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The New Harlem Renaissance Studies
David Chinitz
Modernism/modernity, Volume 13, Number 2, April 2006, pp. 375-382 (Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2006.0033
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/196644
[ Access provided at 26 Oct 2021 06:40 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]review essay
375
Review Essay
The New Harlem Renaissance Studies
By David Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago
Ebony Rising: Short Fiction of the Greater Harlem Renais- MODERNISM / modernity
sance Era. Craig Gable, ed. Bloomington and Indianapo- VOLUME TWELVE, NUMBER
lis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xlii + 552. $60.00 TWO, PP 375–382.
(cloth); $24.95 (paper). © 2006 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Masculinist Impulses:Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and
Modernity. Nathan Grant. Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 239. $44.95 (cloth).
Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance. Daylanne K. English. Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp.
xii + 267. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
When Washington Was in Vogue: A Love Story. Edward
Christopher Williams. New York: Amistad, 2003. Pp.
xxxiv + 285. $23.95 (cloth); $13.95 (paper).
Discarding critical premises that once narrowed the field of scholarly
vision, the New Harlem Renaissance Studies has brought fresh energy
to the analysis of early twentieth-century African-American literature.
A gradual decentering of the canon has directed renewed attention to
marginalized writers, especially women. Neglected texts have been
rediscovered, republished, and restored to consciousness. Periodization
has loosened, bringing the texts from Cane to Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God into dialogue with work from the shadowed decades on either
side. And while an awareness that the Renaissance was never limited
geographically to New York is nothing new—Sterling Brown stated the
case emphatically a half century ago—its full consequences are finally
emerging as critics investigate the multiple sites of African-American
creative activity and the movement’s crucial international dimensions.
Meanwhile, the exclusive focus on literature, painting, and other “high”M O D E R N I S M / modernity
376 forms of artistic expression (to which blues were always a partial exception) widens to include
cultural production of many kinds—a process that not only bears its own fruit but also greatly
enriches the context in which the art may be understood. Criticism bringing theoretical concepts
and approaches drawn from cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, gender and “whiteness”
studies, and elsewhere to bear on the Harlem Renaissance has had a most productive decade
and has much yet to reveal.
As students of other modernisms have intensified their concentration on modernity, the New
Harlem Renaissance Studies, too, connects cultural expression with a seemingly unlimited ar-
ray of contemporaneous intellectual and social formations. The Renaissance now appears—as
George Hutchinson anticipated in 1995—neither autogenous nor isolated from all but the most
obviously “racial” modern phenomena.1 Indeed, the Renaissance and “white” Anglo-American
modernism are seen to share extensive cultural contexts, and what Daylanne English, in one of
the books under review, calls the critical “segregation of modern African-American intellectuals
from the dominant literary, philosophical, and scientific debates of the modern period” is clearly
insupportable (22). That the New Harlem Renaissance Studies and the New Modernist Studies
should correspond in so many ways—as, clearly, they do—is an appropriate and constructive
development for both of these interwoven fields.
Almost all these new tendencies are richly illustrated in the four works under consideration
here, of which one is a resurrected Harlem Renaissance novel, one is an anthology of short
fiction, and two are works of criticism. Each of these books is valuable (though they are not all
equally so), and collectively they attest to the very real merits and continuing promise of the
current trends in Harlem Renaissance Studies.
When Washington Was in Vogue is an epistolary novel of 1925-26 originally published serially
in the Messenger as The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair. Besides
displaying the clever new title and the subtitle A Love Story, its jacket identifies the book as
“A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance.” Adam McKible explains in an introduction that he
“discovered” the novel while researching modernist little magazines for his doctoral dissertation.
He identifies the author, Edward Christopher Williams, as “the first professionally trained black
librarian in America” and helpfully summarizes Williams’s life and character. The introduction
concludes with a section (addressed more to a lay audience than to fellow scholars) on the novel’s
historical background.
The novel recounts the experiences of its protagonist, Davy Carr, among the black bourgeoisie
of early-1920s Washington. Davy, a careful social observer, comments trenchantly, though sym-
pathetically in the main, on the mores of the community in which he finds himself. He gradually
falls in love with Caroline Rhodes, the daughter of his landlady, although he himself is slow to
realize this. As McKible explains, “Much of the book’s pleasure derives from Davy’s ability to
write about his milieu so perceptively while also being unable to see the love blossoming right
under his own nose” (xvi).
