Defining the Harlem Renaissance, Analyzing American Modernist Literature

African Americans and the Making of Modernity Darryl Dickson-Carr*

When poet Paul Laurence Dunbar lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1905, he admitted to future NAACP executive secretary and fellow poet James Weldon Johnson, “I didn’t start as a dialect poet. I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don’t want me to write anything but dialect” (160). Johnson, who had also begun his writing career using Negro dialect, replied that Dunbar had brought the form “as far as and as high as it could go.” “[T]he public,” Johnson continued, may have “still demanded dialect poetry, but . . . as a medium, especially for the Negro poet, it was narrow and limited” (161). In this brief exchange, Dunbar and Johnson reveal that the cultural problem of the twentieth century was not so much the problem of the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois so persuasively argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1903); it was African Americans’ desire to be full partners and participants in modernism in all its forms. That desire extended to modernism in artistic circles as well, whether in black writers and artists’ wish to be appreciated as mod- ernists or in their shaping of modernism itself by their very presence and cultural riches. Predictably, no single definition of “modern” suf- ficed for all African Americans, but virtually all would agree that as a group, African Americans could not remain behind in the US’s semi- feudal past, subject to the whims of their fellow citizens and deprived of agency.

The will to achieve modernism has become the subject of several recent works in African-American studies as it turns its atten- tion to the understudied period between the Civil War and the New

*Darryl Dickson-Carr is an associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He has authored The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (2005), African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001), and is completing Spoofing the Modern: The Role of Satire in the Harlem Renaissance.

American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 672–682 doi:10.1093/alh/ajt024 Advance Access publication June 2, 2013 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Negro or Harlem Renaissance, when African Americans struggled through a long, slow, frequently tragic, yet successful transition from enslavement to full citizenship over five decades. James Smethurst’s The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), Sonnet Retman’s Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (2011), and W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s edited collection, Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930 (2011) each posits African-American literary and cultural developments as vital organs within the modern nation’s reluctant body, rather than mere appendages. Each shares the argument: know African- American literature and culture in this period, and you shall know modernism. As students in the field know, this argument is hardly new, but together these texts trace how American definitions of mod- ernism depended upon the black Other or Africanist presence, as Toni Morrison might call it.

Smethurst openly admits that his project relies upon Dunbar as a crucial exemplar of that presence, one without whom we might not have an African-American literary tradition as we know it. His “ulte- rior motive” is to “write extensively” about Dunbar “not to prove that black literature at the turn of the century is worth reading because it is ‘modernist’ . . . but to rethink the relationship of black literature during the early Jim Crow era, North and South, to a broad sense of ‘American’ artistic modernity as well as to the development of signif- icant ‘American’ artistic avant gardes or countercultures” (26, 25). Neither Dunbar nor Johnson wished for their work to be left out of a world moving irrevocably toward modernity, especially since they had helped to usher African Americans into it despite the American public’s efforts to deny that place.

As a poet, Dunbar stood above nearly all American poets of his time, while Johnson had worked alongside his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole to become one of American popular music’s most respected composers (and later cofounder of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers [ASCAP] in 1914) and a well-respected poet in his own right. Each influenced later gen- erations of poets, writers, composers, and musicians, but also real- ized during his time that, in Johnson’s forceful verse,

This land is ours by right of birth, This land is ours by right of toil; We helped to turn its virgin earth, Our sweat is in its fruitful soil (290)

Johnson’s verse is a claim to African Americans’ continuous link to and partnership in a modern America, but one with a sense of history

Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890– 1930, Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression, Sonnet Retman. Duke University Press, 2011.

The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, James Smethurst. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

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and memory intact. Johnson carries a longstanding claim from ante- bellum days into the present: without free or cheap black labor and bodies, the US would never have become a world power, would never have had the power, luxury, and wealth that precipitated mod- ernism. That history cannot and must not be forgotten as America fully enters modernity and casts aside its semifeudal, agrarian, ante- bellum past.

As Smethurst, Retman, and the contributors to Brundage’s collec- tion illustrate, American modernism depended upon an inferior Other in African-American cultures, one whose slave past and Jim Crow present after Reconstruction had to be reconciled with an amended US Constitution, imperialist ambitions, and a thriving economy. All had direct links to a black presence that even the most insidious and brutal forms of discrimination could not sublimate or destroy, despite the best efforts of local, state, and national legislatures, both North and South, after 1877. The urge toward modernism ironically meant that the people and culture that Jim Crow cast as modernity’s primitives remained abso- lutely necessary, from their labor, to literature, and to more popular forms of art and entertainment.

