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  • Sterling A. Brown’s Master Metaphor: Southern Road and the Sign of Black Modernity
  • Mark A. Sanders (bio)

A growing trend in American cultural and literary studies is toward the hybrid or “mongrel” model of cultural production. The most recent and comprehensive examples of this hybrid approach—George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) and Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995)—aggressively challenge the long-standing custom of critical Jim Crowism in cultural and literary studies, a distorting segregation agreed upon and reinforced by black and white critics alike. On the one hand, the unexamined assumption of normative or perhaps preeminent whiteness has fueled the traditional New Critical construction of the American literary canon as racially homogenous. While on the other, a countering black essentialism has insisted upon a hermetic tradition of the “family’s sounding strategies” 1 completely foreign to “mainstream” ears and eyes. These separate (yet patently unequal) forms of essentialism have conspired to distort our perceptions of strategic cultural movements, practical and philosophical approaches to cultural and literary production, and ultimately the highly complex nature of race relations in a multi-chromatic society struggling toward its egalitarian ideals.

While Douglas and Hutchinson’s works represent the latest assertions of a more complicated, pluralistic model of American cultural production, this trend has a longer history with very serious implications for the resurgence of critical interest in Sterling A. Brown. More specifically, modernism, in the most conceptually abstract and historically specific sense, serves as the current focus for this essentialist/hybrid debate. First, New Criticism has advanced a narrow vision of “high” modernism that overtly negates any black presence or influence, and covertly (as we have seen through work by Aldon Nielsen and Michael North 2 ) invokes blackness as the sign of the anti-modern, a sign lending coherence to this threateningly amorphous moment. So too, traditional approaches to the concomitant black literary movement, the “Harlem Renaissance,” have insisted upon the autonomy and particularity of black arts in Harlem. Either a failure (according to Nathan Huggins, David Levering Lewis, Harold Cruse, and others 3 ), or a resounding success, (according to Houston Baker 4 ), both camps agree upon the Harlem Renaissance’s absolute remove from modernist concerns.

Although this racial and cultural provincialism continues to dominate critical discussion of the era, it is important to note that many critics—anticipating Hutchinson and Douglas’s larger formulations—have conceived an “Afro-modernism,” advancing a more complex, necessarily hybrid process of artistic creation. Richard [End Page 917] Powell and Craig Werner examine the interracial, intercultural dynamics in the blues and African-American poetry respectively 5 ; James L. deJongh conceives Harlem in terms of “vicious modernism,” and Arnold Rampersad applies the concept of modernism to Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. 6 Furthermore, this notion of black participation in modernism dates back at least as far as the early 1980s when Kimberly Benston saw in Sterling A. Brown a “profoundly modernist consciousness,” 7 at once revising and expanding restrictive conceptions of the era. But even earlier than Benston, Brown himself insisted upon his own artistic hybridity, and by extension, that of his contemporaries. Declaring, “I’m also a 4-H man: Homer, Heine, Hardy, and Houseman; if you want four or five more, you can put Langston Hughes and a few other “Hs” in there,” 8 Brown staked his claim to the broadest, most eclectic traditions in Western letters. Just as he claimed an elite New England education and a patently folk and homespun edification in the rural South, 9 James Weldon Johnson claimed Walt Whitman and folk sermons; Langston Hughes (also a Whitman devotee) claimed Carl Sandburg and urban blues; and Zora Neale Hurston claimed Franz Boas and rural folkways. In a larger sense, through the assertion of cultural and intellectual eclecticism as foundation for artistic creation, Brown and his contemporaries rearticulate, in an artistic sphere, the New Negro claim to political access and participation. Artistic hybridity, here in concert with the New Negro assertion of full citizenship, necessarily exposes the highly political nature of modernist formulations. In short, to traverse racial boundaries; to assert a model, thoroughly historicized self; to participate in...

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