A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

Christopher Douglas

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457289
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As an anthropology student studying with Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston recorded African American folklore in rural central Florida, studied hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talked with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage, and collected music from Jamaica. Her ethnographic work would serve as the basis for her novels and other writings in which she shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through an antiracist concept of culture championed by Boas: culture as plural, relative, and long-lived. Meanwhile, a very different antiracist model of culture learned from Robert Park's sociology allowed Richard Wright to imagine African American culture in terms of severed traditions, marginal consciousness, and generation gaps.

In A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, Christopher Douglas uncovers the largely unacknowledged role played by ideas from sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers from diverse backgrounds. Douglas divides the history of multicultural writing in the United States into three periods. The first, which spans the 1920s and 1930s, features minority writers such as Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, who were indebted to the work of Boas and his attempts to detach culture from race.

The second period, from 1940 to the mid-1960s, was a time of assimilation and integration, as seen in the work of authors such as Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, and Ralph Ellison, who were influenced by currents in sociological thought. The third period focuses on the writers we associate with contemporary literary multiculturalism, including Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Douglas shows that these more recent writers advocated a literary nationalism that was based on a modified Boasian anthropology and that laid the pluralist grounds for our current conception of literary multiculturalism.

Ultimately, Douglas's "unified field theory" of multicultural literature brings together divergent African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literary traditions into one story: of how we moved from thinking about groups as races to thinking about groups as cultures—and then back again.

CHAPTER 1

Zora Neale Hurston, D’Arcy McNickle, and the Culture of Anthropology

I was glad when somebody told me, “You may go and collect Negro folklore.”

—Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 (1)

Zora Neale Hurston’s Anthropology

Zora Neale Hurston was part of the paradigm shift from racial anthropology to cultural anthropology. In the spring of 1926, her caliper exercises in Harlem were part of the work of refuting racial thinking, for which Herskovits credits Hurston in his 1928 report The American Negro, and his 1930 study The Anthropometry of the American Negro.1 But Hurston did several important anthropology “jobs” in the years that followed. These included collecting African American folklore in rural central Florida, studying hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talking with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage and collecting music from Jamaica. Hurston had arrived in New York in 1925 to take part in the Harlem Renaissance,2 but began to attend Barnard College that fall, leaving “two years later as a serious social scientist, the result of her study of anthropology under Franz Boas” (Hemenway 21). In fact, the literary output that made her famous emerged only after this anthropological training at Barnard and in the field. Hurston was an enthusiast for anthropology and for “Papa Franz,” and became “a kind of proselytizer for anthropological knowledge,” convincing Renaissance colleague Bruce Nugent to sit in on Boas’s classes for three years (Hemenway 81). What emerged from her ongoing ethnographic labor was the 1930s constellation of two novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and two ethnographies, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), as well as the 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. In them, Hurston shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through the Boasian notion of culture that she had been studying and working with for a decade and a half.

By way of comparison, I crossthread my analysis of Hurston’s work with that of D’Arcy McNickle, a Salish writer and contemporary of Hurston’s whose 1936 novel The Surrounded shared with Hurston’s 1930s work a number of culturalist traits. Whereas Hurston trained as an anthropologist before turning to literature, McNickle became an anthropologist after first being a novelist. Nonetheless, what we know of the composition of McNickle’s novel reveals that he, too, turned to ethnographic sources for the details and perhaps partly for the model of culture that animates his fiction. For both Hurston and McNickle, vernacular story-telling was central to their first-phase vision of minority cultures in the United States. Both writers likewise understood African American and Salish cultures to be premised on a sense of separation from the white dominant society, and even a certain kind of sovereignty of community; the politics that emerged from both writers was an anti-assimilationist one that saw them contest the 1950s sociologically enabled assimilationist consensus signaled by Brown v. Board of Education and the federal Indian policies of Relocation and Termination. Hurston and McNickle are the best representatives of anthropology’s general influence on African American and Native American writers of the first phase.

George Hutchinson and Lee Baker have recently argued that Boasian anthropology was a crucial context for, and influence on, the Harlem Renaissance writers emerging to prominence in the 1920s and continuing their work in the 1930s. “Boasian concepts” about culture and race, says Hutchinson, “became bedrock assumptions among ‘New Negro’ authors of virtually every persuasion” (62). John Dewey’s pragmatics was a “constellation in the intellectual field to which virtually everyone responded” (38), as was Boas’s cultural anthropology and a growing discourse of cultural pluralism as cultural nationalism. Hutchinson cites in particular Boas’s Journal of American Folklore’s sustained attention to African American folk culture as being “of critical importance for the Harlem Renaissance and that continued with historic results through the 1930s by way of the Federal Writers’ Project” (68). Lee Baker likewise suggests that the 14 issues of the journal devoted to Negro folklore between 1917 and 1937 were a critical Boasian project “appropriated by the promoters of the New Negro Movement,” an appropriation completed with Alain Locke’s The New Negro, which contained fifty references to the JAFL (Baker 158).

