LITMIR.BIZ

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categories and challenged the belief that one could possess absolute knowledge of a world tenuously holding onto its sense of internal order and meaning. While the writers I examine found the presence of chaos and excess unsettling, they also implicitly recognized such epistemological instability as inevitable conditions of the modern world.

      In this chapter, I have argued for the literary and discursive innovation made possible by the New Negro encounter with the social sciences. In the second chapter, I explore the historical and disciplinary conditions from which this literary school emerged. The reliance of U.S. racial discourse on sociological and anthropological narratives, and the racially progressive interventions made by disciplinary forefathers, Boas and Du Bois, all prove pivotal to understanding the choices made and challenges faced by New Negro intellectuals.

      In the third chapter, I interrogate the ethnographic distance and simultaneous closeness with the subject that Renaissance figure struggled with in their art by focusing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. In it I argue that if Du Bois’s image of the veil in The Souls of Black Folk is a potent figure for racial divisions and inequality, then the act of raising the veil signals the ethnographer’s skill in cross-cultural transit and translation. In taking on such a project, however, Du Bois struggles with binaries often employed to explain Black/White difference, including subject/object, high culture/low culture, and modernity/tradition—binaries that habitually place African Americans in the position of inferiority. Souls disrupts these binaries, however, through its author’s use of a liminal language to capture his liminal status as native ethnographer. Du Bois moves, in other words, between the detached, empirical language of sociology and the invested, emotional rhetoric of a subject who shares a bond with and the fate of his fellow African Americans. Du Bois’s situatedness, the ways in which he finds himself enmeshed between languages, communities, indeed even identities, enables him to interrogate the terms used to identify him.

      Like liminality, hybridity is a central and focalizing concept in this chapter, for I argue that Du Bois employs a generic hybridity, merging different genres into a single and singular text, in order to explore different ways of viewing, and hence knowing, Black culture. For example, he uses fiction—the short story “Of the Coming of John”—to stage and theorize his ambivalence about the Negro intellectual’s relations with the folk he means to represent. This story’s presentation near the end of a series of sociological, philosophical, and autobiographical essays compels the reader to think anew about the relations between and locations of author and subjects, factors that inform the shaping of the narratives that precede the story. Ultimately, I argue that Du Bois is a central figure whose role in the intersection of Harlem Renaissance literature and anthropology has been overlooked and inadequately analyzed. Ethnography, the narrative mode and method shared by sociologists and anthropologists, proves the link between Du Bois and Boas. These two figures’ great influence can be seen in their combined work on cultural relativism and pluralism. But it is also Du Bois’s willingness to depart from social science conventions that made a mark on the next generation of authors.

      That questioning is immediately evident in Chapter 4, which focuses on James Weldon Johnson’s use and critique of fieldwork as a model for the “talented tenth’s” engagement with folk communities. Johnson metaphorizes the protagonist’s travels through the South as a kind of anthropological exercise in participant-observation. He condemns the protagonist’s detached analysis of folk communities as indicative of his alienation and imperialistic motives, characteristics that disqualify him from assuming the category of race leader to which he aspires.

      Chapter 5 demonstrates how another author uses fieldwork as a trope for the encounter between dominant and marginalized groups. My reading of Sterling Brown’s poetry situates it in relation to his statements vis-à-vis the differences between sociological narratives and true literature. Brown argued that literature transcends the sociological because of its capacity to convey characters’ humanity and individuality. Nonetheless, I insist on the importance of considering that the store of images he draws from is indebted at least in part to the ethnographic imagination and his folklore collecting expeditions. Brown explicitly and implicitly reinscribes the notion of the rural South as cultural center for Black America. He privileges the field, the South, as locus of African American culture. Yet he resists isolating Black culture in that location by emphasizing travel and migration, resisting the depiction of Black culture as static, pre-modern, and fixed in the Southern landscape. Brown’s blues poems, and the figure of the Southern road, meditate on the influences of place and travel in the production of African American culture.

      The sixth and seventh chapters, on Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse, respectively, move away from male writers’ depictions of Southern Black culture to female anthropologists’ analyses of Jamaican and Haitian cultures. As the gender shift alters the terms and implications of the ethnographer’s embodiment, so does the change from regional to international travel alter the meaning of the ethnographer’s “native” status. Hurston and Dunham’s texts fall more clearly than any other texts I discuss under the rubric of ethnography. Although neither narrative is typically considered part of the Harlem Renaissance canon (particularly Dunham’s memoir/ethnography which was published in 1969), both authors conducted their fieldwork in the mid-thirties at the tail end of the Renaissance period and were heavily influenced by and helped to inform modernist notions of cross-cultural translation. Both Hurston and Dunham wrote selfreflexive ethnographies that place the ethnographer and her colonialist enterprise under as much if not more scrutiny as the cultures that they observed. In this sense, their texts clear the space to interrogate how social science methods and discourse endow cultural patterns and social behaviors with meaning.

      Dunham’s writing in the memoirist mode, one might argue, facilitates the kind of self-reflection that I view as a central element of this tradition. Although Hurston employs a strikingly different kind of narration, selfreflection proves to be a central element in her narrative as well. Typical readings of Tell My Horse diminish the significance of the travel narrative and social commentary that frame the Vodou ethnography because of its impressionistic, ethnocentric, and amateurish tone. I insist, however, that a reading of the “frame” is absolutely necessary because it deconstructs the ethnographic project through proximity. The text lays bare the yoking of imperialist and ethnographic ventures through its multiple modes of representation (travelogue, memoir, ethnography), opening the narrative and its author up to the reader’s scrutiny. It is, in other words, another example of the kind of generic hybridity that Du Bois employed in Souls and that underscores for readers the social position of the “knower.”

      By turning to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in the eighth and final chapter, I investigate the diasporic relations in this text in relation to the center-periphery model of exchange presented by ethnography. In comparison to Tell My Horse, which heavily emphasizes transnational politics and imperialist encounters between Americans and Haitians, Their Eyes, written during Hurston’s stay in Haiti, minimizes colonizer-colonized dynamics and instead foregrounds the shared social and political concerns of African Diasporic communities (specifically Haiti, Harlem, and Eatonville). Their Eyes has typically been understood in local/regional terms, but I place it within a global context of African Diaspora writing.

      In contrast to scholars who argue that the narrative’s turn to the rural South and to the Caribbean displaces African Americans’ increasing movement to urban, Northern centers in the twenties, I argue that Hurston sought to explore through metaphor and symbolism the social and political concerns of African Americans in the North, South, and throughout the Caribbean. In other words, where some might argue that Hurston was stuck in the proverbial village at precisely the moment when significant numbers of African Americans were striking out for the city, I counter with the notion that Hurston found in the village many of the same conflicts, desires, and aspirations as her more urban-identified peers around the Diaspora. By symbolically associating her protagonist, Janie, with the Haitian lwa (goddess) Ezili, Hurston was able to explore those elements that enabled or hindered a collective self-expression and self-determination, the very characteristics that Alain Locke identified with the modern, urban New Negro.³⁵ Haitian Vodou provided Hurston with the ideal vehicle to voice African Diasporic peoples’ (especially

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