Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America

by David G. Nicholls

Overview

Conjuring the Folk addresses the dynamic relation between metropolitan artistic culture and its popular referents during the Harlem Renaissance period. From Jean Toomer's conclusion that "the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away" to Zora Neale Hurston's discovery of "a rich field for folk-lore" in a Florida lumber camp, Harlem Renaissance writers made competing claims about the vitality of the African-American "folk." These competing claims, David Nicholls explains, form the basis of a discordant conversation on the question of modernity in African America.
In a series of revisionary readings, Nicholls studies how the "folk" is shaped by the ideology of form. He examines the presence of a spectral "folk" in Toomer's modernist pastiche, Cane. He explores how Hurston presents folklore as a contemporary language of resistance in her ethnography, Mules and Men. In Claude McKay's naturalistic romance, Banana Bottom, Nicholls discovers the figuration of an alternative modernity in the heroine's recovery of her lost "folk" identity. He unearths the individualist ethos of Booker T. Washington in two novels by George Wylie Henderson. And he reveals how Richard Wright's photo-documentary history, 12 Million BlackVoices, places the "folk" in a Marxian narrative of modernization toward class-consciousness.
A provocative rereading of the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance, Conjuring the Folk offers a new way of understanding literary responses to migration, modernization, and the concept of the "folk" itself.
David G. Nicholls is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472110346
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	09/12/2000
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David G. Nicholls is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

Conjuring the Folk
Forms of Modernity in African America

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By David G. Nicholls
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2000
University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-11034-6

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Chapter One Conjuring the Folk

In his 1940 memoir, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes wrote that "the ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any." Hughes's comment suggests a critique of the Renaissance by noting the divide between the artistic activities of black elites and the lot of the working black masses. Despite Alain Locke's expectation, expressed in the opening essay of The New Negro, that artists of "the present generation will have added the motives of self-expression and spiritual development to the old and still unfinished task of making material headway and progress," the latter task remained unfinished for elites and masses alike when the movement lost momentum with the fall of the stock market in 1929. But, while the Renaissance failed to deliver on the promise to improve the lot of the "ordinary Negroes," to use Hughes's term, a good deal of the art produced in the period sought to bring the black masses into representation. Locke himself attributed much of the energy behind the movement to the "migrant masses" who flooded Harlem and other urban centers during the period: "In a real sense it is the rank and file who are leading, and the leaders who are following. A transformed and transforming psychology permeates the masses." Many artists, themselves recent migrants, sought to capture this energy by bringing popular forms like spirituals and folklore into new aesthetic settings and by telling stories about ordinary Negroes. Thus, while the Renaissance artists may be said to have failed on the promise to improve the economic circumstances of the black masses, it was not because they ignored them. Rather, many of them attended to the divide between elite culture and popular culture by translating across the divide.

The dynamic relation between metropolitan artistic culture and its popular referents is the central problem addressed in this book. In particular, I take up one of the more persistent tropes in this dynamic, the folk, and explore its workings in African-American literary culture during the period between the world wars. Poets, novelists, folklorists, photographers, sociologists, and historians all engaged the discourse on the folk in their work. I trace the discourse on the folk through a number of formal settings in this study, devoting chapters to Jean Toomer's experimental collection of poetry and vignettes, Cane (1923); Zora Neale Hurston's ethnography, Mules and Men (1935); Claude McKay's naturalistic romance of post-emancipation Jamaica, Banana Bottom (1933); George Wylie Henderson's female Bildungsroman about an Alabama sharecropper, Ollie Miss (1935), and its sequel concerning her migrant son, Jule (1946); and Richard Wright's photo-documentary history, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). In each case I examine the ways in which the folk is mediated through literary forms.

The discourse on the folk was widely available to those who had followed the debate among black intellectuals concerning the proper role of labor in advancing the "race." At the turn of the century W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that "the training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,-the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts." Du Bois's advocacy of higher education for the "Talented Tenth" was meant to create a vanguard of intellectuals who would enable the race to progress economically and culturally. In contrast, Booker T. Washington, who rose to prominence as a spokesman for the black agrarian class in the post-Reconstruction South, sought to instill in this class self-reliance and "the dignity of labour." For Washington the folk were to be educated for a trade in which they could earn an honest living; their aspirations were to be humble. Worried about the fate of urban migrants, Washington wished that he could remove them from the city and "plant them upon the soil" in the Southern countryside from which they had departed. Washington expended considerable effort in discouraging blacks from migrating; Du Bois, by contrast, urged blacks to refuse the national imperative to "be content to be servants, and nothing more" and encouraged elites to deliver the masses from unrewarding labor.

