through ethnographic conventions-indeed, by transforming ethnographic paradigms—these artists and intellectuals carve open spaces from which Black people’s experiences and desires seep out, refusing the social scientist and the larger society’s attempts at cultural acquisition, mastery, and containment.12
Encounters in the Field: Anthropological Methods and Literary Symbols
Ethnographic literature of the Harlem Renaissance shares many of the defining characteristics of ethnography, a genre that depends on a method, namely fieldwork, to produce a narrative that simultaneously invents and documents a culture. New Negro encounters with the ethnographic imagination resulted in, for example, literature that attends to the Black intellectual’s travel to, participation in, and observation of folk communities. Although most of the artists I focus on were closely identified with the Harlem Renaissance, it is important to note that their interest in ethnography, anthropology, and folklore took them to places outside of New York City, such as the rural South and the Caribbean, and that such locations played a central role in their creative work. The trope of travel to bounded, symbolic sites of Black culture (for example, the South and Haiti) is indebted to an ethnographic method, established by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, which privileges the immersion of the participant-observer in the “field.”13 Sterling Brown, who, by virtue of his youth and residence in the South during the twenties, is least identified with the Harlem Renaissance, articulates the centrality of traveling to the South to his poetry in a 1974 interview in which he declared, “when they were down there [in Harlem] flirting with Carl Van Vechten, I was down south talking to Big Boy.”14 The point I want to make is that each of the writers examined in this book spent time down South (or in other culturally identified spaces) talking to their own trusted informants, and went on to incorporate those fieldwork-like journeys into their fiction, essays, anthologies, and theories of blackness.
New Negro ethnographic literature, produced after fieldwork and/or folklore collecting endeavors, was not exclusively ethnographic. While some of the texts I discuss were produced explicitly to describe the defining attributes of cultures perceived as exotic or primitive, others describe in fictional or nonfiction forms the contact between ethnographer-like observers and peoples indigenous to a location, and still other texts present themselves as nothing more than works of art (whether dance, fiction, or poetry) and only the works’ symbolism hold the signs of their ethnographic origins. Narratives of ethnographic encounters allowed Black intellectuals to explore “native” encounters not only with ethnographers but also with other figures who represent literate, dominant society. These representations offer their authors the chance to stage the complex dynamics between center and periphery in narratives that may feature not only anthropologists but also Black teachers, community leaders, and other members of the professional classes who often returned to and interacted with their communities as liminal figures, participant-observers who are modeled, at least in part, on the fieldworker so central to the ethnographic method.
This book is also about generic encounters between ethnography and other, primarily literary, genres and the cultural productions that emerge as a result. Ethnographic literature (a form related to but distinct from ethnography) is typically understood as conforming to the formal constraints of literary realism, offering empirical representations of a community’s social, economic, and political life.15 Without diminishing the intellectual and artistic merit of such works, I focus primarily on texts that are not explicitly ethnographic in intent, but that use ethnography to trouble or expand the conventional limits of particular artistic forms (such as Sterling Brown’s poetry and Katherine Dunham’s choreography), or that use literary form and conventions to problematize and render more complex the conceptual frames of ethnography (such as Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk). Many of these authors systematically wrote against the grain of ethnographic conventions that insisted on a “scientific” presentation of folkloric materials at the same time that they challenged literary conventions. Their work compels us to question equally what attributes of a narrative cause it to merit the labels, “ethnographic” or “literary” because these authors refused to be limited by convention or orthodoxy.
Hurston, for example, was thrilled at the possibility that literature and folklore could not only interact, but also intermingle. She wrote to Langston Hughes, for example, about her efforts to promote his poetry in the Florida communities to which she traveled:
In every town I hold 1 or 2 story-telling contests, and at each I begin by telling them who you are and all, then I read poems from “Fine Clothes.” Boy! They eat it up. Two or three of them are too subtle and they don’t get it … but the others they just eat up. You are being quoted in R. R. camps, phosphate mines, Turpentine stills, etc.… So you see they are making it so much a part of themselves they go to improvising on it.16
Hurston pushed the boundaries more than others in that she was able to imagine a world not only in which literate society developed the capacity to appreciate and appropriate folk communities, but also in which folk communities could appropriate and appreciate “mainstream” art and culture and use it to their own ends. While she represents an extreme in the array of authors I examine in this book, she is not unique because they all consider the fertile possibilities of creative and conceptual cross-fertilization between ethnography and other genres. For the most part, I restrict my focus primarily to figures that have produced a wide and deep narrative body on the multiple experiences of encountering ethnography, including narratives by the dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, who also wrote about the paradoxes and peculiarities of fieldwork.
Genres such as fiction and memoir may enable the kind of self-reflection that I view as a central and inherent element of this tradition. But I find equally compelling texts that combine ethnography with a range of other genres because generic hybridity is a mode of representation central to the Black modernist imagination. By juxtaposing radically different narratives within the same text, African American intellectuals developed a critical strategy for writing about the multiple factors that contributed to representations of “other” cultures. The hybrid narrative in and of itself is a theoretical site in which knowledge production can be queried and staged. Juxtaposing different modes of representation compels the reader to question how we know what we know. Zora Neale Hurston and W. E. B. Du Bois will be emblematic of this rhetorical stance because they, more than the other authors in this study, use different forms of address within the same texts to open up a space of critical inquiry about the social position of the knower.17
In Inventing the New Negro, I focus on the art and/or ethnographies produced by Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown. The ethnographic novel has traditionally held an appeal for marginalized individuals, habitually excluded from academic positions and seeking a wider audience for their work; and ethnography has always been influenced by literature.18 By focusing on these individuals, I am able to examine the processes by which artists and intellectuals used ethnography to self-reflexively assume the roles of translators and explicators of African American and African Diasporic folk cultures to Western audiences.
A large number of Renaissance-era writers, because of the movement’s focus on cross-cultural translation, saw in ethnography, which entered its “classical period” at the turn of the twentieth century, both a mode that facilitated this representational endeavor and a discursive framework that brought into relief the vexed interplay between dominant and marginalized groups.19 New Negro writers provide complex portraits of ethnography as instrument of colonialism and heroic venture.20 On the one hand, they seized hold of ethnography’s claim to be able to translate seemingly incomprehensible actions into “meaningful” behavior.21 On the other hand, all of these writers, to varying degrees, recognized the epistemological constraints of an academic discipline rooted, as anthropology was, in conditions of colonial conquest and domination.
Du Bois, Johnson, Brown, Dunham, and Hurston wrote during a time when White Americans’ fascination with African and African-derived
