Fachbereich Anglistik und AmerikanistikSommersemester 2010

History of American Literature

Prof. Dr. Ralph J. Poole

Harlem Renaissance & After

Essay:• Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery (1901)• W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)• Alan Locke. The New Negro. Short Story and Novel:• Nella Larsen, Passing (1928 Poetry: • Claude McKay, "If We Must Die" (1919), "Harlem Dancer"• Langston Hughes, "The Langston Hughes (1902-1967) "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), "The Weary Blues" (1925), "I,

Too, Sing America" (1925)

Harlem Renaissance• First major movement of

African American literature and arts

• 1920s until Depression, but stimulus lasting through 1940s and longer

• group of artists and intellectuals from Harlem

• Harlem: since Great Migration of African Americans from rural South center for urbanized blacks

“New York! That’s not a place, it’s a dream” (Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man)

Great Migration• Move made by African

Americans from rural South to urban North beginning 20th cent.

• In 1910: 90 % of blacks in South, by 1930 2 mio in esp. New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia

• better economic opportunities in North

• lasting racial injustice in South

• transformation from rural to urban

• migration from South as move to freedom while slavery, afterwards move to self-fulfillment

• compare South North migration with East West migration of 19th cent.: transformation of social landscape of US

The New Negro• New Negro Movement: named after

anthology The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke

• "the old negro ... a creature of moral debate and historical controversy ... a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism ... [T]he Negro has been more of a formula than a human being – a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be 'kept down', or 'in his place', or 'helped up', to be worried with or worried over, to be harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.“ (The New Negro)

The New Negro• “The younger generation is vibrant

with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.“

• „We are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much a problem to ourselves as we still are to others ... but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken."

• “renewed self-respect and self-dependence"

• expressed "in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, his art, his education, and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about."

• New Negro = New American Art: "If after absorbing the new content of American life and experience, and after assimilating new patterns of art … then the Negro may well become what some have predicted, the artist of American life.„

White Modernism: Interest in Primitivism

• primitivism: immediate passion, direct emotion, true expression, archaic psyche

• Eugene O’Neill: The Emperor Jones (1920)

• Carl Van Vechten: Nigger Heaven (1926)

• call for social and artistic interracial co-operation

• Alain Locke: “The fiction is that the life of the races is separate, and increasingly so. The fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels.” (The New Negro)

Black Modernism• move towards “high art” Countee

Cullen: “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet.”

• but also use of folk idiom (Blues), comic writing, vernacular Langston Hughes: „One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me: „I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet“. . . And I was sorry the young man said that for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mould of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.“ ("The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain„)

•

• Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)• Langston Hughes, Weary

Blues (1926)• Claude McKay, Home to

Harlem (1928)• Nella Larsen, Quicksand

(1928), Passing (1929)• Zora Neale Hurston, Their

Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Tradition vs. InnovationIf We Must DieIf we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one eathblow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Claude McKay

The Weary Blues (excerpt)„I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan –

Ain't got nobody in all this world,Ain't got nobody but ma self.I's gwine to quit ma frowin‚And put ma troubles on the shelf.“

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.He played a few chords then he sang some more –

„I got the Weary BluesAnd I can't be satisfied.Got the Weary BluesAnd can't be satisfied –I ain't happy no mo‚And I whish that I had died.“

Langston Hugheshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyqwvC5s4n8

Harlem“The Negro capital of the world“ (James Weldon Johnson)

Josephine Baker The Harlem DancerAPPLAUDING youths laughed with young prostitutesAnd watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;Her voice was like the sound of blended flutesBlown by black players upon a picnic day.She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,The light gauze hanging loose about her form;To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palmGrown lovelier for passing through a storm.Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curlsProfusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;But, looking at her falsely-smiling faceI knew her self was not in that strange place.

Claude McKay

The Cotton ClubCab Calloway and The Cotton Club Orchestra, 1934

Roaring Twenties and Great Depression

• social, technological changes, economical boom (stock market speculations)

• President Herbert Hoover: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.”

“Black Thursday” Oct. 24, 1929 1930s: Great Depression• 1931: 8 mio unemployed, 1932:

12 mio (maybe up to a quarter of population)

• collective trauma after boom

(Wall Street, October 24, 1929)

Thursday, October 24, 1929, Page 1, Col. 1PRICES OF STOCKS CRASH IN HEAVY LIQUIDATION, TOTAL

DROP OF PAPER LOSS $4,000,000,000 ----------

2,600,000 Shares Sold In The Final Hour In Record Decline

Great Depression: 1930s• radical gap between rich

and poor• “bread lines”• class conflict race

conflict• esp. blacks: unemployment,

homelessness, malnutrition, diseases

• 1932: half of black population in South unemployed (new wave of migration to North)

• threat for democracy

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

• first African-American writer to win broad response from reading public

• born in South, experience of oppression turn to Communism until 1944

• Native Son (1940): made him a leading American novelist

Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing (1937)

• Essay• call for politically

engaged and radically social realism (↔ aesthetics and optimism of Harlem R.)