In Brundage’s collection in particular, those popular forms defined American popular culture from Reconstruction to well into the twentieth century, solidifying the white majority’s self-portrait even as black artists and writers exercised their sense of agency to challenge, alter, and defy demeaning stereotypes, if not eliminate them altogether. Eschewing stereotypes, African-American artists and intellectuals initiated, during the “Nadir” (Logan 52) of Jim Crow, multiple quests for the real, true state of affairs of the titular black “folk” in Du Bois’s classic meditation. Yet, as Retman argues, a second danger arose for the African-American masses, particularly— ironically—during the New Negro Renaissance, which began in the 1910s and ended with World War II: stifling definitions of authenticity that only a “modernist burlesque” (4) or “signifying ethnography” (7) can challenge. A “modernist burlesque” comprises an ironic, often satirical view toward attempts to define the folk according to strict, overdetermined standards, while only folklorists engaged in a “signi- fying ethnography” would allow for artists and intellectuals to under- stand the “folk” in malleable, shifting, contingent terms (4–5).

For Retman, a healthy attitude toward contingency, uncertainty, and revision helped define African-American modernism during and after the New Negro Renaissance. A modernist burlesque effec- tively replaced Du Bois’s arguably overdetermined assertion that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists” (256), the latter group comprising such art-for-art’s-sake intellectuals as Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and Carl Van Vechten. African-American art, Retman argues, could sustain neither a pure,

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nonideological purpose nor a single ideologically driven aesthetic. Instead, the Great Depression produced instead an ironic position for the black artist, thanks largely to satirical works by George Schuyler, Nathanael West, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, and others, all devoted to shifting American art to greater freedom and contingency with a more complex “folk” undergirding American identity.

In each of the texts before us, we see some of Retman’s bur- lesque in operation. African-American literary studies have tended to fall into several distinct ethoses that often follow their scholars’ intel- lectual arcs over their careers. The first consists of recovery: arguing that a long lost, obscure, or dismissed work should receive greater attention than contemporary critics offered it, frequently because it received no attention at all. Although it happens less often nowadays, the scholar invested in this effort finds him- or herself enjoying nearly exclusive rights to make the case; fewer scholars may wish to discuss neglected works instead of the already canonized. The field’s students realize that, in the 1970s and 1980s, such work freed the late Zora Neale Hurston and her oeuvre from dusty bookshelves and occasional remembrances in New Negro Renaissance memoirs to a central place in the American literary canon, one she is unlikely to lose again. Hurston’s newfound popularity helped to bring African-American women’s writing to the fore and to revive interest in African-American folk cultures, and not only those from Florida and other Southern states.

We might include in this ethos archival work that rediscovers partially or entirely lost works and histories, including some unpub- lished. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s celebrated 1982 rediscovery of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and edition of The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (1991) would qualify, as would Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s recent discovery of Claude McKay’s manuscript, “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem” (c.1941). Together, these events indicate that African-American literature remains a vibrantly fecund area for scholarship, not least because so much of the field had lain fallow due to profound lack of interest.

A second ethos, perhaps the most common of all, consists pri- marily of close readings of popular or noncanonical texts, whether by African-American authors or not, arguing for newer, more dynamic interpretations combining scholarship from the first ethos and new developments in literary theory and criticism. This approach keeps critical conversations alive about texts and critiques the limits of past readings. These include Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Gates’s The

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Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1989), Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1987), and Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s collection All the Women Are White, and All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1993), among many others.

The third ethos extends the first two and has dominated the field since the mid 1990s. Put simply, it seeks to challenge and correct earlier studies that might have relied too heavily upon ideol- ogy and polemic and too little upon archival research to construct their arguments regarding movements, individual authors, and major works. In George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995), for example, the author argues against stand- ard readings that cast the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance as a mere success or failure in its artistic and social achievements, choosing instead to focus upon the principal writers and intellectuals’ frequently explicit goals to redefine American democracy by working productively across so-called racial lines. We should also include Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993), Ronald A. T. Judy’s Disforming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (1993), Debra Walker King’s African Americans and the Culture of Pain (2008), Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005), W. Lawrence Hogue’s Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color since the 1960s (1996), or the recent Cambridge History of African American Literature (2011), edited by Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Most relevant of all to the texts under discussion here, of course, would be Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), argu- ably the most eloquent examination of blackface’s ambivalent impact upon American popular culture.

