insider to Black cultures imbue the texts with a strong measure of self-consciousness, ambivalence, and irony.
Anthropologist James Clifford calls participant-observation “shorthand for a continuous tacking between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of events: on the one hand grasping the sense of specific occurrences and gestures empathetically, on the other stepping back to situate these meanings in wider contexts” (34). This stance, which he deems inevitably ironic, proved both cumbersome and enabling for the writers I examine in this study. They shuttle continually between the inside and outside of the cultures they observed. Their resistance to an ethnographic authority based solely on scientific detachment and an absolute assurance of the boundaries between the observer and the observed anticipates poststructuralist critiques of such anthropological conventions, making these individuals—who are to this day frequently dismissed as amateur or failed anthropologists—innovators in the field.33
The ethnography—produced explicitly by Hurston, Dunham, and Du Bois and implicitly by Johnson and Brown-which is characterized by its blurring of inside and outside and its writer’s mobile subject position, has found fuller articulation in the work of contemporary theorists such as George Marcus and James Clifford. Their works’ openness to confronting the politics and poetics of representation anticipates the postmodern era’s “crisis of representation.”34 The native ethnographer privileged the blurring of boundaries between social 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