Though unquestionably forgotten, Williams’s novel was never actually “lost”; it simply lay
disregarded in the pages of the Messenger.2 What McKible has done in preparing this edition,
besides making the novel available for the first time in book form, is not exactly to “discover”
it, but to assert its value—to insist, in fact, that this work stands with the best canonical Harlem
Renaissance fiction and deserves similar attention. The claims he makes for When Washington
Was in Vogue are not modest. Is this really, as McKible declares, “an important addition to the
twinned canons of American and African-American literature” (xxxi)? Does the novel evince
the “great insight and . . . deft style” that McKible attributes to it? Is it “indeed an American
novel of the first order” (xxxiv)? The answers to these questions turn out, astonishingly, to be yes,
yes, and yes. Williams’s novel is indeed a work of considerable significance, and a delightfully
accomplished piece of writing.
The importance of the novel lies especially in its good-natured riposte to the scathing repre-
sentation of African-American bourgeois society, particularly in Washington, that Cane, The Big
Sea, and other key New Negro texts have rendered settled truth for decades. A few critics have
been warning readers for some time that we were accepting uncritically one side of a generational
conflict.3 But there is nothing quite like a work of the imagination to humanize a long-dismissed
group and its culture. As a first-rate, full-length novel of manners written by a figure who stoodreview essay
outside every circle associated with the Harlem Renaissance, When Washington Was in Vogue 377
also lends substance to the commonplace that the Renaissance was hardly confined to Harlem.
As Emily Bernard points out in her useful afterword, the novel gives us a memorable heroine,
as well, in Caroline Rhodes—a Jazz-Age New Woman who is unconventional, articulate, intel-
ligent, and, unlike so many of her sisters in Harlem Renaissance fiction, “unapologetically”
brown-skinned and not a bit “tragically colored” (283-84).
Williams is a stylish and witty novelist with a sharp eye for social fashions and human foibles,
and a fine ear for the spoken and written language of his class. Among his better-known con-
temporaries, he is perhaps most comparable with Rudolph Fisher, and next with Jessie Fauset.
But several attributes set him apart, among them a humorously rakish quality that, as McKible
suggests, extended from Williams’s own character to his fiction. Davy Carr moves in a polite
world in which sexual intercourse outside marriage is beyond the pale, and this frees Davy and
his crowd to indulge in a heterosexual sensualism that would be impossible in a society that
lacked such clear and impermeable boundaries.4 If Davy’s capacity for aesthetic appreciation of
the features, figures, and couture of his female acquaintances is not in itself extraordinary for a
youngish bachelor, the openness and eloquence with which he records his admiration is remark-
able, as is his ability to carry on the most outrageous flirtations in complete innocence:
I sat between Miss Barton and Mrs. Hale. . . . Surely never in my mundane existence have
I had the honor of being the thrice fortunate thorn between two such roses—real American
beauties! The looking was deadly to the right or to the left. . . . Then we toasted marshmal-
lows and roasted peanuts, and I had the exquisite pleasure of being fed from time to time
by the loveliest hands in the world—on both sides of me—and if in the process of taking
marshmallows from the fingertips of Beauty, I now and then missed the marshmallows
and got more than my share of the fingertips, who can blame me? (19)
Through Davy Carr, Williams presents his Washingtonians as a charming and literate “smart
set,” progressive if never radical, and racially engaged if never egalitarian. They are not at all,
as Langston Hughes would have it, “altogether lacking in real culture, kindness, or good com-
mon sense.”5 In Williams’s more generous view they are an amiable and usually graceful elite.
Williams is, however, quite aware of the shortcomings of which Hughes complained; his Davy
Carr is a strong and frequent critic, for example, of the interracial color snobbery that he sees
in the friends he otherwise admires. He makes no excuses, either, for the tendency of some in
his class toward insularity and gossip, or for the showy materialism that one character attributes
to a racial “inferiority complex” (46). It is clear that Williams and Hughes are talking about the
same people. But for Williams, they require sympathetic correction; for Hughes they are ir-
redeemable, and racial progress must take place on another front altogether.