• declaration of cultural independence for black writers

“Are [the Negro writers] being called upon to "preach"? ... To "prostitute" their writing? ... Must they write "propaganda"? No; it is a question of awareness, of consciousness; it is , above all, a question of perspective ... It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people ... Perspective for Negro writers will come when they have looked and brooded so hard and long upon the harsh lot of their race and compared it with the struggles of minority people everywhere that the cold facts have begun to tell them something.”

Wright: Native Son

• Irving Howe: “the day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever”

• Bigger Thomas: from Chicago slums to electric chair (false claim: murder and rape of white girl)

• black rage• radical politics• determinism in underclass black life• white hypocrisy• critical, political realism/naturalism

Ralph (Waldo) Ellison (1913-1994)• resistance to be categorized as

black writer• universalist claim• debate betw. Wright and Ellison

valid for cont. identity politics• although writing about black-

white relationships, critical and satirical treatment of black social, ethnic, regional, moral traditions

• realism (incl. symbolism, expressionism, surrealism)

• mixture of black cultural tradition and white modernism

• The Invisible Man (1952): won National Book Award, regarded as classic of modern American Lit.

The Invisible Man• complex reflection on

individual, collective, and artistic identity

• unnamed first-person narrator born in deep South and adopts compliant behavior of “good Negro”

• his individualism as “invisible”• educated in black college, sent

north to powerful whites who want to place him in high-sounding, but empty positions keeping him “invisible”

• discovery of imposture pitches into chaos of New York City

• bewildering succession of adventures

• falls into a coal cellar disillusioned by world’s absurdity, determines to remain underground and to write down his experiences (= novel)

Invisible Man (excerpt)

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cctjuE95VA

James Baldwin (1924-1987)• not experimentalist, but naturalistic

realist• spokesman for social injustice, anti-

separatism, Christian love• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953):

struggle of intelligent and sensitive boy to transcend Harlem environment and religious fundamentalism of his family

• The Fire Next Time (1963): journalism, powerful impact on civil rights legislation; injustices, indignities, humiliations of African Americans; resistance against withdrawal into black separatism

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS3lpkaLvwQ (scenes from “Sonny’s Blues”)

Baldwin• controversial novels

Giovanni’s Room (1956, young black American in Europe must choose between his “true love” for a man and love for a woman) and Another Country (1962, moral confusion and race hatred of American cities) because of homo- and bisexuality and racial mixing: see Eldridge Cleaver (Black Panthers) in Soul on Ice (1968) accusing Baldwin of racial death wish and self-hatred

• “Sometimes I lie here and I listen, listen for a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I listen to hear them moan. I want them to bleed and choke, I want to hear them crying.” (Rufus, an unhappy jazz musician, realizes his anger and kills himself in Another Country)

Contemporary African American Literature

• 1980s/90s: emancipation of black literature• not writing for or against white audience, but for own ethnic group• Toni Morrison: call for revision, “not just what black people do but the

way we look at it”• finding own aesthetic and narrative techniques• Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964, Alex Haley as ghostwriter)• Alex Haley, Roots (1976)• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972, postmodern-parodist collage on

Harlem Renaissance) • Samuel R. Delany, Atlantis (1995, retro-utopian novel on Harlem) • Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992, on Harlem)“If my work is to confront a realty unlike that realty of the West, it must

centralize and animate information discredited by the West.” (Morrison, “Memory, Creation , and Writing”)

• discredited information: gossip, magic, sentimental …

Alice Walker (1944-)• black (female) experience of South• impressionist, symbolist realism • wisdom of black matriarch, brutality

of low-class black male; white oppression, exploitation; folk heritage, feminism (sexism, rape, abortion, economic injustice)

• The Color Purple (1982): American Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, epistolary novel (see tradition of English sentimental novel). Story of Celie who suffers poverty, racism, sexual abuse, but through strength of character rises to accommodation to her life and restoration to her loved

Toni Morrison (1931-)Jazz (1992)• from agrarian South to

Harlem of 1926• recapturing spirit of Jazz

Age, but also white exoticism and sexual projections

• instead of equation Jazz = Sex focus on oral tradition of Jazz

• multiple voices: bridge between orality and written narration

Beloved (1987)• tradition of slave narrative• story of slave mother who kills

her daughter to safe her, but daughter returns as haunting ghost

• recurrence of traumatic past of slavery

• past not factual reconstruction (Haley) or parodist deconstruction (Reed), but as “rememory”: remembering, working through, overcoming of collective history

Morrison • 1993 Novel Prize• Essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary

Imagination (1991) – omnipresence of blacks in white American literature as

potentially destabilizing feature – readings of Poe, Hemingway, Willa Cather and Faulkner– claim that national consciousness of white Americans rely

on denial of African Americans– but these suppressed figures return as ghosts of history– call for relocating interest from victims (Blacks) to

aggressors (Whites) – re-reading of canonized white texts