Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature

2 /“Home Thoughts”: The Transnational Routes of Nostalgia in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

2 / “Home Thoughts”: The Transnational Routes of Nostalgia in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem With the Western frontier now several-decades “closed,” the “Great War” in the not-so-distant past, and increasing mechanization, industrialization , and mass production creating anxiety in the present, many modern authors shared Willa Cather’s feeling that the world had “broke[n] in two” (Not Under Forty v).1 Regionalist literature like Cather’s reflected a widespread modernist nostalgia, but it was distinguished from other forms of modernism by its attempts to heal this sense of cleavage through rootedness in place and a “return” to an idealized, often pastoral, premodern society. Although most regionalists frowned upon pioneers for the same reasons Ransom and the Southern agrarians did, nostalgia for the frontier was sometimes an implicit subplot in regionalist fiction. As Robert L. Dorman explains in his survey of interwar regionalism, many regionalist writers invoked a revised frontier myth to highlight “the folk characteristics that pioneers displayed at special moments along that modernizing continuum of development . . . when culture and place melded, community flourished, a ‘yeomanry’ emerged.” Interwar regionalists looked to these “special moments” to retreat “to a more humane and heroic past” (87). Unfortunately, some aspects of the past are neither humane nor heroic. The nostalgia espoused by some regionalists risked re-naturalizing racial difference (and race-based inequalities) even through a seemingly benign celebration of pastoral nature.2 Cather’s The Professor’s House, with its appropriative nostalgia for indigenous culture in the Southwest and its celebration of the masculine frontier explorer, is a case in point.3 This “HOME THOUGHTS” / 59 novel exemplifies how “backward looking” regionalist texts could reproduce hierarchical social dynamics and sustain the frontier ideology that Zitkala-Ša and other writers of the early twentieth century were working against. Although the pastoral region masquerades as a peaceful locale, it often implies its precursor: the conquest of nature and the oppression of people that accompanied the frontier’s “taming.” There are, of course, limits to generalizing about any literary movement , especially one defined by dispersal, and I do not mean to imply that all regionalist texts deal in these problematic forms of nostalgia.4 Moreover, recent studies have productively reconsidered regionalism, to the point where it is questionable whether the category is still meaningful in any historical or formalist sense. New work by literary scholars, architecture theorists, and “New Western” historians advocates a “critical regionalism,” which suggests, among other things, that attentiveness to local-global nexuses is essential to understanding regions.5 Many contemporary scholars are heeding historian Lewis Mumford’s warning to “never us[e] the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of the universal” (qtd. in Campbell, Rhizomatic West 51). This new scholarship tends to downplay physical environment and define regionalism “less [as] a term of geographical determinism and more as a discourse or a mode of analysis, a vantage point within the network of power relations that provides a location for critique and resistance” (Fetterley and Pryse 11). As scholars and writers struggle to recast regional character in the context of a rapidly homogenizing, increasingly technological, and easily commodified world, it makes sense to understand regions as contact zones, rhizomes, or process geographies.6 Whichever terminology one prefers, regions are dynamic places that should be characterized not just by their “roots” but also by their “routes”: the migrations, itineraries, and mobilities of the diverse people that inhabit, pass through, and give meaning to any place. As James Clifford suggests, “Travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity” (2). This tension between “roots” and “routes” is an especially useful one for thinking about a regional modernity in which nostalgia was commonplace. Indeed, seeing literary regionalism as a site of critique and resistance should involve a renewed attention to how nostalgia contributes to that critique. Although it is not typically labeled “regionalism” per se—and should not be casually treated as such—the Harlem Renaissance did engage contemporaneous discourses about nostalgia as well as the pastoral and frontier narratives that were central to regionalist ideologies. The 60 / RECLAIMING NOSTALGIA movement also participated in a broader, modern “Return to the Primitive ,” albeit on its own particular terms (Cooper xiii). In this chapter, I treat Harlem as a modernist region in that it engages contemporaneous discourses and anticipates current trends in regionalist theory. With its complex migratory patterns (routes) and its simultaneous location of a...