both the looker and a subject under scrutiny, as does her slippage from writing about listening to folktales, to writing about her audience reading her narrative. By linking her text so closely with a community that is never willing to completely expose itself to scrutiny, Hurston subtly challenges the assumption that one can attain complete, unmediated access to this culture by reading the ethnographic narrative. “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind,” she insists and the reader wonders if the speaker is the informant or the ethnographer.
The answer, of course, is that Hurston is both native informant, by virtue of her racial identity and place of origin, and ethnographer, by virtue of her training. This duality, resulting in a subject I call the native ethnographer, is common to all New Negro writers who delved into anthropology and ethnography, even those not as intimately familiar with Southern culture and mores as Hurston. Thus, the focus of any critique of this body of literature is always, inescapably, on narrative, positionality, and the relation between the two. New Negro artists and writers looked to ethnography for strategies for representing their cultural identity and combating racist preconceptions at the same time that they maintained a firm grasp of themselves as culture-workers and creative individuals. Therefore, even as I foreground the influential role played by ethnography in African American artistic expression, I caution against ethnographic readings of literary texts that look for signs of authenticity and bind the narrative by expectations of the “real.” As Hurston’s commentary suggests, such expectations—even in supposedly straightforward ethnographies—are bound to be confounded.2
The Spy-Glass of Anthropology and the Black Modernist Gaze
By examining the New Negroes’ strategies for self-examination, I am suggesting a new way to think about their modernity. One aspect of New Negro modernity is the insistence on a way of seeing that dislocates ways of knowing especially visible in their literature’s engagement with anthropology. Their writing shows how a culture can be perceived in multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways, inviting, like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, the possibility of the “dawning of a [different] aspect” each time an object is encountered. Wittgenstein writes, “If you search in a figure (1) for another figure (2), and then you find it, you see (1) in a new way. Not only can you give a new kind of description of it, but noticing the second figure was a new visual experience.”3 New Negro literature is equally disorienting (or, more accurately, multiply oriented) in that its creators produce multiple, fluid, and dynamic portraits of African America, depictions that resist absolutist thinking about the other. Thus, even as they respond to and challenge stereotypical representations of African Americans as subhuman and inferior, they resist questions of truth and illusion, authenticity and falsity, and turn our attention to a redefinition of truth as multiply unfolding and composed of a constellation of interconnected concepts and experiences.
New Negroes were modernists because of their willingness to grapple with the uncertainty of knowing and to use this in self-reflection. In this way, Black modernism echoes the larger sense of instability and uncertainty in the face of multiple and rapid social change that characterized U.S. society in the interwar years. Although Houston Baker distinguishes Black modernist preoccupations from “high” modernist unease, common ground can be found in both groups’ narrative explorations of modern instability that center on the gaze.4 Baker identifies high modernist preoccupations as centering around a kind of “civilization and its discontents” that not only excludes the contributions of African American modernists but also situates Black people as the polar opposite of a “civilization” in decline and mourned for by Elliot, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and the rest. While I agree with his contention that Black modernists had concerns that differed from those of some of their Anglo-American peers, my point here is that they jumped right into the discursive fray and challenged on its own terms the colonizing gaze that would render them unspeakably and monstrously other.
One example of this modern and modernist unease has been examined by Mitchell Breitwieser.5 Breitwieser cites as evidence of the trauma brought about by shifting racial and social hierarchies various instances in which F. Scott Fitzgerald proposes and then rapidly shuts down the possibility of Negro subjectivity, figured through the image of a “fugitive” gaze (23). Fitzgerald describes one such incident when Nick and Gatsby, riding in Gatsby’s car, witness another vehicle: “As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.”6 Breitwieser offers a number of insightful observations about this scene, including the foreclosed possibility of cross-racial identification as the pair of socially ambitious, upwardly mobile White men pass by and then rebuff a group of equally ambitious African Americans whom they dismiss as upstarts. What I want to focus on here, however, is the significance he reads into the series of looks and counterlooks that pass between them. Breitwieser states:
Deprived of a look that supplied a way of being seen to which we have grown accustomed and with which we have merged ourselves, we are suddenly captured in another look that does not see us as we are—or rather, that does not see us as we wish to be seen, but sees instead what we have secretly feared to be the case about ourselves, squalid, peculiar attributes and motives over which dead love had urged us not to worry, but now, incited by this novel gaze, escape the restraint of a reassuring normality, insist upon themselves, itch at us. (19)
The gaze, from the perspective of Anglo-American modernism, is an attribute that connotes consciousness and the powers to reason, universalize, and objectify that which the viewer surveys. The modernist anxiety arises when Gatsby and Nick become aware of an other, presumed to lack these attributes, witnessing their activities. They experience something very similar to what W. E. B. Du Bois labeled double-consciousness, the awareness that another’s perception of one’s self differs radically from one’s own selfunderstanding. Nick and Gatsby immediately displace the anxiety and confusion that it generates by reasserting their dominance by objectifying the “Negroes,” invoking the minstrel image of rolling eyes, and equating them with food, capable of being consumed but never having the power or capacity to “consume” another.
While the Anglo-modernist gaze in this instance is characterized by its dislocation and anxious restoration of a previous sense of order, we see in New Negro ethnography and ethnography-inspired writing an engagement with modernity that insists on displacement and resists the reassertion of racial and social hierarchies exemplified by Gatsby and Nick’s colonizing looks. I do not mean to elide the differences between the modernist’s will to not see and modern anthropology’s establishment of a tradition of gazing on the other from a position of objectivity and with a commitment to ideas of cultural relativism. But what links these different ways of looking (one racist and one progressive) is the colonizing impulse to construct and contain through observation and narration. What I argue is that New Negro writers interrogate and ultimately critique the colonizing gaze on the racialized subject, intersecting and shifting the presuppositions of both literary modernism and modernist anthropology by making their narratives as much about epistemology as they are about objectivity.
In Mules and Men, Hurston never positions herself as an all-seeing and transcendent anthropologist. Instead her mentor, Franz Boas, suggests in his preface to this collection of folklore that she garners her authority from her likeness to her informants, who are assumed to be open to and available for examination. Hurston’s visibility in the narrative is reinforced by the dual roles she performed as both social scientist and raced individual. Boas validates this duality in the preface when he writes, “the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work [is] that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood” (x). Boas expected that sharing racial and cultural traits with Eatonville’s inhabitants would facilitate Hurston’s identification with “the folk” and her participation in communal rituals, presumably making more “authentic” her representation of Black folk life. He also expected and assumed that she would maintain her objectivity and scientific detachment, another precondition of producing a cultural portrait that
