Modernism/Modernity
Nov. 2016
 

Seeing Complexity and Hearing Laughter in the Harlem Renaissance

Three recent books bring their gifts to Harlem Renaissance studies. Taken collectively, these books amplify recent critical work that interrogates the role of the state in the development of black modernism, emphasizes the visual culture of the Harlem Renaissance, and examines the coteries and collectives that propelled African American creativity during the New Negro era. Lena Hill’s Visualizing Blackness offers the widest angle on the Harlem Renaissance by placing it within the centuries-long trajectory of African American literature from the colonial era through the Civil Rights Movement; [Darryl] Dickson-Carr’s Spoofing the Modern focuses more narrowly on a handful of New Negro satirists who were especially active in the 1920s and 30s, and [David] Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear? zooms in on Langston Hughes, who memorialized the years in Harlem when the Negro was in vogue. Chinitz, Dickson-Carr, and Hill present Harlem Renaissance writers who challenged stereotypical representations and confining social strictures, survived heroically against imposing odds, and opened new discursive spaces for the production and publication of African American art, thought, and experience. As Dickson-Carr notes, the Harlem Renaissance “has to be considered a resounding success,” and the texts discussed illuminate some of the ways in which that success was achieved (13).

As suggested by his subtitle, Chinitz divides Which Sin to Bear? into interconnected examinations of authenticity and compromise in Hughes’s life and work. In the first three chapters, Chinitz explores Hughes’s lifelong “preoccupation with the problem of racial authenticity and its relationship to identity and art,” and in the next three chapters he discusses Hughes’s evolving political positions and the compromises he made, offering extended readings of Hughes’s closed and open sessions with Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist Subcommittee on Investigations (4). In his richly rewarding study, Chinitz examines the constructed nature of authenticity and demonstrates that “‘compromise’ is not necessarily detrimental to a person’s integrity”, arguing that Hughes’s pursuit of black authenticity and his engagements with a complicated and often hostile world do not reveal a lack of character, backbone, or even consistency (219, n.2; emphasis in original). Instead, his conscious pursuit of a modernist black poetics and his advocacy for racial justice demonstrate his aesthetic and political growth, his subtlety as a thinker and citizen, and his human complexity, intellectual flexibility, and artistic subtlety. Indeed, Hughes’s compromises should be read as “complex ethical decisions rather than simple surrenders; they were not invariably blows to Hughes’s spirit or wounds to his integrity” (7).

The production of African American authenticity was essential to Hughes’s self-fashioning and his poetics. In no small part, Hughes is responsible for the critical posture that considers even a “whiff of inauthenticity” a fatal flaw (9). This, in turn, complicates our reception of Hughes’s later politics, because they seemingly betray an earlier, more “real” person. But Hughes was perhaps never quite the uncomplicated, authentic black self that he constructed and performed. In his youth, Hughes occupied a liminal space between the purportedly inauthentic black middle class and the African American urban masses that he portrayed as the seat of authenticity. As Chinitz demonstrates, Hughes carefully produced an aura of authenticity, and he did so with a self-consciousness that always threatened to complicate and destabilize this ideal. Nonetheless, Hughes’s “vexation over his own authenticity was productive: struggling with his anxiety enabled Hughes as an original creator” (10).

Despite manifold complications, insufficient “attention has been paid to authenticity as a problem” (17). While often taken as an ontological status that “precedes presentation,” authenticity should instead be considered as manufactured, performed, and perceived (11). As Chinitz writes in a later chapter, authenticity is better understood as a “semblance,” “veneer,” or “sense” (83). In addition to these general problems with authenticity, Hughes more specifically discredited as inauthentic middle class attainments, higher education, homosexuality, feminism, and the earlier traditions of genteel African American literature, and yet he was ”educationally if not economically privileged, self-consciously racially mixed, given (even if ambivalently) to aestheticism and sexually nebulous if not gay,” and he was, therefore, “hardly an obvious candidate for the echt-African-American writer” (19). As a consequence, Hughes deliberately performed the “authentic blackness that would be popularly assumed, in time, to be his birthright” (19).