It was not just Boas’s devastating critique of racial ideas that was important to Renaissance theorists and writers like Wallace Thurman, George Schuyler, and Jessie Fauset—whose brother Arthur Huff Fauset was a working folklorist, like Hurston, with both contributing to The New Negro—but also the culture concept that came to replace race (Hutchinson 70). Hutchinson sees Boas’s anthropology along with Dewey’s pragmatism as the theoretical underpinning of the project of cultural pluralism within a cultural nationalism that the Renaissance generally shared with many white critics and writers. “Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University (on West 119th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, just up the steps of Morningside Park from Harlem) were reshaping the anthropological discourse on race literally in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance,” writes Lee Baker, and they were no less important in developing the rival notion of culture in its stead (166–67).

Of all the Renaissance-associated writers and critics, it was Zora Neale Hurston who responded most deeply to Boasian anthropology. Hurston does not get much space in Hutchinson’s Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, but her place is especially important in terms of the genealogy of literary multiculturalism. When a later generation of African American multiculturalists—including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Ishmael Reed, Alex Haley, and Ernest Gaines—turned to Hurston over and above other Renaissance figures, instead of their most recent antecedents Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, to substantiate the shape and content of African American culture, they were turning, with far-reaching and not yet understood effects, to the figure most deeply influenced by Boasian cultural anthropology and its concepts. It is important to draw a firmer distinction than Hutchinson does between Boasian anthropology and the different set of emphases in the sociology associated with the University of Chicago’s Robert Park. Hutchinson sees the atmosphere of cultural pluralism emerging partly from Park’s sociology (Park was a student of Dewey), with the resulting pragmatics-cum-pluralism represented by figures like Charles Johnson, the sociologist trained by Park who was the editor of the Renaissance-sponsoring Opportunity. But in fact, three generations of minority writers, intellectuals, and activists understood there to be fundamental differences between the culture concepts of Boasian anthropology and Parkian sociology, an understanding that has crucially shaped the twentieth century’s genealogy of literary multiculturalism.3

Hurston’s training in the Boasian concept of culture brings up one of the key problems of this book—the question of influence and articulation in the feedback loop between social science and literature in the middle of the century. To what degree were the contours of African American culture part of Hurston’s thinking before she took classes and did fieldwork under Boas’s and Herskovits’s supervision? What were the influences of social science ideas on her work? Did they change her vision, or sharpen and help articulate ideas already present? One biographer contends that with anthropological training, Hurston’s culture became a “scientific concept” which she could then “confront” both “as subject and as object,” suggesting that “the academic discipline provided a conceptualization for her folk experience” (Hemenway 21–22, 62). Houston Baker argues the reverse, that Hurston had to “slip the yoke” imposed by disciplinary anthropology.4 There is no easy answer to this question of influence or articulation. Many of the qualities that went on to define Hurston’s reading of African American culture—its essential health, its creative and not just reactive energy, its sophisticated artistry, its inner complexity—pre-dated her study of anthropological ideas. Other qualities of the culture concept—the full ramifications of historical particularism—probably emerged mostly through her anthropological training. In between is the wide range of qualities and content already present to Hurston, such as the artistic value of black music and folktales, that would be re-interpreted and articulated partly through Boas’s work, such as the cultural relativism that said black music and tales were not to be evaluated by Western artistic criteria. As I hope to make clear, there were some aspects of Boas’s thought—primarily, the implication of the gradual assimilation of minority cultures into a larger environment—that Hurston rejected, and in this sense she was, like the other writers I examine here, a critical evaluator and consumer of social science ideas. In fact, on some issues, like the idea of the retention of African cultural traits across the Middle Passage, Hurston seems to have embraced this idea before her training in anthropology (Hemenway 74), and then substantiated it with her fieldwork in the next decade.5

I want to suggest that there was not so much a “vocational schizophrenia” or ambivalence between her role as an ethnographer and her role as an artist, as there was a mutually reinforcing culturism that deeply infuses both her ethnographic work and her literary work (Hemenway 63, but see also 117 and passim). Hemenway reads Hurston as a budding Renaissance artist who lived in New York between 1925 and 1927, but who trained as a scientist and whose new discipline helped her understand her folklore and culture-specific upbringing. According to Hemenway, a subsequent phase began with her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (which was composed after, but published before, the ethnographic work Mules and Men), where “her writing exhibits a studied antiscientific approach” (213), forecasting a steady movement toward fiction (215). I think we can better understand the anthropological and fictional work between 1927 (when she went to Florida) and 1942 (when Dust Tracks was published), however, as a continuous development of the culture concept in all of Hurston’s work, an elaboration of a dominant paradigm of cultural autonomy and difference that is Boasian in several crucial and identifiable respects, but which represents nonetheless a distinct adaptation of Boas’s ideas rather than a straight adoption of them.

