Redefining American Identity

HUM 3285: British and American Literature

Spring 2011Dr. Perdigao

February 18, 2011

Race and/in America• 1526: 100 African slaves brought to North American continent

• 1619: Jamestown, Virginia colony established with twenty Africans as indentured servants

• 1645: Trade in African slaves begins in Boston, becoming triangular trade between North/South America, Europe, and Africa

• 1705: Slave code defines slave status: all Negro, mulatto, and Indian non-Christians

• 1740: Comprehensive “Negro Act” denies slaves basic freedoms, including the right to read

• 1760: Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, first dictated slave narrative in America

• 1773: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, first book published by a black slave in America

Race and/in America• 1775: First anti-slavery society organized in Philadelphia

• 1776: Colonies declare independence from Britain; Continental Congress votes against the importation of slaves in all thirteen united colonies

• 1793: First Fugitive Slave Act

• 1808: African slave trade officially ended in Britain

• 1816: American Colonization Society founded in Washington, DC to return freed slaves to Africa

• 1830: International salve trade officially ends; illegal traffic continues

• 1830-60: Slave narratives become the most popular form of American literature

• 1831: Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia; Underground Railroad

• 1833: Oberlin College founded as first coeducational, racially integrated US college

Race and/in America• 1839: Amistad revolt led by Joseph Cinque, carried out by fifty-three Africans

• 1845: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

• 1850s: Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative, first novel by an African American woman; Congress passes second Fugitive Slave Act; fugitive slave hunts

• 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly

• 1853: William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, first known African American novel

• 1857: Dred Scott decision—denial of access to federal courts

• 1861-65: American Civil War

• 1861: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• 1862: Emancipation Proclamation abolishes slavery

Race and/in America• 1865: 13th Amendment passed, freedom to former slaves; Freedmen’s Bureau and

Freedmen’s Bank; Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee; assassination of Lincoln

• 1866: Civil Rights Act—citizenship for all Americans

• 1867: Howard University founded in Washington, D.C. for former slaves; Reconstruction begins

• 1868: 14th Amendment passed, granting African American citizenship and civil rights

• 1870: 15th Amendment passed, giving African American male citizens the right to vote

• 1877: Reconstruction ends

• 1881: Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute in Alabama

• 1883: Supreme Court repeals Civil Rights Act of 1866

Race and/in America• 1896: Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case upholds separate but equal doctrine

• 1901: Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery

• 1903: W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk

• 1909: NAACP founded

• 1910-30: Great Migration of African Americans from South to North, second African Diaspora

• 1910: The Crisis NAACP journal founded; anti-lynching campaign begins

• 1915: Death of Booker T. Washington; Association for the Study of Negro Life and History founded

• 1919: “Red Summer” of more than eighty lynchings and twenty-five race riots; McKay’s “If We Must Die” and Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

Race and/in America• 1920: 19th Amendment gives women right to vote; Prohibition begins; Marcus

Garvey’s First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World leads to the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) for racial solidarity and return to Africa; the New Negro (Harlem) Renaissance begins

• 1923: Toomer’s Cane

• 1925: Alain Locke’s The New Negro, anthology of Harlem Renaissance

• 1926: Hughes’ The Weary Blues and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; Nella Larsen’s Quicksand; Negro History Week established

• 1928: McKay’s Home to Harlem; Larsen’s Passing

• 1933: New Deal legislation; WPA (Works Progress Administration) begins, giving support to writers and artists

• 1937: Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

(The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Ed. Maryemma Graham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.)

Harlem Renaissance• Beginnings in 1914, 1927, spanning 1923-1929 (Heath 1741), even 1895 with

Booker T. Washington’s address

• Colored American Magazine, founded in 1900

• Crisis magazine, established in 1910 for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

• W. E. B. Du Bois, essays on art and culture, running Crisis, with editor Jessie Fauset

• Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity

• Cultural identity, psychological reconstruction, intellectual responsibility as themes in Harlem Renaissance writing

• Alain Locke’s The New Negro, progressive views of writer in black America

• “talented tenth”

Reconstructing a tradition• Social realist or “protest novel” or impressionism or high modernism

• Ideas about culture and cultural transmission

• Recovery and revision of the canon

• African-derived oral forms and traditional Western literary forms

• Uses of the folktale, slave narrative, the blues

• Questioning place of tradition—cultural continuity, innovation, radical change

• “The continuous need to explain and ‘inscribe the self’ in a world which has historically denied the existence of that self gives both focus and intensity to the act of writing a story about black life” (Graham 5).

• Writing as act of cultural revisionism, redefining history and historical memory, confronting the past

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)• Poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, and philosopher

• Born in Washington, D. C.

