Performative Cultures: Functions and Tropes in African American Literature

Session Coordinator: Ruth Ellen Kocher
Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis

Without Folk: Performative Culture, Bourgeois Writers, and the Black Aesthetic from Jean Toomer to Dorothy West

Writers of the Black Aesthetic have been integral to various eras of African American writing in the 20 th century from Harlem Renaissance to Black modernism to Mid-Century Realism but their most encompassing feat is an affected revision of folk in Black literature. For Jean Toomer, folk became a cultural artifact for which he found a home through textualization. The shift in Toomer’s folk emphasized it’s aesthetic nature and it’s relevant performativity which resounded not unlike the spiritual calls underlying the perversion of black minstrelsy. Toomer’s task is taken up more holistically later by Zora Neale Hurston on one hand and Sterling Brown on another, both of whom argued for the efficacy of directed folk preservation within African American communities. Writers of the so-called Black Bourgeois countered the deep dialect and folk narratives of their contemporaries with work that was, if not move “civilized,” then more noticeably concerned with all that was northern and previously subject only to white novels of manners. This paper explores the nature of work that takes up the task of clarifying the direction of early century Black writing and the relative nature of folk as it was either present or conspicuously absent from such undertakings.

Ruth Ellen Kocher
University of Missouri-St. Louis

Revolutionary Performances of Unmotherly Conduct: Suicide, Infanticide, and Child Abandonment in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison's Beloved

While the nineteenth-century American conception of motherhood envisioned white mothers within the "cult of true womanhood" as pious angels in the house, black women were written out of "true womanhood" through pro-slavery white supremacist rhetoric.  Therefore, the writing of herself as a mother was a revolutionary act for former slave Harriet Jacobs.  Yet Jacobs' performances of motherhood, though written to appeal to the sympathies of white women readers, violate her readers' expectations of motherly conduct: she conceives her children out of wedlock, at times wishes her children dead, tolerates her children's imprisonment, and abandons her children during a seven-year-long self-imprisonment.  Toni Morrison revisits another slavery-era performance of unmotherly conduct in her novel Beloved: Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave, attempted to kill her children (successfully killing one) rather than see them returned to slavery.  In Beloved, Morrison also revisits earlier performances of unmotherly conduct: suicide by an African mother aboard a slave ship in the Middle Passage and Sethe's mother's unsuccessful attempt to flee slavery without her daughter.  Through autobiography and fiction,  Jacobs and Morrison demand of readers a redefined understanding of revolutionary motherhood in the context of slavery through the acts "unmotherly conduct" their characters perform.   

Vanessa Holford Diana
Westfield State College

Authoritative Performances: Challenges to the Science of Race from the Harlem Renaissance to the Human Genome

This paper considers performances of authority by two often intersecting populations -- twentieth-century scientists and their literary critics – as they have weighed in on the question of race as a social or biological construction over the past ninety years.  In bio-medical research undertaken during the Harlem Renaissance through recent cancer and A.I.D.S. studies, scientists perform authority in their roles as creators of theoretically objective studies that either theorize difference or assume difference when they rely on socially constructed categories to learn about human disease.  Writers who dispute these theories, such as Zora Neale Hurston and her challenges to the faux-science of physiognomy, or dispute the methods of scientific performance, as in literary responses to the Tuskegee Study, perform their own, similarly complex authority often based upon a lived experience in a nation that needs both types of performances to understand its past and present identities.   

Jacquelyn Scott Lynch
Arizona State University