Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation, and: Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (review)

The study of all literatures depends on definitions. During the past decade, the study of American literature has benefited immensely from new perspectives on its national and generic characteristics. Much of the recent critical work published under the rubrics of new historicism, feminism and postfeminism, and cultural, race, and queer studies has focused on modernism and its needlessly separated subcategory, the Harlem Renaissance. These two books draw usefully upon this decade of work, and—more important—help to move the discourse into different patterns of emphasis.

Delia Konzett's Ethnic Modernisms considers how the writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys attack stereotypes of class and nativism. The opening chapter is a model of helpful definition in which Konzett rehearses the crucial dilemma of recognition that Henry James experienced upon his return from England in 1904. Absent for over twenty years, thoroughly—and complacently—immured in the social and literary conventions of the upper middle class, James was aghast at the current state of culture in the United States. Reacting in The American Scene (1907) to what he saw as the transience of modern accomplishment, he wrote: "One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written" (2). This is also the essay in which James introduces the claim that the "hotel-spirit" is the American spirit—a restless searching for the new rather than the enduring. (It is not surprising that James never again returned to this country, and that most of the writing he did during the last years of his life was nostalgic.)

In her chapter of definition, Konzett not only captures the sense of shock that accompanied the realization in the new century that a more populist America now existed, but she also identifies the many immigrant groups that changed the composition of a country dominated only twenty years earlier by Western European and Anglo languages, values, and blood lines. Konzett describes well the battles between the democratic acceptance of difference and actual exclusionary politics, as practiced, for example, by the Immigration Restriction League and the American Eugenics Society. She also summarizes current theoretical work on ethnicity, such as that by Edward Said, Werner Sollors, Paul Rogin, Thomas Ferraro, and Michael North.

The problem of categorization is never simple, and Konzett explains her choices of Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys as appropriate to the complex grid of modernism that was changed by new considerations of race, class, and displacement. These writers assume "complex, rather than reductive positions on ethnicity," and they reach for innovative language in order to provide what Konzett calls "their unique articulation of ethnic identity in an unprecedented era of transformation, displacement, and mass consumer culture" (7).

Konzett's best analyses within this interesting treatment concern the language experimentation in these writers' truly avant-garde aesthetics, which are "appropriate to their experience of dislocation and exclusion" (8). The readings of Yezierska and Rhys, in particular, sustain new kinds of interpretations and give the reader challenges that live up to the announced wide topic.

In Rereading the Harlem Renaissance, Sharon Jones emphasizes class more than race. Jessie Fauset, with her degree from Cornell University, and Dorothy West, with her family home on Martha's Vineyard, have often been excluded from ethnically based considerations of modernism. Jones seeks to redress this omission with her polished readings of the works of both writers. Jones's major contention, however, is that today's...