These studies and many more give African-American literature a much broader context than the field had seen outside of literary biographies, refusing to accept verbatim common assertions in earlier studies. In that sense, they inhabit the modernism described within Retman and Smethurst’s texts in particular, upending modern- ism and postmodernism’s common skepticism toward memory and history in favor of reified histories. In Brundage’s collection, the authors give closer attention to such previously ignored threads within American popular culture’s rich quilt as racist illustrations on sheet music, Frederick Douglass’s reliance upon photography for the abolition and civil rights efforts, developments in dance at the turn of the century, the Great Migration’s impact upon modernity and popular music, early film, prizefighting, and of course, the blackface

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tradition that alternately spawned and undergirded these phenomena, sometimes threatening to undermine them.

The collection does more than simply draw attention to these developments; the authors explicitly argue that American popular culture as we know it today has its origins in the mass-produced culture that would have been impossible before the Industrial Revolution’s greatest heights in the US. Popular dance, for example, emerged in the first three decades of the twentieth century as whites sought access to the true dances performed in African-American communities rather than the corrupted forms that white blackface performers created. This enthusiasm in turn generated more interest in ragtime and other musical forms, inspired black and white com- posers to begin creating and selling music more amenable to dancing, and united the nation in dance crazes. Americans sought authenticity—a true blackness that could be reproduced and transmit- ted through sheet music, “race” records, and the phonographs that played them, to say nothing of radio—for the sake of making it new in ways that Ezra Pound might never have fully envisioned.

And they could do it as mail-order catalogues, public fairs and expositions, movie theaters, and eventually radio brought constructed authenticity to a growing middle class with the leisure time to indulge its fascination with mores that ran counter to Victorian pro- priety. As the American frontier closed in the early twentieth century, so did one site of mythologized primitivism and moral chaos in the popular mind. Black culture replaced the frontier as the place one could go to escape from middle-class respectability. No longer did black and white native and immigrant populations move primarily to the west coast to discover economic opportunities and cultural identi- ties; for most of the twentieth century, they moved from the “agricul- tural ‘periphery’ of the ‘South’ and ‘East’ to the industrial centers of the ‘North’ and ‘West,’” thereby “transform[ing] the symbolic geog- raphy of the United States in complicated ways” and “enabl[ing] the modern industrial system” even as they “increase[d] . . . racist and nativist anxieties” (Smethurst 189). For the first generation of white modernists, these anxieties centered upon the question of “whether one’s culture or even one’s self [was] ‘white’ enough” resulted in works such as Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” (1909) that might “ven- triloquiz[e] or impersonat[e] black voices and bodies . . . as a way of asserting an ‘American’ vanguard identity,” despite the later Eurocentrism of an Eliot or Pound (190). Migrating populations destabilized old sectional or regional identities in much the same way that ethnic and so-called racial identities began to blur. The African-American passing novel illustrates this anxiety, but accord- ing to Smethurst, so does F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), in which “Jimmy Gatz’s transmogrification into Jay Gatsby,

Americans sought authenticity—a true blackness that could be reproduced and transmitted through sheet music, “race” records, and the phonographs that played them, to say nothing of radio—for the sake of making it new in ways that Ezra Pound might never have fully envisioned.

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from a poor, non-WASP, possibly Jewish boy” into a whiter man lies at the novel’s center, as does Tom Buchanan’s racism and Nick Carraway’s possible gayness (198). When the nation’s ethnic palette was shifting rapidly, modernism’s adherents wondered whether any stable white or black identities could be had.

Retman’s third chapter, “‘The Last American Frontier’: Mapping the Folk in the Federal Writers’ Project’s Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State,” highlights a more explicit search for stable identities in the Sunshine State’s folk cultures. As the title indi- cates, the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) travel guides, produced to reintroduce Americans to other states in the Union, relied upon discovery narratives that posited Florida (and other erstwhile hinter- lands) as the frontier. One could find the authentic “folk” therein, resplendent in their realness; all it took was an automobile and “wan- derlust” (114) akin to the white settler pioneers of the last century. The FWP guide amplifies earlier tourist books that imagined white, Native American, and African-American Floridians as “untamed” by civilization (133). In a newly modern nation, the tourist could find the primitive past here, and perhaps even acquire a piece of it. This would have the dual effects of shoring up Florida’s weak economy while reassuring the (usually Northern, white) reader/traveler that he or she had completed a hegira to modernity and civilization.

In view of popular culture at the turn of the century and during the Great Depression, then, the New Negro Renaissance doesn’t seem so new after all, nor did fascination with black culture end with the movement’s decline in the Great Depression. The renaissance had already found its way into white homes long before whites began seeking black culture in Jim Crow’s newly segregated communities. Despite Jim Crow’s perniciousness, the nation had already been primed for the movement that emerged in Harlem, Chicago’s south side, Central Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and other cities in the 1920s and 1930s. As Smethurst reminds us, Harlem had a substantial black population at the turn of the century, decades before the New Negro Renaissance (Smethurst 10). What came to Harlem later was a modernism in full swing—along with many thousands of new migrants.

