Introduction: Naturalism and African American Culture

What—if anything—is African American naturalism? While it is now commonplace to discuss the plural "modernisms" that emerge in the twentieth century, less familiar is the notion of literary "naturalisms." Whether defined through shared philosophical assumptions or a methodology of composition, literary naturalism too often appears as though a monolithic phenomenon, practiced with varying degrees of success or commitment by a disparate group of writers. Indeed, finding mutual aesthetic or ideological expectations among even the most canonical naturalists often proves difficult. Under these circumstances, the prospect of defining African American naturalism as a discrete category offers a particular challenge. While many recent discussions of naturalism have incorporated African American authors, these discussions seldom focus on the unique properties that make these works simultaneously part of both the African American and naturalist traditions. Furthermore, critics have seldom considered the value or utility of considering works by black writers through both scholarly lenses.

To the extent that these issues have been addressed, scholars have largely identified naturalist texts by African American authors in one of two ways: as a subset within an expanding naturalist canon, or as transitional efforts that paved the way for more demanding or liberating methods by either these same, or other, African American writers. Both critical approaches offer significant limitations. In a 2007 review essay, Lisa Long usefully addresses the first assumption, questioning the traditional placement of African American authors within the genealogy of literary naturalism, suggesting that "more rigorous interrogations of genre are necessary to make texts by African American authors (and other authors of color) integral to literary histories, rather than relegated to the proverbial margins when they are added on to the end of literary histories" (172).¹ Addressing this point, Jennifer Fleissner, in Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, notes that "It is a curious fact of American literary history that, while Wright's Native Son and Ann Petry's The Street have been among the twentieth-century works most often discussed in relation to naturalism, this linkage has had little effect on broader theorizations either of naturalism or of African American literature" (276). Likewise, many of the works most frequently cited by critics of naturalism, including the fiction of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as those later works by Wright and Petry, fit quite differently into the broader narrative of African American literary and cultural history. Within this context, their affinities with literary naturalism assume lesser significance than do their reflection of the historical, cultural, and formal qualities specific to the African American experience, particularly given the recent critical preeminence of vernacular theory.²

Indeed, if American readers and critics have often looked askance at naturalism's ostensible heritage in continental European philosophy and aesthetics, this tendency is compounded by contemporary skepticism toward the Eurocentric master narratives of literary history, as well as toward naturalism's frequent alignment with Social Darwinism and the racial politics of the Jim Crow era. Exploring naturalism's "dual tendencies," toward the sociological study of the group on one hand, and toward the psychological study of the individual on the other, Bernard Bell carves out a place for African American writers within the naturalist canon, and a place for a naturalist approach uniquely shaped by the contours of black culture:

When refracted through the double-consciousness and double vision of black American novelists, however, the dual tendencies of naturalism are often suspended in dialectic tension. The sociohistorical source of this tension is the deep-rooted romantic belief of nineteenth-century black Americans in moral responsibility and free will, in a world of purpose and meaning, which contradicted deterministic philosophy and mechanistic despair. As a result, we usually discover a tragicomic vision at the end of Afro-American novels or an ambiguous glimmer of hope beyond despair that concedes life's limitations while celebrating its possibilities.

(81)

This limited commitment to the perceived deterministic philosophy inherent in naturalism has helped define the role of the "Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem" writers as precursors to the Harlem Renaissance,³ and a similar paradigm applies to the later resurgence...