Her collection work in Florida in 1927 and 1928 was composed as Mules and Men between March 1930 and September 1932. Its project is anthropological on a general level, as Marc Manganaro has shown through the affinities of Hurston’s work with the famous British anthropologist and disciplinary rival of Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski. Mules and Men, like Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Pacific, “argues for cultural unity through the display of often apparently random and rambling narratives” and then substantiates that “coherence” through reference to the “mythical-magical,” contends Manganaro (Culture 198). Manganaro shows how Mules’ fragmented structure contrasted with the “well-wrought” quality of the other great ethnography of 1934, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, thus anticipating postmodern ethnography’s views of “culture as porous, as fluid, as mobile, and as less than tidy and wholly synecdochic” (198). But we have yet to realize how thoroughly Boasian Hurston’s anthropological project actually was, and with what results for the literary multiculturalism that later turned to her.

Beyond the square one of racial equality, which Hurston accepted and which, as we have seen, she helped corroborate, her work substantiates four further qualities of Boas’s emerging paradigm of culture. My admittedly schematic method is to place Boas’s theory beside illustrative examples in Mules and Men, thus serving the dual purpose of explaining Boas’s paradigm of culture and showing how Hurston adapted it for her anthropological and literary work of the 1930s.

Culture as a Dynamic Whole

Mules and Men is carefully framed by Boas’s presence. Hurston asked Boas to write the preface, and he makes much of Hurston’s double status as an insider informant to, and outside ethnographer of, black Southern rural folk culture. Hurston’s introduction famously opens with the calling of the King of Kings himself: “I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore’” (1). Mules begins with the narrator-ethnographer casually driving up to the store porch in Eatonville with a “Hello, boys,” where the men are playing cards (7). She openly announces her folklore collecting project, and while this provokes some incredulity, the porch talkers begin supplying Hurston with tales. Mules and Men integrates its story collection into a full portrayal of African American verbal and social life. This is not just a kind of deep context for the stories themselves, “the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro” which, Boas says in the preface, “has been given very inadequately” in other collections of African American folklore (xiii). It is a treatment of the stories as an integrated part of Eatonville life and central Florida work-camp culture.

Mules’ attention to the culture’s verbal life is extraordinarily wide-ranging. Hurston records animal fables, just-so stories, tales with standard characters like John the slave who always manages to ultimately trick “ole Massa” or the Devil, spooky stories about Raw Head, hoodoo doctors, and the squinch owl, and a set of Brer stories (165–73). Interspersed are songs, jokes, and repartee. We hear not only the stories, but the frames for the stories: the challenges to tell, their critical reception, and the counter-tales. We hear “it’s so hot that . . .” contests along with competing tales of the biggest mosquito (98–100), and instruction on the hidden meaning in phrases (125). There is specifyin’ and signifyin’ (124). There are instructions on how to eat a fish properly, and how to get warm (136), and the older generation’s stock despair over the young (137). An entire sermon is included (139–42), as is a church prayer (25–26), and instructions on vernacular: words like “abstifically” (perhaps meaning absolutely and specifically) and “suscautious” (suspicious and cautious) are productively meaningful adaptations of standard English in African American Southern rural culture (35, 111, 228). When Hurston is instructed to “spread my jenk” (65), the ethnographer expertly explains the black idiom (she is to have a good time).

Mules does not offer a formalist account measuring the collected tales against tales from other cultures. Rather, Hurston understands the stories as an integrated part of a larger verbal culture; in turn, those stories and the verbal life of which they are a part are understood to be aspects of the larger social life of the community in Eatonville and the mill camps. What the avoided comparativist scheme would look like is glimpsed only briefly in Mules and Men, mostly by way of her footnotes, which stand as a commentary apparatus for the ethnography. The stock character John, for instance, “is like Daniel in Jewish folklore, the wish-fulfillment hero of the race. The one who, nevertheless, or in spite of laughter, usually defeats Ole Massa, God and the Devil” (247). One can see the potential hazards of drawing such cross-cultural comparisons: while measuring John next to Daniel might raise the status of the African American hero, it might also suggest (according to the “evolutionary” model of cultural development that Boas was refuting) that Southern black culture has achieved the level of Hebrew culture—of about 2,400 years ago. Likewise, “among the animals the rabbit is the trickster hero,” Hurston notes, except in Florida where Brer Gopher sometimes takes his place (2...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Zora Neale Hurston, D’Arcy McNickle, and the Culture of Anthropology
• 2. Richard Wright, Robert Park, and the Literature of Sociology
• 3. Jade Snow Wong, Ralph Ellison, and Desegregation
• 4. John Okada and the Sociology of Internment
• 5. Américo Paredes and the Folklore of the Border
• 6. Toni Morrison, Frank Chin, and Cultural Nationalisms, 1965–1975
• 7. N. Scott Momaday: Blood and Identity
• 8. Ishmael Reed and the Search for Survivals
• 9. Gloria Anzaldúa, Aztlán, and Aztec Survivals
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography