Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (review)

The task hails ambitious: against the theoretical backdrop of vernacular criticism and postcolonial transition narrative, David Nicholls sets out to develop a "historicist method for interpreting the literary mediation of the folk" during the Harlem Renaissance (3). Choosing only one text generally considered a "core" period piece—Jean Toomer's Cane (1923)—Nicholls otherwise rests his analysis in Conjuring the Folk on a rather unique combination of writings from the 1930s and 1940s. Here, Claude McKay's Banana Bottom (1933) and George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946) join ranks with Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) and Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941). All these texts engage the folk on a conceptual level, but to Nicholls, the cacophony of voices in the emerging discourse suggests a "contested vision of collectivity" (4) rather than a unitary tradition.

In its finest moments, Conjuring the Folk attests to Nicholls's skill in providing sensitive and insightful readings of his challenging material. His discussion of the "gendered autonomy" (86) available to Henderson's Ollie Miss and her son, Jule, prove provocative; his suggestion that Bita Plant's return to Banana Bottom be read not merely as "an elaborate scheme to contain the political agency of Afro-Jamaican women" (82) but as the enactment of an alternative modernity vis-á-vis "the incursions of colonial rule . . . [and] the exigencies of a global commodity culture" breaks fresh interpretive ground for McKay's final novel (83). Unfortunately, such moments of learned precision remain few and far between. Too often, Nicholls only skims the surface of the material before him, leaving valuable ideas undeveloped and textual dilemmas unresolved, even unattended.

The notion of the hidden transcript, developed by James C. Scott, certainly bears significance for Nicholls's discussion of Mules and Men. But one wonders why he opts merely to superimpose other scholars' concepts on his own work without any of the contextual adjustment or elaboration of which he is clearly capable. And the author's later failure to recognize the (inevitably manipulative) omnipresence of Hurston's authorial persona in her ethnographic writing constitutes an unfortunate, and surely avoidable, lapse in scholarly decorum.

Indeed, Conjuring the Folk tends to take its literary subject matter as a record of a reality whose architecture Nicholls deduces from contemporary social science accounts. For example, he draws on Arthur Raper's 1936 Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties to authenticate (or question) Toomer's representation of rural Georgia in Cane. How else might one explain his exclamation "Certainly, Toomer was misreading the scene before him" (29, my emphasis)? Denying Toomer any artistic license, Nicholls perniciously posits Cane as a document that is either faithful or not to "the truth" (rendered by a sociologist) of the historical moment it describes.

The volume's stated aspirations also point to its greatest limitations. Nicholls's interpretations rely heavily on what he calls "the ideology of form," the inescapable mold into which he sees genre conventions force the discourse of the folk. Hardly a simple interpretive task when working with texts somewhat easily classifiable as novels or personal essays, the project appears gargantuan—if not outright impossible—when considering such hybrids as Cane or Wright's verbal-visual 12 Million Black Voices. In his eagerness to read Wright's photo essay as a Marxian narrative of modernization, Nicholls glosses over the particular challenges of the "illustrated text." He never so much as addresses such issues as how and if images and words cooperate, or how the particular design of Wright's work may influence its reading.

Nicholls's text struggles with one final difficulty. The folk that figure so prominently on its title page and in the introduction fade to a vaguely defined referent hovering over the chapters themselves. Even in his attempt to demonstrate "that there are ‘many folks'...