But, despite the efforts of black intellectuals to shape migration and labor patterns at the turn of the century, the black masses had mostly voted with their feet by the end of World War I. The years between the wars saw dramatic changes in the economic and social organization of life in African America. Broadly speaking, the mechanization of agricultural labor and the growth of industrial production, along with persistent racial injustice and the hope for improved living conditions, encouraged black Southerners to seek a new life in urban centers. Through the Great Migration approximately five million blacks moved to the cities of Chicago, New York, Detroit, and the like between the start of World War I and 1960. While many blacks remained in the South, African-American literary culture in this period tended to emanate from metropolitan centers and was frequently produced by recent migrants. Much as Locke had suggested, cultural life in the period was energized by migration. By the 1925 publication of The New Negro, migration had decisively reorganized contemporary African America.

The practice of conjuring up an African-American folk thus produced a compelling vision of collective origins for metropolitan African Americans. As millions of black Americans left agricultural settings to pursue employment in urban centers, the folk seemed an appropriate term to describe these masses of former sharecroppers and farmhands who were moving across the landscape. Additionally, in homology with narratives of European national development, the folk provided the telos in narratives that sought to describe the development of the race into modernity. As Benedict Anderson has argued, novels, newspapers, and other printed narrative forms provide an "imagined linkage" between disparate individuals through which they can imagine a shared temporality; such was the case with metropolitan representations of folk life. I have chosen the folk as a topic for extended study not only because it is one of the most salient figures of the period but also because the topic tends to animate broader interpretive questions about the relation between literature and modernity.

My aim in this opening chapter is to develop a historicist method for interpreting the literary mediation of the folk in this era. I begin by considering the role the folk plays in critical histories of African-American literature, paying particular attention to the development of vernacular criticism in the 1980s. Following the post-structuralist critique of vernacular criticism, I explore the possible responses to the (largely unfulfilled) call by the post-structuralist critics for a historicist criticism. Hazel Carby and Robin Kelley have recently argued that the historical conditions giving rise to modernity also provoke the discourse on the folk. I examine recent work in post-colonial studies that relates modernity to modernization and that argues for a recognition of "many modernities," to use the words of one argument, in place of the global modernity assumed by the European Enlightenment. With this sense of multiple destinations in mind, I seek to locate the folk through a brief discussion of two major poets of the era, Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes. This inquiry leads me to define a method of historical description that relates the ideological and narrative dimensions of form to contextual information so as to advance an understanding of the mediation of the folk in metropolitan art.

The Post-Structuralist Critique of Vernacular Criticism

Literary histories that address texts authored by African Americans have typically relied upon canonical, or tradition-centered, narratives for their coherence. In such narratives the folk has often been portrayed as the wellspring from which literary culture has flowed. Major studies such as Robert Bone's Negro Novel in America and Bernard Bell's Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition use the folk as an organizing trope. In general, these studies have treated the folk as an assumed category of person rather than as a contested vision of collectivity. Consequently, the tradition-centered approach tends to underplay social conflict in pursuit of a neatly unfolding narrative of collective development and achievement. This practice gained momentum in the 1980s with the advent of vernacular criticism, by which critics attempted to identify the unique formal attributes of this literature to show how they form, across time, an African-American tradition. Frequently, the vernacular tradition also found its origins in the folk, conceived here as the authentic voice of the unconscious of the race. As I have suggested, this critical enterprise has recently come under scrutiny from post-structuralist critics, who have noted that for the vernacular critics the folk operates as an unmediated category. This critique forms an important precursor to my work in these pages, and for that reason I want now to rehearse the post-structuralist critique of vernacular criticism.

In her study of essentialism in contemporary literary theory, Diana Fuss has observed that vernacular theory has been preoccupied with the folk as the origin of authentic African-American discourse. Fuss directs her attention to recent work by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker Jr.:

What makes the vernacular (the language of "the folk") so powerful a theme in the work of both Gates and Baker is precisely the fact that it operates as a phantasm, a hallucination of lost origins. It is in the quest to recover, reinscribe, and revalorize the black vernacular that essentialism inheres in the work of two otherwise anti-essentialist theorists.

As a corrective scholarly exercise, Fuss suggests that we produce historical accounts of the sign race, noting that "such historically specific studies remind us that racial categories are politically shaped, that 'race consciousness' is a modern phenomenon, and that the very meaning of 'race' has shifted over time and across cultures." In Fuss's revisionary account the folk could then be seen as a hallucinatory effect produced by a modern phenomenon, race consciousness.

