Spoofing the Modern

Darryl Dickson-Carr

Description

An examination of satirical texts from the first major African American literary movement

Spoofing the Modern is the first book devoted solely to studying the role satire played in the movement known as the "New Negro," or Harlem, Renaissance from 1919 to 1940. As the first era in which African American writers and artists enjoyed frequent access to and publicity from major New York-based presses, the Harlem Renaissance helped the talents, concerns, and criticisms of African Americans to reach a wider audience in the 1920s and 1930s. These writers and artists joined a growing chorus of modernity that frequently resonated in the caustic timbre of biting satire and parody.

The Harlem Renaissance was simultaneously the first major African American literary movement of the twentieth century and the first major blooming of satire by African Americans. Such authors as folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Langston Hughes, journalist George S. Schuyler, writer-editor-poet Wallace Thurman, physician Rudolph Fisher, and artist Richard Bruce Nugent found satire an attractive means to criticize not only American racism, but also the trials of American culture careening toward modernity. Frequently, they directed their satiric barbs toward each other, lampooning the painful processes through which African American artists struggled with modernity, often defined by fads and superficial understandings of culture.

Dickson-Carr argues that these satirists provided the Harlem Renaissance with much of its most incisive cultural criticism. The book opens by analyzing the historical, political, and cultural circumstances that allowed for the "New Negro" in general and African American satire in particular to flourish in the 1920s. Each subsequent chapter then introduces the major satirists within the larger movement by placing each author's career in a broader cultural context, including those authors who shared similar views. Spoofing the Modern concludes with an overview that demonstrates how Harlem Renaissance authors influenced later cultural and literary movements.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• New Negro
• The Passing of the Great Race
• Richard Bruce Nugent
• George Schuyler
• Pudd'nhead Wilson
• Hubert Harrison
• Postmodern literature
• Demagogy
• Ishmael Reed
• Populism
• Modernity
• Miscegenation
• Postmodernism
• Modernism
• Iconoclasm
• African American
• Thomas Nast
• American
• Jean Toomer
• Black
• Ambrose Bierce
• Satire

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 06 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611174939
• Langue: English