My one complaint about this edition is that it makes so few concessions to the teachers
and scholars who are bound to form a large part of the audience for any rediscovered Harlem
Renaissance novel. From the design of its dust jacket and its repeated billing as “A Love Story”
to the tenor of its introduction, the book is clearly being marketed to a general public. That
in itself is not a problem. But if a reader happens to be unfamiliar with, for example, Tosti or
Shand, or does not know the provenance of “Duna” or “the pitiful story of Dechelette and poor
little Alice Doré,” or has not read Dorland’s Age of Mental Virility or Stribling’s Birthright, the
book provides no help at all. The assumption seems to be that readers would rather not know,
if enlightenment requires the insertion of a footnote. Yet for the public to whom it seems ad-
dressed, the occasional note explaining even such less-obscure references as James Weldon
Johnson, Octavus Roy Cohen, and the Dyer bill would not be out of order. In any event, When
Washington Was in Vogue, while probably light in incident for some readers’ tastes, merits seri-
ous consideration and soon ought to be finding its way onto college syllabi for exactly the reason
McKible gives: that Williams has “captured,” with skill and craft, “a time, a place, and a psyche
previously undocumented by authors of his era” (xxxiv).
Ebony Rising, which distinguishes itself from other recent anthologies as the only one to
offer a “comprehensive” collection of Harlem Renaissance short fiction, brings additional mate-M O D E R N I S M / modernity
378 rial into the spotlight—and the classroom. With fifty-two stories dating from 1914 to 1940 and
written by thirty-seven different male and female authors, the book gives readers a broad sam-
pling, within its single genre, of Harlem Renaissance creative output. Several well-considered
decisions by editor Craig Gable make Ebony Rising the vital anthology that it is. The expansive
timeline along which he envisions “the Harlem Renaissance Era” enables him to include writing
that, he argues, “predates” the Renaissance yet “segues into it”; it also allows readers to see that
such “transitional figures” as Richard Wright and Chester Himes “appeared in the midst” of the
Harlem Renaissance and not merely in its aftermath (xiv). Gable has arranged the stories in strict
chronological order, giving readers a sense of an unfolding literary movement instead of the usual
congeries of authors. Reading the book sequentially, one is permitted to observe both historical
and stylistic change, rather than being introduced, yet again, to a gallery of isolated geniuses. In
making his selections, Gable deliberately showcases the generic variety and geographic diversity
of Harlem Renaissance fiction. He has also chosen to omit certain heavily anthologized stories,
which not only makes room for other selections but also avoids reinforcing the impression that a
small canon of works defines the best of the movement. Determining which familiar stories are
indispensable and which can be done without is a dangerous project for an editor, but Gable’s
choices strike me as defensible even where I might have wished for others.
A number of stories in Ebony Rising have been seldom reprinted since their original publica-
tion; a few have never been reprinted at all. One of the pleasures of this anthology is the oppor-
tunity it affords readers to discover some unknown gem of short fiction. In his introduction to the
book, Darryl Dickson-Carr particularly commends S. Miller Johnson’s “The Golden Penknife,” a
1925 story of Russian immigrants whose plot turns on the suspicion of one main character that
another has “colored” blood. This story is certainly remarkable, though not altogether success-
ful. Johnson’s writing deploys a Jazz-Age irony that is sometimes sharp, sometimes ham-fisted.
One of his most impressive passages is an extended scene in a cabaret that translates into prose
the atmosphere of Hughes’s jazz poems of about the same time. Elsewhere, though, the story is
marred by bathos, as in the interactions between Anna and her suspect lover Tervanovitch, or
in the heavily foreshadowed yet still not quite convincing ending. Yet “The Golden Penknife”
remains a significant “find” from an author who, apparently, produced only one story in his life.
Readers who have not already discovered Ottie B. Graham or Eloise Bibb Thompson will find
still more to be impressed with in these equally obscure writers.6
Readers will also find themselves, I think, freshly impressed with a number of the more
canonical authors. Gable’s sometimes unexpected choices among the works of these better-
known figures helps keep Ebony Rising from traversing too much familiar territory. But the
contributions of Toomer, Hurston, Walrond, Fisher, Larsen, Hughes and Bontemps—and, I
would add, Gwendolyn Bennett—remind us, each in its own way, that these artists did possess
an uncommon command over words and technique.
