Jean Toomer

How a Greek exile and mystic teacher influenced America's Harlem Renaissance

What constitutes "blackness" in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more "authentic" than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement-also known as the Harlem Renaissance-to explore early challenges to the idea that race is a static category. Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the "folk"-those African Americans "furthest down," in the words of Alain Locke-& how the representation of the folk & the black middle class both spurred the New Negro Movement & became one of its most serious points of contention. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Houston Baker as well as theorists Judith Butler & Stuart Hall, Favor looks closely at the work of four Harlem Renaissance fictions writers: James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, & Jean Toomer. Arguing that each of these writers had, at best, an ambiguous relationship to African American folk culture, Favor demonstrates how they each sought to redress the notion of a fixed black identity. Authentic Blackness illustrates how "race" has functioned as a type of performative discourse, a subjectivity that simultaneously builds & conceals its connections with such factors as class, gender, sexuality, & geography. Offering new insight into the work of the Harlem Renaissance as well as concepts of racialized identity, Authentic Blackness will be welcomed by all those involved in the study of African American literature & culture. It will also be of interest to those concerned more generally with issues surrounding constructions of race.

The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.

During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American culture flourished. The period gave birth to numerous significant and enduring creative works that were at once American and emblematic of the black experience in particular. Even though those who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance recognized that they had much in common, they also distinguished themselves from one another. This book approaches the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of the conflict between individual and group identity. Central to the imaginative effort of the era was an unresolved tension to construct an individual as well as a collective identity; this tension continues to characterize contemporary African-American culture.

Definitions of modernism have been debated throughout the twentieth century. But both during the height of the modernist era and since, little to no consideration has been given to the work of minority writers as part of this movement. Considering works by writers ranging from B.A. Botkin, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Frank, and Jean Toomer to Pedro Pietri and Allen Ginsberg, these essays examine the disputed relationships between modernity, modernism, and American cultural diversity. In so doing, the collection as a whole adds an important new dimension to our understanding of twentieth-century literature.

While the height of the Harlem Renaissance occurred more than seventy years ago, in many ways it still has an effect on our culture. "The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined" brings to light long-neglected writers and artists from that era for a second look at the roles that they played in developing the arts in America, and for a re-evaluation of thier talents.

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was "invented" as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white "color line", the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality.

At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public's attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact,inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and "deviance" were sexual used to reinforce each other's terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis's late-nineteenth-century work on "sexual inversion", the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer's fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.

Queering the Color Line will have broadappeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.