Extrait

Spoofing the Modern
Spoofing the Modern
Satire in the Harlem Renaissance
Darryl Dickson-Carr
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-492-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-493-9 (ebook)
Front cover design by Herbie Hollar, illustration istockphoto/Juan Darien
For Carol and Maya
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Toward a Revision of the Harlem Renaissance
2 The Importance of Being Iconoclastic: George S. Schuyler, the Messenger , and the Black Menckenites
3 Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the Reification of Race, Aesthetics, and Sexuality
4 Dickties vs. Rats: Class and Regional Differences within the New Negro Movement
5 Punchlines
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been completed without the encouragement and criticism of some selfless colleagues and friends, as well as generous funding and support from several different sources. I only hope that my thanks here convey the extent of my gratitude to all parties. Needless to say, I bear full responsibility for all mistakes found herein.
First and foremost, my wife, Carol, took upon herself the arduous task of pushing me in the right direction every time my enthusiasm flagged or my reach seemed to exceed my grasp. Our daughter, Maya, offered her love and understanding as her father disappeared for long hours to work in the office or in local coffee shops.
At Southern Methodist University, I am indebted to the Office of the Dean in Dedman College for granting extended leaves of absence to continue my research and writing and the Department of English for providing research funds for books, travel, computers, and other resources. Kathleen Hugley-Cook of SMU s National Fellowships office helped me obtain-with the dean s endorsement-a Sam Taylor Fellowship from the United Methodist Church s General Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
In the Department of English, Professors Steven Weisenburger, Ezra Greenspan, and Nina Schwartz sought the most generously advantageous resources and helped to protect my time as best they could during their respective tenures as department chair. Professors Schwartz, Dennis Foster, Lisa Siraganian, Dan Moss, Beth Newman, and Rajani Sudan read an early draft of my discussion of Rudolph Fisher and helped shape it into a more readable contribution to the overall project. I am eternally grateful to our Ph.D. program s students, who asked about my progress, applauded the smallest milestones, and taught me more than I could ever imagine.
I began this project while still on the faculty at Florida State University, where funds from the College of Arts and Sciences supported the initial archival research and writing. I would like to thank my former colleagues in the Department of English: Professor Jerrilyn McGregory read early drafts, suggested research aids, and offered unwavering support. Professors Christopher Shinn, Leigh Edwards, Maxine Montgomery, former English Chair Hunt Hawkins (now at University of South Florida), Professors Marcy North (now at Pennsylvania State University), Barry Faulk, and Chanta M. Haywood (now at Albany State University) also took precious time to read early drafts and offer critical advice. Professor Raymond Fleming in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature continuously inquired about and critiqued my work and served as an indispensable mentor and advisor.
I presented early versions of these chapters at successive conventions of the College Language Association and at Pennsylvania State University s biannual Celebrating African American Literature Conference, among other occasions. In each case I enjoyed a wealth of critical feedback, guidance, and support from peers working in African American literary studies.
Finally, special thanks go to the professional archivists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, the New York Public Library s Manuscripts and Archives Division, Yale University s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Brown University s John Hay Library, and the Moorland-Spingarn Center at Howard University.
1
Toward a Revision of the Harlem Renaissance
African America of the New Negro Renaissance era-from the 1910s through the 1930s-and Harlem in particular were ready for satire. The period s circumstances primed black communities for the sharp wit and wry comfort of the satirist s perspective like no other in their collective history to date. The horrors of chattel slavery in the United States required the enslaved to use humor and indirection to cope with the unspeakable. Those who gained their freedom had a greater degree of license, however slight, to express their thoughts, often with the aid of abolitionists and through that movement s lens. Activists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, David Walker, and Sojourner Truth relied upon parody, irony, and sarcasm to construct their narratives, essays, pamphlets, and addresses against slavery and in favor of women s rights. The myriad of triumphs and setbacks African Americans alternately enjoyed and endured from the beginning of Reconstruction, though, might not have seemed the best material for satire. Between the steady development of black disfranchisement; neo-slavery in the forms of peonage, chain gangs, sharecropping, and tenant farming; and the terrorism of lynching through bloodthirsty mobs and such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and the Regulators, it seemed that African Americans had scant sources for satire. Whether they did or not, they certainly lacked a critical mass of authors that could have developed the genre.
This is not to say that American writers, broadly speaking, did not attempt satire involving African American characters; quite the contrary. Mark Twain s greatest works- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd nhead Wilson most prominently among them-challenged the nation s smugness with regard to its opinion of its black denizens, albeit by drawing upon common stereotypes about and images of African Americans that became popular in postbellum America. African Americans figured prominently in the editorial cartoons of Thomas Nast and in Ambrose Bierce s essays, articles, and stories, but often as the objects of ridicule, or as devices allowing the creator to satirize one of the major political parties. While the nation s attitudes toward African Americans came under scrutiny, it was difficult to find signs that they had any positive effect upon the status of African Americans.
The white majority s general attitude toward African Americans reflected beliefs about race underscored by science and pseudo-science, with the darker races inevitably emerging as childlike, bestial primitives who needed the guidance and dominance of white civilization to prevent them from relapsing into the savagery that defined Africa and Asia. From Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Darwin, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, among many others, intellectual justifications for white supremacy were the norm rather than the exception. As Martin Japtok recounts, these beliefs found expression most prominently in the Black Codes that defined white supremacy and black inferiority after the Civil War. 1 Although the U.S. Congress put an end to most of the Black Codes via both the Reconstruction Acts and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, this short-term support for the freedmen and their descendants did not last beyond the end of Reconstruction. Instead, full support for white supremacy eventually became de rigueur in everyday life, from intellectual circles down to the common person. Japtok cites, as but one example, Frederick L. Hoffman s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), which used flimsy scientific evidence to determine the inherent weakness and depravity of African Americans and the futility of policies of racial uplift. 2
Published the same year as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and one year after Booker T. Washington s landmark address at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta that conceded African Americans political rights in favor of industry and segregation, Hoffman s volume was among many signs that convinced such younger black intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances E. W. Harper, and William Monroe Trotter that a policy of passive acceptance of white dominance was a policy of failure that would establish a permanent underclass and squelch opportunities for African Americans to speak and thereby to become equal components in the American body politic. Simply to protest the Booker Washington-dominated leadership of the time was to be militant, even radical. Little wonder, then, that satire could hardly be found outside of editorial pages and folk witticisms.
On the rare occasions that African American authors possessing a satirical sensibility and sharp wit found major magazines and publishers willing to print their work, the results were subtle and complex, as seen in Charles Chesnutt s local color stories and gothic protest novels. Chesnutt succeeded in the former primarily via his disarming storyteller, Uncle Julius McAdoo, to undermine common, humiliating literary and cultural stereotypes and to lampoon whites romantic view of slavery after the peculiar institution s demise. In his novels, especially The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt highlighted the unequal treatment afforded African Americans, especially the best of the race, as embodied in the doctors,