Borders, Boundaries, and Frames

Mae Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415909303
• eBook ISBN: 9781317959120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume take up the challenge of working out -- or reworking -- the problematics of the borders, the boundaries and the frameworks that structure our various and multiple notions of identity -- textual, personal, collective, generic, and disciplinary. The contributors to this volume write about subjects (and are often themselves subjects) who "refuse to occupy a single territory" -- who cross geographical, cultural, national, linguistic, generic, specular and disciplinary borders.

Essays by Kathryn Hellerstein, Anita Goldman, Jane Marcus and Scott Malcomson exlpore the semiotics of exile and the problem of its representation in the lives and writings of individual aritists and intellectuals. Autobiographical criticism, as represented in the essays by Nancy Miller and Sara Suleri, enlargess our conventional notions of what consitutes literature in general and criticism in particular.

PART I

CROSSING BORDERS: EXILE AND LANGUAGE

1.

Bonding and Bondage: Nancy Cunard and the Making of the Negro Anthology

JANE MARCUS

BONDING AND BONDAGE

It ought to be self-evident that Judaism in no way touches on the mass murder of Jews by Gentile Germans and their Gentile European helpers; nor is the Holocaust, though its victims were Jews, a product of Jewish history or civilization. Oppression belongs to the culture of the oppressors.

Cynthia Ozick¹

If it is true that oppression belongs to the culture of the oppressors, then it is also true that cultural historians need to remember that they are the ones who name and catalogue histories.² Blaming the victim has too often been the result of attributing oppression to those who were oppressed. For slavery continues to be studied as a problem in black history, when it is surely (firstly rather than also) a subject in the story of white cultures. Yet the identity of the historians and producers of knowledge about subject peoples has recently been scrutinized mercilessly for purity of motive and mind-set. Anyone who might possibly belong to the family of “oppressors” has been eliminated as an authority. Or at least I’m assuming that it was her gender, her color, her class, her politics and her several sexualities as a set of (shifting) identities which set all the red lights flashing on everybody’s indicators of “political correctness” well before the popularity of the phrase but not the activity—to discredit Nancy Cunard as an intellectual historian of black culture. If slavery is not just a problem in black history, then why are a white European woman’s extraordinary efforts to understand it and to write and circulate its many complex and overlapping different histories ignored or marginalized by black intellectuals and activists as well as white historians?

My project in this paper is to ask why Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) has been eliminated or discredited as a producer of knowledge in all the fields to which she contributed, why her voice has been silenced in the histories of the several modern(ist) discourses to which she contributed. Given her indifference to feminism, it would be ironic if the chief cause of the loss of Nancy Cunard’s presence as a radical intellectual was her gender. She was not the kind of role model usually offered to aspiring young crusaders for social justice. She’d be a failure as a heroine in a “Lives of Great Women” series, and feminists will not find a long-lost champion of women’s rights when her achievements are reviewed. Her life was not a happy one, nor was it stable in any sense. Women are supposed to live stably and provide stability for others. Nancy Cunard was a revolutionary, dedicating her life to political upheaval, committed to changing the world. But the standard narratives of revolutionary lives provide no pattern—except perhaps the lives of Russian upper class Anarchists. Revolutionaries are supposed to come from the working class. British intellectuals and historians of that class have not rushed to claim her as their own (The attitude is similar to the encouragement of class suspicion against Virginia Woolf’s socialism and feminism. They are suspicious of her motives.) From the point of view of her birth, she was a class traitor, and so she is seen by biographers and spies for international intelligence agencies alike. Her other survival is as an eccentric, a stagey and flamboyant “character,” like her fellow-poet Edith Sitwell. The place where she most deserves to be honored is the history of the struggle against racism in Britain and the U.S. She was a major figure from the Left in the British Black Liberation movement in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. When the stories of African anti-colonial struggles are written, perhaps it is here that she will find her place in history.

Half-educated by governesses by her rich Irish-American mother (Maud Burke) and Sir Bache Cunard, inheritor of the shipping fortune, she renounced family and fortune and educated herself in the history of racial oppression and trained herself as a writer and publisher, journalist and anthropologist. As an English expatriate self-made “expert” on black culture and the history of slavery, she does not fit easily into the one anti-racist discourse which does exist, that created by white Englishwomen who worked in the anti-slavery movement, documented and analyzed by feminist intellectual historian Moira Ferguson in Subject to Others— unless it proves to be the case that the missing feminism in her story is really there and has been suppressed.³

Her name did her more harm than good. As brilliantly as her mother, Lady Emerald Cunard, had shone in her London literary and artistic salon with her (also married) lover Sir Thomas Beecham, Nancy’s Hours Press office at 15 rue Guénégaud in Paris gave off a different sort of vibe, an antipatriotic glow made of blue notes and red flags and ivory bracelets,— a certain surrealist glamour composed of sex, primitivism, left politics and jazz. And there she staged a series of salons in the 20s and 30s around the intersections of surrealism, communism, avant-garde writing, African art and ivory artifacts, jazz and anti-fascism in Spain, a center where African intellectuals and political leaders and black artists from all over the world were apt to meet Beckett or Janet Flanner, Louis Aragon or George Moore.

