-
19. The Gendering of Place in the Great Escape
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
421 The Gendering of Place in the Great Escape T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING 19 The varied historical roots and routes of black diasporic political, cultural, and literary expressivity; rhetoric; and practices of New Negro womanhood and manhood, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism are at the heart of Escape from New York. And as the anthology’s title suggests and the volume’s contributors ably verify, Harlem, New York, was but one nerve center of such frenzied creative and communal energy. Peripatetic intellectual Claude McKay attested to as much as he reflected on these strands of activity in the global hopscotching that formed the core of his autobiographical A Long Way from Home. Whether he foresaw the rise of noted singer Florence Mills in Harlem, only later to find the Parisian rendition of the musical Blackbirds starring Adelaide Hall somehow inauthentic, or threaded the needle on masculinity and diasporic confraternity in the French port town of Marseille with the novel Banjo, McKay himself was both participant in and chronicler of the multisited flourishings of the African diaspora from above and below. An escape from a Harlem state of mind widens our frame to include other places and spaces where black folks sought and created possibilities. “The power of place,” Aristotle wrote in an opening epigraph to Physics, “will be remarkable.” For some, those remarkable places could be found in other vibrant cities in the United States; for others, the transformative catalysts of place were necessarily abroad, where a writer like Jessie Fauset offered: I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of “thou shall not.” In order to offset criticism, the refined colored woman must not laugh too loudly, she must not stare—in general she must stiffen her self-control even though she can no longer humanly contain herself. I am colored and wish to be known as colored, 422 T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so—but only temporarily—I have fled from it.1 Gender, too, colors the power of place. In Harlem, Fauset nurtured the movement that we are now reconsidering in its plurality; she also felt hemmed in by the possibilities available to her as a “colored” woman and writer in that very evocative space, opting for a temporary rupture with America in a move to Paris. Between the First and Second World Wars, the period that some call the Jazz Age as well as the New Negro movement more broadly, or the Harlem Renaissance , France became a place where a black American woman could realize personal freedom and creativity, in narrative or in performance, in clay or on canvas, in life and in love. Paris, as it appeared to her, was physically beautiful , culturally refined, inexpensive as a result of the war, and seductive, with its seeming lack of violent racial animus. It was also hospitable, for like the revered Harlem, there was an existent black community. As Tyler Stovall notes, the experience of community was fundamental to the history of black Americans in the French capital. Blacks did not come to Paris as isolated individuals but generally with the encouragement and assistance of African Americans already there. Once in Paris they were able to participate in a rich community life with its own institutions, traditions, and rituals. Moreover, the creation of an expatriate black community played a vital role in easing the pangs of exile. Many blacks in Paris rejoiced in their escape from the United States but at the same time feared losing touch with African American culture. Informal networks enabled them to recreate a black cultural presence abroad freed from racism.2 Though there were very few other women writers of the era who had the wherewithal to escape from New York to Paris, art, and performance art, in particular, provided other avenues. Like Claude McKay before him, Langston Hughes did an accounting of black women performance artists’ place in interwar Paris: In Paris, within the last decade, one after another three colored women have risen to reign for a time as the bright particular stars of the night life of Montmartre. And all three of them have been American colored women. Princes, dukes, great artists, and kings of finance have...