If we follow the general arc within each of these texts, the twen- tieth century’s first few decades didn’t mark the rise of the New Negro, but the real Negro, one that African Americans, blacks from the Caribbean, documentary filmmakers, blues and jazz artists, and painters, poets, and novelists of all backgrounds created. To be clear: no single real or authentic African American emerged like a black Athena from a multicultural, multimedia Zeus’s head, but black and white artists and intellectuals sought her. If we could write her story, we might say that she emerged from nineteenth century feudalism as

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a rural Southern migrant who, along with millions of her black and white brethren, shifted from the country to the city, bringing vestiges of the folk with her. Paradoxically, her folksiness never quite com- peted with the real folk, the “salt of the earth” that Retman argues documentary filmmakers always sought and invariably found in the nation’s rural hinterlands (16).

The camera became the favored means to capture these primi- tive vestiges of an organic past and put them on display to shape public opinion about everything from the effects of Jim Crow to gov- ernment programs’ virtues. As a result, the camera underscored mod- ernism’s distrust of the old expressive languages and genres and disrupted earlier interpretive forms; it allowed people to see them- selves and their fellow citizens as real, rather than abstract words and drawings. The camera’s ability to shift public opinion quickly became obvious, as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) ably demonstrated, as did Oscar Micheaux’s many films for black audiences. The new expressive language expressed enough to cause riots, revive the Ku Klux Klan, and help foment divisions that the Democrats’ national ascendancy in 1912 and 1914 exposed.

Featuring analyses of George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), the Federal Writers’ Project’s Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1939), and Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Retman highlights how mod- ernist burlesque from the New Negro renaissance through the Great Depression exposed how different parties capitalized upon interest in the folk, class, and race. Regarding Black No More, for example, Retman argues that Schuyler’s most famous novel dismissed civil rights, white supremacist, and political interest in the everyman as so much hokum; instead, each of these groups regarded the everyman as a commodity to be parceled by race, region, and class into items sold to other parts of the populace for wealth, votes, and material gain. Schuyler developed this view after witnessing radical groups, intellec- tuals, and artists in the 1910s and 1920s parlay race consciousness and the notion of the folk into personal gain. “Many in the Harlem Renaissance inner circle,” Retman reminds us, “grasped the central paradox” that “although primitivism and the vernacular”—markers of the folk—“were defined as something outside the marketplace, they were nevertheless situated thoroughly within it” (44). Modernism, moreover, tended to conflate blackness with “primitivism and the ver- nacular,” leaving African Americans of the New Negro movement in the strange position of performing a commodity at the same time that they attempted to counteract the demeaning and hypercommodified legacy of blackface minstrelsy. In modernity, it seems, the folk can’t get up for falling down.

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Which is not to say they haven’t tried and met with tremendous, if ambivalent, success. Susan Curtis’s essay, “Black Creativity and Black Stereotype: Rethinking Twentieth-Century Popular Music in America,” stands as one of the most representative contributions to Brundage’s collection for detailing how such pioneers as ragtime composer and performer Scott Joplin swept away Victorian mores and heralded modernity simply by writing down and selling the music he and other black musicians knew so well. In doing so, Joplin spurred a ragtime “craze” (124) that initially drew criticism for its appeals to individual identity, greater sexual freedom (128), and independence for women (134). These features attracted listeners across so-called racial boundaries, but ragtime’s popularity with the white majority marked it as the exemplar for American popular music until the present. That popularity had its price; the genre in general included such black-authored songs as “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” which “traded in stereotype to advance (white) cultural libera- tion” (138). For this reason, Curtis argues, “the popular music industry in America rose from the ashes of Victorian culture and from the lynch mob’s flames. It played a major role in rewriting the cultural rules for modern America and in maintaining the color line” (139).

Rewriting the cultural rules has a similarly steep price through- out the essays in Brundage’s collection. Not all concern themselves equally with the white majority maintaining its supremacy between the 1890s and Great Depression, but most do assert the conflict between black agency’s upward pull and white hegemony’s often brutal downward push. John Giggie’s “Buying and Selling with God: African American Religion, Race Records, and the Emerging Culture of Mass Consumption in the South” connects the popularity of recorded sermons to black consumers’ buying habits from slavery through the “nadir” of Jim Crow, when whites sought to dictate black buying habits. African-American ministers, Giggie writes, acted as “agents of the market” (205) who would help guide their congregants to goods and services that would mitigate the “embarrassment and peril of being overcharged, ignored, refused credit, and sold shoddy goods” in white-owned establishments, then the normal state of affairs (196). In return, congregants would buy products ministers endorsed, build and support churches in their communities, and pool resources for “primary schools, district associations, women’s con- ventions, Sunday schools, newspapers, presses, and pastor’s and young people’s ‘unions.’” (197). Black Baptist and Methodist minis- ters thereby acted as intermediaries for white and black merchants, allowing them to develop their own enterprises. In slightly altered forms, and despite the absence of legal Jim Crow, vestiges of this relationship remain today. Giggie’s analysis acknowledges that min- isters’ role in this regard could be slightly exploitative, but he argues

