Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World by Eve Dunbar (review)

Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination renegotiates the relationship between regionalism in African American literature and ethnography as a practice and form of knowledge production around race in the United States. The tensions between the two entail questions of class, community, authorship, and authority; they speak not only to questions of perceived insiderness and outsiderness but also to accusations of provincialism and romanticization, and to public and critical battles over racial formation in the national sphere. Dunbar scrutinizes this intellectual and cultural tension in the critically undertheorized period between major African American literary movements of the twentieth century: the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.

It is in this in-between period, after the artistic experiments and cultural vogue of African America in the Harlem Renaissance and before the black nationalism of the Black Aesthetic, that Dunbar locates the important drama of these two modes, literary regionalism and the ethnographic. Both popular forms emerged during the Harlem Renaissance as the sites of “knowledge” and the exoticizing of African American and African diasporic life. Thereafter, in Dunbar’s analysis, the two openly vie for primacy in defining the concept of race in the United States. Dunbar explores the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes as navigating this contest between the regional and the ethnographic, through the lens of the international rather than the national.

Dunbar argues that the cosmopolitan and diasporic experiences of these authors solidify their regional concerns with African America rather than transcending the national into a seemingly more progressive diasporic identification: “U.S.-based African American narratives might be coextensive rather than antithetical to more international or global narratives” (8). She then redefines regionalism as an imaginative structure of racial belonging and politics that stands alongside and apart from both nationalist and diasporic frameworks, attempting to situate African American literature beyond the dichotomy that has so dominated the field for the past two decades. Dunbar challenges African American literary scholars to keep taking regionalism seriously.

Dunbar’s necessary reevaluation of regionalism produces nuanced, against-the-grain readings of the canonical authors studied in each chapter. Zora Neale Hurston’s domestic ethnography Mules and Men (1935) is lauded for its emphasis on the “timeliness” rather than “timelessness” of the folk and folk culture in the American South (42). Her Caribbean ethnography Tell My Horse (1938), however, does not fare so well in Dunbar’s estimation, mostly due to what Dunbar deems the failures of the comparative impulse in Hurston’s (and later Wright’s) ethnographic work outside of the United States, work still preoccupied with African American racial formation and national politics. When Dunbar turns to Wright’s later works, Black Power (1954) and The Color Curtain (1956), she asserts that cosmopolitan travel offers far more than the political progress narrative now ascribed to Wright’s post-US period. Of considerable note here is Dunbar’s fine reading of the presence of Africa as both conceptual and literal site for Wright, and the unsatisfying way that the continent becomes frozen in time and in a static regionalism, particularly with respect to gender and sexuality, in Wright’s late work.

Dunbar’s riskier analysis of Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) and four of Chester Himes’s Harlem detective novels reframes the oeuvres of these two pivotal figures in African American letters. Baldwin’s international travels provide only a loose frame for Dunbar’s third chapter; she argues that Baldwin’s fiction writes back to ethnography as “a competing narrative meant to upstage, or at least contend with, mid-twentieth-century national discourse that often relied on sociological and anthropological tracks to create and then manage ‘the crisis’ of the black family and black culture, more generally” (98–99). While Baldwin’s work is regularly read as upending the limits of racial representation, this specific...