• Grandfather was former lieutenant governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction; raised by grandparents after the death of his mother

• Dedicated Cane to his grandmother

• Attended University of Wisconsin, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, and New York University; entered University of Wisconsin passing for white

• Changed name from Nathan Pinchback Toomer to Jean Toomer in 1920, after reading influential texts

• Moved to Georgia in 1921 to be acting principal at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute; Toomer in the South twice, for less than three months

• Defined self as American rather than African American

Structuring• Three parts of the novel

• First part—southern women, image of sun, changes to slave system, victims of caste

• Second part—northern cities, cut off from others, loss of spirituality

• Third part—dramatic narrative

• “Blood-burning Moon” as end of first section of Cane, only story staging confrontation between races

• Not a woman’s name

• Louisa, Tom Burwell, Bob Stone

• Moon as character, taking part in the tragedy

• William M. Ramsey’s “Jean Toomer’s Eternal South”

• Two Souths—historical oppression and lack of progress and “eternal South” as site of culture

Reading Race• “points to a cosmic order detached from blind and earth-bound human passions”

(Ramsey 87)

• The South giving Toomer an identity, liberating him from the loss of spirituality in modernism

• Jennifer D. Williams’ “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning”

• Battle over masculinity rooted in the economics of slavery (Williams 95)

• Lynching—protection of white womanhood, here over a black woman

• White men’s rape of black women as other story

• Male/female, light/dark, North/South, black/white, urban/countryside, narrative closure/fragmentation (Heath 1743)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)• Born in 1891 in Alabama, fifth of eight children; family moved to Eatonville, first

incorporated black community in America; father as mayor

• Attended Howard University; graduated from Barnard College, studying with Franz Boas

• Short story “Spunk” published in Locke’s The New Negro

• Collecting folklore in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana

• Returns to Eatonville in 1927 during Great Migration under fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History

• Folklore collection Mules and Men (1935); novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

• Mules and Men as first collection of black American folklore by African American

• Death in poverty, burial, headstone by Alice Walker

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)• Wrote Mules and Men in Eau Gallie and Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti

while on Guggenheim fellowship doing ethnographic research

• Worked for the WPA writing sections on folklore for volume on “The Florida Negro”

• Changes in landscape for fiction with Native Son, ideas about the protest novel

• Idea of preserving and adapting cultural practices versus creating in the dominant style of the time

• In 1950s, moved back to Eau Gallie

• Scandal with writing to editor of the Orlando Sentinel criticizing ruling in Brown v. Board of Education

• Dies in Fort Pierce, in a welfare home

• 1960s and 1970s, resuscitation of Hurston’s works

Gildings • Double-voiced narration

• Inside/outside perspectives

• Missie May and Joe

• “But there was something happy about the place” (1839)

• Otis D. Slemmons—from Chicago

• “Hes jes’ got a corperation. Dat make ‘m look lak a rich white man” (1841).

• Moon, sun

• Gilded half dollar

Langston Hughes (1902-67)• Hughes born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri to stenographer father and mother who

wrote and acted

• Father left for Cuba and then Mexico; failed reconciliation with mother; Hughes lived in Kansas with his working mother; after grandmother died, lived with mother in Illinois

• 1916: Hughes named class poet at Ohio school

• 1918: Published verse and short stories in Central High Monthly Magazine

• 1919: Spent summer with father in Mexico; lives with him for a year

• 1921: Hughes published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis; enrolled in Columbia University; met Fauset, Du Bois, Cullen

• 1922: Withdrew from Columbia; continued to publish

• 1923: Wrote “The Weary Blues” after visiting a Harlem cabaret

Langston Hughes (1902-67)• 1923: Visited Africa while sailing on steamship

• 1924: Settled in Paris; influence of jazz

• 1925: Lived in Washington, DC with mother; won Opportunity magazine’s poetry prize for “The Weary Blues”

• 1926: Entered Lincoln University

• 1927: Met patron Charlotte Mason (“Godmother”); traveled with Hurston who was also supported by Mason

• 1929: Graduated from Lincoln; completed first novel

• 1930: Visited Cuba; Hughes broke with Mason, Hurston, Locke

• 1931: Traveled to Haiti and in 1932 and 1933 Moscow

• 1940: published autobiography The Big Sea in same year as Richard Wright’s Native Son

Langston Hughes (1902-67)• 1942: Worked for war effort on projects for the Office of Civil Defense and

Writer’s War Committee

• 1944: FBI surveillance of Hughes for alleged communist activity; attacked by Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives

• 1948: Hughes denounced as a communist in the U.S. Senate

• 1953: Served subpoena to appear before Senator McCarthy’s subcommittee on subversive activities; was exonerated but attacks continued

• 1961: Inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters

• 1967: Died after illness, prostate surgery