As I have already suggested, there is good reason to critique the claims for folk authenticity in vernacular theory. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance Baker locates an authentic African-American voice in the folk when he contrasts Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Washington's Up from Slavery with respect to voice: "Washington remains the spokesperson on behalf of the folk (who, really, are not a FOLK in his account); Du Bois, by melodious contrast, lifts his voice and transmutes his text into the FOLK's singing. If Washington provides a speaking manual, then Du Bois offers a singing book." Du Bois, who was educated in Europe and at Fisk University and received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard, would seem to be an unlikely candidate to sing the unmediated voice of the folk. Nevertheless, in Baker's description the narrator of The Souls of Black Folk acts as a spiritual channel through which the collective voice may be heard:

The narrator's cultural performance, therefore, can give life to a sign ("folk") that connotes a pretechnological but nonetheless vital stage of human development toward ideals of CULTURE. A FOLK is always, out of the very necessities of definition, possessed of a guiding or tutelary spirit-an immanent quality of aspiration that is fittingly sounded in its treasured rituals, in its spirit houses or masks of performance.

Although Baker notes that folk is a sign and thereby suggests that he takes the folk to be constructed through language, he never develops this position with any consistency. He historicizes the folk ("The folk not only come to the domain of culture but also refigure the very notion of 'culture' for the modern world")18 and shows how the 1920s generation of the Harlem Renaissance had to use standard forms, rather than "unadorned or primitive folk creations," to prove their artistic merit, but he sees in later work of the 1930s a return "to rendering the actual folk voice in its simple, performative eloquence." In the final pages of Baker's book he turns to a discussion of the "genuine cultural authenticity" of African-American expressive culture and calls attention to the "traceable ancestry that judged certain select sounds appealing and considered them efficacious in the office of a liberating advancement of THE RACE."

As Fuss has noted, Baker's concern with recovering the vernacular roots of African-American culture is shared by Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose insistence on attention to formal analysis is often accompanied by a yearning for these roots. For example, in a discussion of his strategies for editing the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature Gates admits that "my own biases toward canon-formation are to stress the formal relationship that obtains among texts in the black tradition-relations of revision, echo, call and response, antiphony, what have you-and to stress the vernacular roots of the tradition."

In her response to Gates's remarks on canon formation, Barbara Johnson argues that "the terms 'black' and 'white' often imply a relation of mutual exclusion. This binary model is based on two fallacies: the fallacy of positing the existence of pure, unified, and separate traditions, and the fallacy of spatialization." And she further examines the term vernacular, noting that its Latin root means "a slave born in his master's home"; she concludes that "the vernacular is a difference within, not a realm outside." Johnson would have us see that "black" and "white" literatures are mutually intricated, rather than mutually exclusive, and she would urge us to see the vernacular as located within that intrication, rather than in a separate realm of black difference. Moreover, as Kenneth Warren has argued, there are dangers in centering a criticism and a politics on black difference: "as an interpretive and political strategy vernacular critique entails serious liabilities, not the least of which are the depoliticization of black cultural discussion and the tendency to suppress and discredit internal dissent."

As with most attempts to construct a canon around the notion of tradition, vernacular criticism claims to honor history by dehistoricizing the texts it celebrates. It posits African-American folk expression as the authentic origin of a cultural tradition and includes texts that repeat its figures of speech and formal patterns in its canon. If we accept the charges that Fuss, Johnson, and Warren have leveled against vernacular criticism-namely, that it posits an essentialist origin, it reifies tradition, and it can operate to suppress dissent-we can return to Fuss's request for "historically specific studies" with a sense of urgency. The critique of vernacular criticism from the standpoint of post-structuralism leads us to consider the folk as a historically contingent constituency. For Fuss this revelation might allow us to exorcize the "phantasm," or "hallucination," of the folk as produced, in her account, by modern race consciousness. Such an exorcism does not go very far toward offering a historical account of folk aesthetics in this period. Moreover, it raises bell hooks's worry that "a totalizing critique of 'subjectivity, essence, identity' can seem very threatening to marginalized groups, for whom it has been an active gesture of political resistance to name one's identity as part of a struggle to challenge domination." In place of a totalizing critique of the folk as phantasmatic essence, we can offer historically specific studies that acknowledge the numerous representations of the folk in this period.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Conjuring the Folk by David G. Nicholls
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Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments....................ix
1 Conjuring the Folk....................1
2 Modernism and the Spectral Folk: Jean Toomer's Cane....................21
3 Folklore and Migrant Labor: Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men....................43
4 The Folk as Alternative Modernity: Claude McKay's Banana Bottom....................63
5 Rural Modernity, Migration, and the Gender of Autonomy: The Novels of George Wylie Henderson....................85
6 The Folk, the Race, and Class Consciousness: Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices....................113
7 Conclusion: Local Histories and World Historical Narrative....................131
Notes....................135
Select Bibliography....................157
Index....................171