At the beginning of his career, Hughes established his aura of authenticity through techniques reliant on dialect, persona, and a blues aesthetic, and he shifted “the ground of authentic blackness from the rural, southern ‘folk’ to the modern, urban proletariat” (4). In his second and third chapters, Chinitz limns these techniques and offers illuminating readings of noteworthy personae in Hughes’s oeuvre. As Chinitz notes—despite some important, early counter-examples—the lyric “I” appears with little frequency in Hughes’s poetry; instead, Hughes created a mosaic of urban, African American personae who collectively shape “authentic blackness” and allow for a more capacious and ever-evolving sense of authenticity (47). Second only to Alain Locke’s reorientation toward the Northern, urban experience of black modernity, “Hughes substantiated the idea that black proletarian culture was best understood as the legitimate offspring, and not a bastardized commodification, of southern folk culture” (49). In Hughes’s hands, authenticity involves myriad experiences and geographies and is understood as dynamic, not static. As Chinitz demonstrates, this capacious authenticity extends to gender and sexuality. Chinitz concludes his second chapter with an assertion that is still achingly true: “Hughes’s work as a whole offers a credible and passionately conceived model for the dynamic and tolerant racial paradigm whose necessity is in our own day more evident than ever” (66). Chapter 3 continues Chinitz’s examination of technical approaches to producing authenticity by focusing on Hughes’s blues poetry. Offering careful and convincing readings of works such as “Young Gal Blues,” Chinitz demonstrates how Hughes produced a “self-concealing art,” one that used plain diction to convey complex emotions and ideas, and that navigated the competing demands of an oral folk art and a written literary tradition (67). “None of this, to be sure, makes Hughes’s blues poems ‘authentic’ folk expressions,” because, Chinitz reminds us, “authenticity is an effect”—something to be performed but not possessed (83).

In the second half of Which Sin to Bear?, Chinitz turns to the problems and practices of compromise, identifying Hughes as “a master of that unglamorous art” (89). The difficulty with thinking through Hughes’s post-1930s political evolution arises because he so thoroughly denounced compromise. For example, Hughes’s 1945 column “Art and Integrity” identifies

 

compromise with hypocrisy and therefore underscores the difficulty of tolerating “the compromises of a figure who has so starkly and consistently denounced compromise” (93). But Chinitz sees some wiggle room in Hughes’s stance, because his creative works, unlike many of his essays, are often more forgiving of admirable but imperfect characters who make compromises because of exigency and injustice. Despite scholars who worry over Hughes’s move from radical socialism and toward “Popular Front left-liberalism,” Chinitz challenges the idea that Hughes was either a sell-out or a closet revolutionary and asks whether Hughes instead returned to an earlier stance that primarily sought racial justice and, in fact, preceded and outlasted his radical economic politics of the 1930s (104). Chinitz’s suggestion certainly resonates with Alain Locke’s observation in The New Negro: “But fundamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a ‘forced radical,’ a social protestant rather than a genuine radical.” Through a deft reading of Hughes’s “Simple” stories, Chinitz concludes his fourth chapter with the compelling assertion that change, doubt, and compromise are not necessarily a betrayal of some chimerical authentic self but may in reality vouch for human depth and complexity. Chinitz writes, “Hughes harbored faith and doubt simultaneously—as a sophisticated person will. And his liberalism, like any examined belief system, was often a ground for struggle and not a matter of simple adherence” (108). Chinitz characterizes the “Simple” stories as “a remarkable record of liberal self-questioning, self-criticism, and self-correction,” and he reads Hughes’s “ambivalent liberalism” as an expression rather than a betrayal of self (108–09).

