The real Negro: The question of authenticity in twentieth century African-American literature

• Main Author: Eversley, Shelly Jennifer
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1998
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969); African American Studies; African Americans; American literature; American studies; Black studies; Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917-2000); Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895); Du Bois, W E B (1868-1963); Dunbar, Paul Laurence (1872-1906); Gates, Henry Louis; Giovanni, Nikki; Howells, William Dean (1837-1920); Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960); Marx, Karl (1818-1883); Wheatley, Phillis (1753-1784)
• ISBN: 0591860201; 9780591860207

This dissertation explores the notion of an authentic Negro and an authentic African American literature. The primary concern is to historicize the demand for racial authenticity--for what Zora Neale Hurston called "the real Negro"--in twentieth century American literature. The question of an author's identity began to play a role in American literature long before the twentieth century; the works of writers like Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson were all introduced by material testifying to the fact that they were indeed black. But I argue that the modern emergence of the interest in "the real Negro" transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Thus, although the dialect poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar will first be prized because, actually written by a black man (instead of, say, Joel Chandler Harris), they are not "imitation" black, the dialect performances written by Zora Neale Hurston will be prized, because written by a "real" black, they are not "imitation" white. Using the Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to frame my inquiry, I argue the terms of authenticity relevant to Dunbar and to Hurston demonstrate authenticity as a crucial part of an economy of literary production and as part of an earlier articulation of the visibility of racial difference. In its dismissal of the material segregation established by Plessy, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) institutionalizes a notion of black racial meaning as internalized. In this regard, the second half of this dissertation studies Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and the 1960s Black Arts movement and the means by which psychological discourses interiorize racial significance and racial "truth" to continue the larger narrative that fixes the idea of difference. My concern foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person "black," while it also reveals how "blackness," spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and the primacy of "whiteness" as a stable uncontested ideal.