But she was not a hostess or a lady with a salon, as a historian of women surrealists who had never heard of her assumed when she asked contemptuously, “Did she do anything?” Nancy Cunard was primarily what we used to call in the civil rights and antiwar movements, a full-time political organizer. She was a living network, a one-woman permanent walking demonstration against racism and fascism, and a celebrant of black culture in all its forms. She had a voice in shaping all the competing and conflicting discourses of modernism, but in their histories there is only the marginal trace of a husky whisper, a smudge like a streak of kohl across those hooded piercing eyes remembered in a malicious footnote. She was an autodidact, a self-made intellectual and political organizer. And she was very successful at her work. She produced an enormous amount of knowledge to combat racism and to invite Europe and the West to see Africa and Negro cultures as civilizations. Her work and the work of those she organized to produce the monumental Negro anthology, an international body of progressive intellectuals and artists of all races working together to produce and disseminate knowledge about black culture, was ridiculed, lost, dismissed, made fun of, ignored—and then it was done all over again. This is what gives me a chill. The case of the loss of the Negro anthology is an example of what happens to the histories of all oppressed groups when they have no institutions—universities, libraries, museums, art galleries—to protect and value, cherish and circulate them. (I always tell my students that my collection of books by women writers on feminism was bought in book sales by the university library. I was buying what the institutions of knowledge preservation were throwing away.)

Nancy Cunard is remembered as a bad bold body, the subject of some stunning photographs by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and their colleagues in the visual avant-gardes of London and Paris. The problem with this limited role allowed on the margins of the numerous “fields” in which she worked, or, rather, the use of photographs of her to illustrate modernist texts and trends, is that her central generative activity is denied—as if Hemingway, for example, were remembered only in the louche snapshots of his friends and not for the shape and length of his sentences.

That body and its self-fetishizing is indeed one of my subjects. But I want to open up the question of what it means when a white woman of the mistress class stages herself as a slave, binds and shackles her body and her head in shameless and fashionable display of political solidarity which, contrary to her intentions, highlights difference. What happens when she revels physically in the primitivism she is articulating as modernism? How much irony is there in Cunard’s costumes? Who shared it? And who shares it now?

We can begin to think about some answers when we acknowledge that it is not uncommon for the arc of desire to intersect with the arc of intellectual activity, for art and work to focus on exchanges between the body of the self and the other, especially in the encounter between surrealism and anthropology which generated so much of Cunard’s cultural work. Heming way’s body might be studied along with his fiction and reportage. The sex life of the ethnographer has become the focus of recent genealogies of modernist anthropology and Michel Leiris has become a hero to his successors. But none of the writers cite Cunard. I believe her work was just as important as that of Leiris, who does in fact cite her political bravery and devotion to the cause of black culture, but then he had the protection of the institution of the Musée de I’Homme to allow for the playfulness of surrealist autobiography to mask the fact that he served the state in a daily job in which African and other forms of primitive art were collected, studied and displayed. He had an empire.⁴

If genealogy is history, then it is becoming clear that one of the ways hegemony is maintained in fields threatened by others, is the writing of the biographies of the great men in the field as a history of the field. For example, Lévi-Strauss made it clear that structuralism was founded by Jane Ellen Harrison; he continually acknowledged his debt to her pioneering work in inventing the discipline of anthropology as a materialist rather than a linguistic enterprise, where fieldwork and the study of objects in context was to replace the study of ancient texts alone. But his followers wished to eliminate her from history, to make Lévi-Strauss the founder, the father, of their field. Their genealogical persistence has effectively marginalized a central figure of modernist anthropology and a history is passed on of the great men and their great ideas yet again.

Is it that Nancy Cunard’s lust to know and to reproduce and circulate what she found out by diligent research and a massive campaign of self-education offended or threatened everyone with a territorial interest in some aspect of the cultural history of modernism? Is it that, as Sabena Broeck argues, her desire and her politics were both centered on black men? Like Carl Van Vechten, Cunard was acknowledged as an important bridge figure between black and white cultures in Paris, London and New York. Why was it necessary to burn the bridges to build a black liberation movement? Or was it her “conflation of matriphobia and political radicalism,” as Susan Friedman claims, which shocked her contemporaries most?

Was it that she raised “troubling questions about the mother-daughter bond within the psychodynamics of gender, race and class,” by breaking the taboo of class loyalty and washing the Cunard family linen in public? She died a raving alcoholic in a public ward in Paris, still working on her epic poem on world peace. Why is there such a taboo about the lives of women alcoholics?

Her biographer creates her as a misguided nymphomaniac, assuming that sexuality determined her politics just as her ex-lovers, black and white, attributed her lack of the monogamous impulse to a fundamental moral and intellectual flaw, when such behavior by themselves or their male friends was glamorous and enhancing to the image of the expatriate heroic artist. A strange posthumous as-told-to “autobiography” by her jazz musician ex-lover Henry Crowder circulates to discredit her role in the history of black liberation and in particular the amazing production of the Negro anthology—which he had inspired by his tales of life in the South and the history of slavery.⁵

Belittled by histories of the Harlem Renaissance, Nancy Cunard was left out altogether from the story of the culture she did so much to shape, the story of the Communist Party in Harlem in the 30s; she is basically a missing person in Valentine Cunningham’s history of British writing in the 30s, barely mentioned in the histories of the English expatriates and the Spanish Civil War, ignored as a journalist and war-correspondent, marginalized as a modernist poet, erased from her role as organizer of the international protest movement on behalf of the Scottsboro boys, her Hours Press listed on the fringe of the small press and avant-garde publishing world (discovering Beckett, printing Pou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(work)s
• PART 1 Crossing Borders: Exile and Language
• PART II Blurring Boundaries: Autobiography and Criticism
• PART III Breaking Frame(work)s: Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
• Contributors