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2. The Limits of Exemplarity: Marita Bonner’s Alternative Modernist Landscapes
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68 68 2 The Limits of Exemplarity Marita Bonner’s Alternative Modernist Landscapes There are all the earmarks of a group within a group. Cut off all around from ingress or egress to other groups. A sameness of type. The smug self-satisfaction of an inner measurement ; a measurement by standards known within a limited group and not those of an unlimited, seeing world. . . . Like the blind, blind mice. Mice whose eyes have been blinded. —marita bonner, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925) As detailed as Suzanne Lacascade’s is vague, the biography of Marita Bonner (1899–1971) reads as a virtual primer of New Negro success. Her personal history positions her squarely within the cultural and intellectual traditions that shaped many an early-twentieth-century African American luminary: Bonner was raised along the U.S. eastern seaboard in Brookline, Massachusetts; took an undergraduate degree in English and comparative literature in 1922 from the prestigious Radcliffe College; and was fluent in a foreign language, German.1 Portrait of Marita Bonner from the Radcliffe College yearbook, class of 1922 The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University Image Not Available 69 The Limits of Exemplarity In 1924 Bonner followed in the footsteps of Anna Julia Cooper and Jessie Redmon Fauset, both of whom spent part of their careers teaching in the nation’s capital, and began teaching at Washington’s Armstrong High School.2 Bonner also participated in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “S” Street Salon and, from 1925 until 1941, contributed regularly to Crisis and Opportunity, two of the premier showcases for Harlem Renaissance literary talent. Bonner interrupted her career in 1930 to marry Brown University alumnus William Occomy and relocate to Chicago, where she spent most of the 1940s focused on wife- and motherhood before eventually returning to teaching. If one pauses here, these personal and professional achievements seem the very hallmarks of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” the black “aristocracy of talent and character” poised to educate and uplift “the masses of the Negro people.”3 Yet, however much Bonner’s biography corresponds to model African American modernity, her work reveals rather than relishes the limits of exemplarity . Whereas Du Bois argues that the Talented Tenth will assist “all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground,” Bonner questions the desirability and stability of said ground.4 Whereas Alain Locke contends that improved race relations must begin with “the carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups,” Bonner disputes the blanket applicability of the term enlightened to any elite, white or black.5 And, finally, whereas Elise Johnson McDougald advocates the subsumption of gender equity to the greater good of “the race,” Bonner demonstrates how race cannot be discussed independently of gender. From her first published essay to her final short story Bonner critiques reductive expressions of intraracial solidarity, cracks facades assumed for the purpose of group preservation, and creates narrative landscapes in which despair and struggle often trump hope and success. While in her non- fiction Bonner writes from a position of privilege that she alternately finds liberating and stultifying, in her drama and fiction she moves from anonymous wastelands to finely appointed black bourgeois homes, and, finally, to cramped urban tenements, sparing no group or locale in her critique of restrictive conceptions of race and belonging. Shifting skillfully between sites, voices, and perspectives , Bonner problematizes the utopian spirit of the Talented Tenth and New Negrohood and maps in its stead an alternative African American modernism , one that turns on, rather than away from, the tension between individual concerns and communal solidarity. Bonner explored and refined these themes in a body of work spanning two essays, three plays, and twenty short stories, five of which were published post- [3.238.107.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:44 GMT) Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism 70 humously. Bonner’s admirers included some of the Harlem Renaissance’s most discriminating readers: her work garnered numerous awards in the leading African American cultural arts competitions of the 1920s and 1930s. The essay “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” placed first in the 1925 Crisis literary contest, the one-act play The Purple Flower received the 1927 Crisis award for drama, and the short story “Tin Can” won Opportunity’s 1933 fiction prize.6 Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner, the first and to this date only comprehensive Bonner anthology, was published in 1987 and...