Which Sin to Bear? then turns to the moment that crystalizes the tension between authenticity and compromise: Hughes’s appearance before McCarthy during the senator’s anti-Communist reign of terror. Unlike earlier biographers and critics, Chinitz had access to the edgier, more combative executive session testimony held two days prior to Hughes’s public encounter with McCarthy (and only declassified in 2003). Appendices provide transcripts of both sessions, and the differences between Hughes’s engagement with the “good-cop/bad-cop” team of Roy Cohn (McCarthy’s chief counsel) and Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois are often startling (115). Hughes has attracted his fair share of negative criticism because he agreed publicly with McCarthy’s assertion that his books should not be on the shelves of overseas libraries, and Chinitz agrees that this compromise went too far and caused “social harm” (138). But in his discussion of the executive session, Chinitz argues for a more sympathetic reading of Hughes’s engagement with the McCarthy machine, suggesting that Hughes exploited his public testimony to protect himself “from future harassment” for his earlier radicalism (110). The poet used “McCarthy as a shield against further persecution,” the witch hunter got what he wanted, and a “wink from the senator sealed this devil’s bargain” (141–42).

Chinitz concludes with a pivot toward Hughes’s “forty-year agon” with Booker T. Washington, the African American leader who most notably embodies the problematic of compromise (147). Hughes wrote about Washington repeatedly throughout his life and produced a series of starkly contradictory portraits. For example, while the unfinished, unpublished poem “Atlanta, 1906” condemns Washington “for the violence and injustice perpetrated by the system with which he compromised,” Hughes praises Washington’s practicality and accommodation in “The Ballad of Booker T.,” because the Tuskegean’s compromises built the actual structures of a lasting institution (157, 161). Ultimately, Hughes most closely sympathized with Washington as an author—a heroic endeavor for an African American during the nadir of race relations in the U.S.—and as a “solitary child” who must make his lonely way in a hostile world (162). Despite his ambivalence, Hughes always harbored a deep sympathy for Washington, and over the course of his life, Hughes came to feel that Tuskegee “might outlive the compromise on which it had been founded. . . . [S]uch a compromise with compromise is unavoidable if Hughes’s own accomplishments, like Booker T. Washington’s, are to be respected. And Hughes knew it” (176–77; emphasis in original).

. . . . .

Which Sin to Bear, Spoofing the Modern, and Visualizing Blackness indeed offer examples of the complexity of black humanity in general and of the Harlem Renaissance in particular. Chinitz, Dickson-Carr, and Hill focus on different, sometimes overlapping aspects of what was arguably the highpoint of black modernism during the longue durée of the New Negro era, and they demonstrate how various figures engaged with American modernity and forged a body of work that has maintained its relevance for generations of readers and scholars. Writers such as Hughes, Schuyler, and Hurston undertook a collective effort that continues to bear fruit, warrant critical attention, and remind us of the many vibrant communities that nurtured these creative spirits. But another, perhaps surprising theme arises in these books: the sense of loneliness or isolation that pervades one of the most famous moments of communal African American cultural endeavor. Chinitz points to this theme when he suggests that Langston Hughes most empathizes with Booker T. Washington when he considers the loneliness Washington must have felt—even while surrounded by the students he gathered, in classrooms and buildings he constructed, all in the face of extreme adversity. Hughes, who earned his bread from his pen in a hostile world, seems to understand the compromises and self-doubt Washington must have wrestled with. Turning to Dickson-Carr’s book, one might argue that the satirist is by definition a perpetual outsider who shakes a witty fist at a thickheaded world. Such was the case for George Schuyler, who perhaps adopted socialism to avert boredom, and Wallace Thurman, whose sense of isolation and perpetual dissatisfaction almost certainly contributed to his early death. In Visualizing Blackness, Hill portrays Harlem Renaissance women as yearning for communities that recognize their complexity and creativity, and in the case of Hurston’s anthropologist-protagonists, we see characters defined by their outsider status. The lonely children of the Harlem Renaissance, it seems, built their temples for tomorrow while contending with the cold-water flats of the writer’s life. Suzanne Churchill and I have suggested elsewhere that modernism can be understood as a “great party,” but Which Sin to Bear, Spoofing the Modern, and Visualizing Blackness remind us that even the most raucous party with the best conversations can also have its moments of frustration and loneliness. Chinitz, Dickson-Carr, and Hill reward our attendance by revealing the complexities, compromises, and extraordinary achievements of African American modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Adam McKible
John Jay College