Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (review)

At least since Frederick Douglass wrestled in his Narrative with the "deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs" sounding through the plantation woods, African American writing has habitually—and ritually—enshrined the music of the folk as the touchstone of racial identity. For Douglass, the slave songs revealed "at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness," establishing this paradoxical feeling as a template of African American communal memory. In our own time, African American writers such as Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Nathaniel Mackey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Elizabeth Alexander brilliantly deploy the rhythms, tonalities, dialects, and bittersweet ironies of the blues, even while absorbing, critiquing, and reshaping Anglo-American elite literary culture. Jazz scholars working in the shadow of Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Amiri Baraka continue to document and theorize the music's rootedness in African American blues culture, even as jazz's power as an elite, international, cross-cultural language grows exponentially.

Never was the memorialization of the African American folk inheritance a more urgent, historically significant, or controversial cultural mission, and never was the work of authenticating and vindicating African American music so compelling and complicated as during the Harlem Renaissance. So suggests Paul Allen Anderson in his highly informative and superbly crafted Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Anderson's book rehearses, amplifies, and extends other recent scholarship that frames the Harlem Renaissance (or, as Anderson more often refers to it, the Negro Renaissance) as a richly layered, multifarious, contradictory movement in which the vernacular made claims on the cosmopolitan, self-consciously racial art served as the cornerstone of interracial cultural exchange, and notions of sui generis blackness became entangled in arguments about a distinctive American culture. More systematic and pointed than Arnold Rampersad, David Levering Lewis, George Hutchinson, and Ann Douglas, Anderson aims to position music at the center of Harlem Renaissance cultural discourse. While music scholars may wish that Anderson had paid more attention to musicians and musical works themselves, literary and cultural critics and historians should be intrigued by Anderson's idea that during the Renaissance "musical performances (and literary evocations of them) provided especially haunting and portable sites for the staging of social memory" (4).

In his first four chapters, Anderson anchors his study in a series of interlocking intellectual portraits of his major figures—W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston—with cameo appearances by James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, and Carl Van Vechten. These densely textured portraits are full of powerful, sometimes dazzling, insights into the ways musical performances evoked critical debate about the relationship between racial authenticity and racial progress. Anderson has a Hegelian temperament; he finds exquisitely dialectical contradiction where others might see incongruity and confusion. This cast of mind serves him particularly well in readings that address DuBois's famous "double-consciousness" formulation and Locke's investment in a paradoxically universalizing cosmopolitanism and pluralizing racialism. In his memorialization of the sorrow songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers tradition, DuBois imagined a "new nation" growing out of a synthesis of folk romanticism and cultural idealism. Steeped in German romantic nationalism and devoted to high art's aesthetic bliss, DuBois idealized these songs as the soul of the people, the basis of a folk-centered nationalist art that would lead to the cosmopolitan "kingdom of culture." Similarly, Locke's cosmopolitanism took the form of an elitist New Negro evolutionism that favored the use of racially inscribed folk materials in formal works of disciplined mastery; his hope was that jazz would develop into scored-through concert music. Locke and DuBois championed Roland Hayes, the formally trained concert spirituals singer, whose refined European tone embodied their aspirations of racial uplift; others, notably white patron Van Vechten, preferred Paul Robeson's more rhythmically propulsive style. DuBois, the bourgeois...