Magazine focuses on Mrs. Adis, who provides shelter for Peter Crouch (who killed her son Tom). As Kaplan notes, Larsen faced an accusation that "Sanctuary" plagiarized "Mrs. Adis" (xxxi). [End Page 313] "Criticism" presents scholarship examining Quicksand from feminist, historical, biographical, and transnational perspectives. For example, Deborah McDowell's feminist critique in "The 'Nameless…Shameful Impulse:' Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing" (a reprinted excerpt...

“Hard Reading”: US Empire and Black Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death

“Hard Reading”: US Empire and Black Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski

Reviewed by: West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski Michael Nieto Garcia WEST OF HARLEM: African American Writers and the Borderlands. By Emily Lutenski. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2015. In West of Harlem, Emily Lutenski brings heretofore marginalized or erased black modernist experiences to the center. As the book’s subtitle suggests, there is an intimate connection between African American Writers and the Borderlands. Though the nearly exclusive focus on Harlem as the site of black modernist literary production and identity formation provides a useful center point from which to start, the center cannot hold if striving to do justice to the breadth and complexity of black lives. Indeed, any dominant narrative of blackness—in any era—will likewise occlude, suppress, and deny the great diversity of African American experience. In her rejection of “the idea that the West is anomalous in black history and experience” Lutenski joins the growing ranks of scholars [End Page 173] who would disrupt, challenge, and outright refuse monolithic racial and cultural narratives (25). Rather than anomalous, Lutenski argues, the West played a significant role in shaping the consciousness of the New Negro. What is more, “the borderlands West … was repurposed as … dreamscape in the years of the New Negro renaissance” (257). The dream was shared by Ralph Ellison, who argued that black freedom can be found in the American West (5–10). Here the West figures as frontier, as an escape from the black-white dialectic, and as liberating geographic space “beyond the North-South binary” of the black diaspora (12). In this West, the African American dream and the American Dream converge, rather than deferring the latter for the advantage of the former. To figure black freedom through geographic mobility, however, introduces a new challenge, and a not unproblematic one at that: “if American culture is to be maintained, new frontiers must be created” (9). Lutenski’s argument, it should be noted, is a cultural one. The book’s thesis, to paraphrase its promotional copy, is that borderlands cultures influenced the art of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance in surprising and important ways. In short, one would be mistaken to conceive of African American identity as a monoculture rather than a diverse culture characterized by cultural mestizaje. By recovering the ways in which “Mexico played a formative role in [Langston] Hughes’s transnational and antiracist vision” we can better see that “a politics and aesthetics long considered Pan-African” must also “be understood as multiethnic” (27). The same could be said of the politics and aesthetics of Richard Wright (who was also deeply influenced by sojourns in Mexico), as well as Jean Toomer (who arrived in Harlem from the West, and kept a home in New Mexico), Arna Bontempts (who set multiple works in Los Angeles, where he “spent his formative years”), and other major figures of the Harlem Renaissance—the last three of whom Lutenski devotes separate chapters to in the book (26). Lutenski’s masterful recovery of the West’s influence on the African American imaginary—the myths, metaphors, and folklore around which identities coalesce and form—gestures toward the work of Paul Gilroy, whose seminal notion of the Black Atlantic encouraged looking beyond national borders. In illuminating previously occluded cultural and intellectual influences, such projects run parallel to work done in borderland studies, as José David Saldívar notes in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. In drawing from both Gilroy and Saldívar, Lutenski’s recovery project suggests the need—given the inextricable connections that bind them together—for greater engagement and conversation between ethnic studies fields. As a spatial studies project situated in the borderlands of the American West, Lutenski’s work engages deeply with the work of Latina scholars such as Mary Pat Brady and Norma Alarcón. It is no surprise, then, that in opposition to her opening gesture toward Gilroy and “constructs of the transnational,” Lutenski must insist that “region” cannot be elided—that place matters (12). Even a more abstract and metaphorical account of space theory must insist on the importance of place, as indicated by Mary Pat Brady’s emphasis on “the discursive and the spatial...

Langston Unashamed: Radical Mythmaking in Hughes’s 1930s Short Fiction

This essay contextualizes several of Langston Hughes’s mid-1930s short fiction works, exploring ways in which these Black Marxist writings expose racism as a function of an absolutist US nationalist discourse. The essay argues that the short story “Cora Unashamed” is a crucial document of interwar period African American internationalist literature, as it imparts a black modernist fable that rearticulates the realist folklore of the 1930s Left. The article then considers several stories that carry on the radical socialist theme, including “The Blues I’m Playing,” “Little Old Spy,” “Why, You Reckon?”, “On the Road,” “Professor,” “Gumption,” and “The Trouble with Angels.”

Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism

As Schuyler's story hones in on market-driven formulations of identity, it speaks to fantasies and anxieties about increasing urban industrialization, racial assimilation, and the reproduction of raced bodies in the black modernist moment. Tracing the manufacture, promotion, and regulation of race in the novel, I argue thatBlack No Moreilluminates new market possibilities for the trade of racial property in commodity form during the Fordist era. In this way, Schuyler's narrative offers a complex and prescient understanding of racial capitalism in the interwar period, one that portends our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture on a global scale.

Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker's Cinematic Celebrity

This interdisciplinary study incorporates a literary reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) with a cultural history of Baker's cinematic celebrity in order to reconsider celebratory narratives of the St. Louis native's success in Paris. Did she transcend stereotypes of black womanhood or was she enmeshed in their discursive net? Analyzing Baker's dancing and film roles through Larsen's conception of exoticism, migration, bodily representation and cultural hybridity reveals the complications assembled in this dancer's seemingly transparent stardom and recasts her as an informed Black modernist.

Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949

Introduction - returning the gaze the souls of black folk in the age of mechanical reproduction - black newspaper criticism and the early cinema, 1909-1916 the Birth of a Nation and interventionist criticism - resisting race as spectacle cinephilia in the black renaissance - new negro film criticism, 1916-1930 black modernist dialectics and the New Deal - accommodationist and radical film criticism, 1930-1940 the recalcitrant gaze critiquing Hollywood in the 1940s.