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chapter one Haunted { 1 } The idea that black culture haunts American literature was suggested by Toni Morrison, who identified what she calls an “Africanist presence” (6) in American literature. Whereas Morrison is primarily concerned with the means by which this haunting takes place as a function of fictional rhetoric and character development, I am concerned with this trope as a function of poetic language and style. In an attempt to expand the idea of this “presence ” by examining its function at the semantic and symbolic levels, this chapter explores how such language acts as a function of what I am calling the “African American Imaginary,” the term I use to identify an aspect of the cultural milieu in which modernism developed. This milieu is also a historical one, in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture in the United States was being reshaped by, in part, the migration of African Americans from the rural areas to the cities. Much of the influence on the larger culture that this migration produced can be seen in its reflection in popular culture, and part of the urbanizing African American culture’s influence showed up both in the way popular culture “imagined” black people and in the way African American artists’ artistic imagination impacted the larger culture. It was, as I try to show, a process marked by, to use Jacques Lacan’s words, “an alternating mechanism of expulsion and introjection, of projection and absorption, that is to say from an imaginary interplay” (82). The process works, I suggest, in two ways. At the symbolic level, it provides a means by which modernism defines the self in terms of its opposition to this Africanist presence, by proposing that this presence be understood as a kind of binary opposite to itself, a binary in which each side is, in effect, haunted by the other. At the rhetorical level, the process uses the forms of linguistic expression that African American people brought into the culture as a means of creating its own, “new” or “modernist” expression. Put another way, there is a relationship between the concept of the “colonial uncanny” and that of the “African American Imaginary.” Modernism is, in part, constituted by an engagement between the racial self-consciousness of whiteness 27 and the figure of the racialized other. This racialized other is not, as is often thought, a mute and unnameable presence but one whose works in the world are as present as those of the speaker, the “modernist.” The ways in which these relationships develop, either in culture in general or in the realm of artistic expression, are not straightforward. As I attempt to demonstrate, the mechanisms described by Lacan (and used, as I suggest below, by Homi K. Bhabha in his discussion of the stereotype) call for understanding this process as one characterized by an interplay of both mimetic and synthetic elements; that is, the song lyrics, dialect phrases, cultural artifacts , and iconography that make up the substance of these elements may or may not belong to the actual African American culture. Whether they are “real” or “copies,” however, makes little difference to the substance of this inquiry, because the two forms together make up the “African American Imaginary” that I wish to explore. Through an examination of “The Comedian as the Letter C” by Wallace Stevens (Collected Poems 27–46; hereafter “The Comedian”), one can see how Freud’s idea of “the uncanny” can be used to read Stevens’s poem as an enactment of a specific type of anxiety which catalyzes the construction of modernist self-consciousness, which is at the same time a racialized selfconsciousness . And a discussion of Tender Buttons (1914) by Gertrude Stein demonstrates how even the most apparently opaque modernist texts are implicated in this dynamic of the racialized uncanny. Using “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) by Zora Neale Hurston as our primary guide helps to uncover the “black” voice of Tender Buttons. I begin with a consideration of what I call the “language of the colonial uncanny” as it is expressed in the voyage of Crispin in “The Comedian.” This idea of the “colonial uncanny” is a way of thinking about how modernism can partially be conceptualized in terms of a performative relationship between the racial self-consciousness of whiteness and the figure of the racialized other. It is a relationship in which the connection can be said to involve an act of haunting. Following this discussion, I turn to another means of using...

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