Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (review)

Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. J. Martin Favor. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 187. $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Though J. Martin Favor presents this remarkably accessible book as an intervention in the "discourse of black identity," it will be interesting to anyone concerned with issues surrounding identity politics or the representational logic of cultural studies (10). Favor does not cite Walter Benn Michaels's argument that discussions of cultural identity unintentionally replicate essentialist definitions of race, but he does gesture toward this possibility (118-9, 153-4 n. 8); unlike Michaels, however, Favor is unwilling to dispense with racial categories (18-9). ¹ Discussing a topic hotly debated in a broad range of cultural contexts, this work is notable for the sensitivity with which it negotiates between the benefits of racial discourse--its resistance to assimilation from without--and its dangers--its vulnerability to restrictive formulations from within.

Favor is most concerned with the latter, particularly the "critical discourse of blackness that places the 'folk'--southern, rural, and poor--at its forefront" (4). Positioning his argument against previous readings of novels by James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and George Schuyler, interpretations that marginalize the representations of these authors for being insufficiently "folk," Favor argues that their ambivalence toward folk culture should not be interpreted as a lack of racial authenticity but as a productive rewriting of blackness, allowing for the recognition of "multiple authentic African-American subject positions", identifications complicated by "class, gender, and geography" (32, 21). This argument is persuasive and corresponds with his conclusion that race is an internally heterogeneous "performative trope" (141).

Favor's suggestion that contemporary "antielitist elitism" also dominated early-twentieth-century African American discourse is less convincing. Although he quotes writers from the 1920s who valorize the increased politicization of the migrating southern poor, the importance of the southern past, and the possibilities of a "folk" aesthetic, he also cites their insistence on the diversity within African America. Even the text he posits as foundational in the folk-centered discourse of black identity, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), seems less to downplay its author's cosmopolitan, middle-class background than to enact an often tortuous movement between empathy and alienation in describing his relationship to the rural poor. Though Favor's suspicion that Harlem Renaissance writing granted a "class privilege" to "folk" identity leads him to find progressive resistance to assimilation in moments that might otherwise look like bourgeois elitism, his readings demonstrate the degree to which the celebration of "folk" identity has shaped critical understanding of this literature and provide a new perspective on the important question of intraracial negotiations of representational identity during this period.

Such questions are crucial for Favor, whose theoretical framework, like that of many critiques of identity politics, analyzes power relations in representational space--the movements between "cent[ral]" and "marginal" discursive positions, for example (139-41). And since race is a representational construct, he is right to argue that this is a vital space in which to subvert it. But his method could be enriched by further analysis of the relationship between discursive and other types of space--material and social space, for example, or the "interior," cognitive and emotional space of the subject. Favor gestures toward this latter possibility, particularly in his reading of Larsen's Quicksand, which "expos[es] the factor of affective response [in addition to political, ideological, and moral considerations] in the process of defining one's self" (87). In making the connection between individual anxieties and desires and the discursive construction of identity, Favor suggests a relationship that merits further consideration in cultural studies; he raises similar issues in his chapters on Johnson, Toomer, and Schuyler.

Favor is not inclined to link his study of representational politics with issues in material space, in part because such combinations have previously resulted in...