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chapter four Somebody Else’s Civilization African American Writers, Bohemia, and the New Poetry In the United States, as elsewhere, the rise of artistic modernism and the emergence of indigenous bohemias in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were closely linked, though not twinned phenomena. I use the plural rather than speak of bohemia in the singular because, nearly from the beginning, bohemia in the United States was characterized by racially and ethnically distinct, though significantly overlapping, communities, whether one is speaking of “black bohemia,” the largely white bohemia in such communities as New York’s Greenwich Village and Chicago’s Towertown, or the avant garde artistic subcultures of immigrant communities, such as the circles of Yiddish- and Russian-speaking Jewish artists and intellectuals who frequented the cafés of New York’s Lower East Side. Given the increasingly rigid segregation of urban space and the debates about race and citizenship that roiled the United States, such distinctions are not surprising. However, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, it was the intersection between these bohemias , particularly between “black” and “white” (especially as the importance of the older “white ethnic” artistic circles faded as the twentieth century wore on), even as distinct predominantly black and white bohemian spaces were maintained, that came to define the ideas of bohemia and the artistic avant garde in the United States. Early bohemia in the United States grew out of a complicated triangulation between primarily literaryand musical representations of European bohemias (generally French and, to a lesser extent, English), actual bohemian communities abroad (themselves much shaped by a dialectic of imitation and rejection of popular representation), and local conditions and imperatives . As Christine Stansell points out, for example, women and organized feminism played a far more prominent role in the New York and Chicago bohemian communities of the early twentieth century than was true of London or Paris, even if their counterparts in bohemian Paris and London were unquestionably influential in shaping these new U.S. countercultures (231–34). In fact, one of the things that makes early literary modernism and what 124 | SOMEBODY ELSE’S CIVILIZATION Harriet Monroe and others termed somewhat vaguely the “new poetry” complicated is that they were significantly a product of circles and institutions rooted in the new bohemias of the United States in dialogue with American writers and intellectuals based in or on the fringes of the bohemias of London and Paris that had much different gender and ideological dynamics. Thus, the political radicalism, especially the socialism and anarchism (in the days when anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were a significant , if seemingly counterintuitively, organized section of the Left) of such journals as The Little Review, The Masses, Others, and even Poetry, not to mention the key roles that women had in these journals, distinguished these journals from their pre-Dada counterparts in London and Paris. These distinctions made for some contradictions in the journals’ relationships with expatriate artists, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, based in the far more masculinist and often relativelyapolitical bohemias of London and Paris, relationships that were crucial to the development of modernism in the United States. Pound, in particular, had difficulty adjusting to the leading roles that such women writers and editors as Amy Lowell and Monroe played in the early modernist literary circles of the United States—though, ironically, he would support Monroe in her conflict with the black poet, critic, and editor, William Stanley Braithwaite.1 As such critics as Lorenzo Thomas and Kenny Williams (and James Weldon Johnson, for that matter) have pointed out, black writers and intellectuals , especially Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, were significant players in the rise of U.S. poetic modernism and the idea of a “new poetry.” Braithwaite in particular joined his sometime antagonist Harriet Monroe as a crucial critic and editor in promoting the new poetry—or the “poetry renaissance ” as Braithwaite preferred.2 To this one might add that black writers, including Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Fenton Johnson, were important early commentators on indigenous U.S. artistic bohemias—black, white, and black and white. At the same time, Braithwaite, Fenton Johnson, and JamesWeldon Johnson championed new African American writing, seeing what they posited as an upsurge in black poetry as simultaneously a part of the larger U.S. poetry revival and of a Negro “renaissance.” They certainly did not invent the idea of a “New Negro.” Still, they did much to take what had been primarilya political term and concept and use it to...

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