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that they should be considered in a mostly positive light, given both the limited goods ministers recommended or sold and the greater exploitation African Americans experienced outside of their communities.

Brundage’s collection concludes with several essays on film, the blues, black celebrity, and the spectacle of black bodies, conclud- ing a narrative that reifies African Americans’ assumption of their own modernity in the early twentieth century. Such minor and major icons as aviator and professional celebrity Herbert Julian or prize- fighters Jack Johnson and Joe Louis illustrate black desires to break color lines, certainly, but also revised the language describing black competency and expertise in white occupations. In the 1920s, Julian made a name for himself in African American communities for pub- licity stunts that allowed him to shill for various products, enrich himself, and serve as a symbol of black pride, primarily through that most modern of inventions: the airplane.1 Early in the twentieth century, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson occupied a similar role, flamboyantly defying racist dogma, but attracting virtually unin- terrupted controversy, which contributed to his professional demise and precipitated the resegregation of boxing. As Lewis Erenberg writes, champion Joe Louis represented something entirely different in the 1930s and 1940s. When Louis boxed German champion and Nazi propaganda tool Max Schmeling in 1938, Americans of all (so-called) racial, social, and political backgrounds found themselves supporting a black American as a national symbol, one conquering Nazism, racism in general, and white supremacy in particular, in a sport epitomizing aggression and domination. That Johnson did so for a segregated nation that treated him as an African savage (324) and later forced him to endure Jim Crow during his service in World War II only compounds this irony, but for African Americans in the Great Depression, Joe Louis personified modernity (317). He was intelligent, strong-willed, and represented ethnically (black, white, and Cherokee) a major cross-section of American history in the popular mind. Put simply, Louis was modern America for a moment, whether Americans wished it or not. Although Germany’s invasion of Poland was still over a year away, when Louis defeated Schmeling, his symbolic, spectacular body made a prescient case for the US’s inevitable entry into World War II and African Americans’ push for civil rights that would follow. One black figure inexorably transformed African Americans into democracy and modernity per- sonified (344).

It is little wonder the present texts possess their shared focus on literature, popular culture, and their place in modernism. They reflect African American studies’ au courant concern with black cultures’ commodification in a global marketplace, a direct descendant from

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the era when the Negro was in vogue. Such contemporary works as damali ayo’s lampoon How to Rent a Negro (2005), Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2000), and Kenneth Warren’s provocative What Was African American Literature? (2011) all draw attention to black bodies and abilities as inextricable components both in the US’s popular culture and economy. Each of these creates a burlesque illustrating how blackness sells, until it doesn’t, when publishers, music purveyors, and politi- cians repackage and resell it in old and new media. From “street lit” and traditional literature, to cable news, to the White House itself, blackness remains fecund as modernity’s commodity, one that tells us the story of ourselves in terms that have roots in the nineteenth century.

Read in tandem, Brundage’s Beyond Blackface, Retman’s Real Folks, and Smethurst’s The African American Roots of Modernism make the most salient case that American modernity depends upon distilling, packaging, and marketing blackness, a shared enterprise with richly ironic profits in which blacks and whites share, albeit unequally. In the twentieth century, Americans learned how to be modern via this product; in our young century, it continues to be profitable in multiple media.

Note

1. See Shane White, Stephen Garton, Shephen Robertson, and Graham White, “The Black Eagle of Harlem,” in Brundage’s collection, 291–314.

Works Cited

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the

Creation of American Popular Culture,

1890–1930. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 2011.

Curtis, Susan. “Black Creativity and Black Stereotype: Rethinking Twentieth-Century Popular Music in America.” Brundage 124–46.

Erenberg, Lewis A. “More than a Prizefight: Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, and the Transnational Politics of Boxing.” Brundage 315–56.

Giggie, John. “Buying and Selling with God: African American Religion, Race

Records, and the Emerging Culture of Mass Consumption in the South.” Brundage 190–212.

Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way. 1933. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Retman, Sonnet. Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 2011.

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