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Chapter 9 Afterword By focusing on five authors who portray different sites that represented to them African American culture, I have elucidated the ways that the ethnographic imagination informs New Negro literature, including the introduction of a set of figurative devices derived from anthropology (the construction of the field and the territorialization of culture, the ethnographic eye, and the participant-observer, for example). I have also examined how their identification with dual sites of identification, "native" and ethnographer (in some cases the assumption ofsuch a guise is more figurative than literal), resulted in the emergence of a literary preoccupation with ways of seeing, knowing, and representing African American culture. This is not to say that such questions had never been asked before the modernization and institutionalization of anthropology; rather, I argue that the active exchange of ideas between Black intellectuals and modern anthropologists in the early part of the twentieth century played a significant role in the cast and tenor of such discussions. Ultimately, thinking about ethnography (or about themselves as ethnographers) underscores for Renaissance writers their own positions in relation to the cultures that they represent in writing and as teachers, scholars, and politicians. The ethnographer-academic, in other words, assumes a symbolic role in Black literatures beginning in and extending beyond the Renaissance period, representing hegemonic culture. A group of texts has emerged in the twentieth century that repeatedly returns to such figures of cross-cultural transit. From Alice Walker's reworking of Du Boisian paradigms of culture-work and racial uplift in Meridian, to SherleyAnne Williams and Toni Morrison's depictions of the dehumanizing views and actions ofthe "schoolteacher" figure in Dessa Rose and Beloved, to Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor's fictional rejection of the ethnographer as an adequate bridge between dominant culture and African American communities in Chosen Place, Timeless People, and Mama Day, the figures for crossing cultures and the methods of knowing and understanding difference established during the modernist era continue to exert their influence. 180 Chapter 9 Still other books ask if individuals can only"find" (authentic) Black culture in the South, or in other geographically bounded locations. The territorialization of culture, often linked to its aestheticization, lies in opposition to a view of culture as process and as relational. This dichotomy is explored in contemporary narratives, such as Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Song ofSolomon, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day. In Mama Day, the ethnographer enters a space that he conceptualizes as "the field;' only to learn that it refuses to be managed. Attempting to write a scholarly monograph, this ethnographer arrives with the expectation that he will foreground his observation and analysis offolk customs. The novel turns this assumption on its head, however, by recentering the folks' perspective on the ethnographer, whom we also learn is the offspring of one of the island's inhabitants. We discover that "Reema's boy" was born in Willow Springs, was educated on the mainland, and "came hauling himself back from one of those fancy colleges mainside, dragging his notebooks and tape recorder and a funny way of curling up his lip and clicking his teeth:'1 This (not-quite) outsider strikes a discordant note in this setting because ofhis inability to listen carefully to what the "folk" find meaningful about their own lives. He is too preoccupied, in other words, with constructing them as primitive other to consider them equal participants in the discursive exchange. Reema's Boy represents the figure of the African American, adrift from home and longing to remember and preserve it; he also stands in for dominant cultural assumptions of the superiority of cosmopolitan subjects, metropolitan spaces, and institutionalized knowledge. The ethnographer thus stands as a cautionary figure for the novel's main characters, George and Cocoa, who also want to reclaim and reconstruct their origins, as well as being a figure of cross-cultural exchange. By highlighting the experiences of individuals who, in contrast to the ethnographer, either possess or seek to acquire a more meaningful and equitable relationship with the people whom they view as the keepers of their cultural heritage, and by problematizing both the notion of cultural essence and the dynamics of cultural change, Naylor considers the possibility of an African American identity rooted in a communal identity, yet not restricted to a particular geographical location or homogenous idea of blackness.2 What I argue in regards to Naylor's text I would extend to a...

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