Dickson-Carr’s general assessment of the stories in Ebony Rising is accurate: they “represent
a qualitative range extending from competent, engaging journeywork, to the finely honed craft
of the mature artist, to the avant-garde” (xxii). While almost all the stories collected here are
imaginative and provocative, quite a few are primarily ideas outfitted with a little flesh and blood
to give them body. Some stories are tarnished by predictability or mawkishness, some by clumsy
writing or cliché. Not all of the experiments are equally successful. But some unevenness is to be
expected in an anthology designed to cross-section an era. In compensation, the representative
range of the stories allows us to observe how, for example, the “genteel” prose style slackens
its grip over the years while modernist techniques add new colors to the writers’ palettes, even
in stories that are not particularly experimental—see, for instance, Bontemps’s light-handed
deployment of what Hugh Kenner once dubbed the “Uncle Charles principle” in Joyce (“He
was one of the most handiest boys Adina had ever set eyes on” [362]).
Although Ebony Rising has perhaps more than its fair share of typographical errors, editor
Gable has helpfully endowed the collection with a substantial apparatus. The stories from each
year are preceded by a page or more of information: a list of the year’s historical events, pertinent
statistics such as the current U.S. unemployment rate and the number of reported lynchings, and
cultural data such as the winner of the annual Springarn Medal and a bibliography of important
African-American books. Appendices include a biography and a bibliography for each author;review essay
tables of the prize-winning works of short fiction from the Opportunity and Crisis literary contests; 379
a bibliography of scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance; and, of special benefit to teachers, a
table of thematic elements linking the various stories within the collection. A particularly salient
detail emerging from the appendices is the markedly scant output from many of the contributors
to Ebony Rising. Too few, one more than suspects, had the five-hundred pounds per year or the
room of one’s own that they needed to practice their craft, or the publication outlets in which
to market it. The loss is clearly ours as well as theirs.
While its thesis that black masculinity has been historically warped by economic and social
injustice is hardly revelatory, the value of Nathan Grant’s Masculinist Impulses lies in its careful
teasing out of several writers’ analyses of black masculinity even where such analysis is not the
most prominent or obvious feature of the texts. Grant shows that Toomer’s stories “Esther” and
“Fern,” for example, are not simply portraits of two Southern African-American women, but
portraits of those women in relation to the battered and fragmented psyches of the black men
who interact with them. In another valuable sequence, Grant closely examines the differently
flawed masculinities of Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake Woods in Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God. Starks, for example, is attractive at first because his “ambition and
energy” suggest a masculine drive capable of “nation-building,” but this drive soon devolves into
class consciousness, control of others, and an “anticommunitarian” isolation of himself and Janie
from their neighbors (133-35). Grant has a sharp eye for unexpected relations between texts as
well—for the common symbol or motif that connects Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain
with Their Eyes, or Toomer’s “Bona and Paul” with his “Blood-Burning Moon” and “Avey.” His
method of reading across texts reveals an almost poetic sense of relation between them.
Hampering the presentation of his insights, Grant’s prose tends to flutter among ideas rather
than pursuing clear argumentative lines. One typical paragraph starts by presenting Toomer’s
opposition of man and woman, but quickly turns from sex to race in his play Natalie Mann.
After reiterating a point from the previous page about the character Merilh’s portraits, the
lengthy paragraph then continues with a few sentences on the erasure of black identity and a
digression on the Young America group of writers before trailing off with a quote from another
critic on Toomer’s response to that group (28-29). Much of the text reads this way, with fine
local observations and sophisticated theoretical ideas suggesting many things but never quite
coalescing into an argument.
What happens at the level of the paragraph is reproduced in the book’s overall structure.
Masculinist Impulses devotes two chapters to Cane alone and two to Hurston’s four novels. One
chapter on a pair of mid-career novels by John Edgar Wideman—Reuben (1987) and Philadel-
phia Fire (1990)—follows; another on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day
concludes the book. The Toomer chapters, predictably, would gain much force and coherence
from condensation. The Hurston chapters, while less distended, are strangely constructed. The
first, for example, inexplicably begins by discussing her last novel and proceeds more or less
backward from there. This forces Grant to grapple with some of the most problematic aspects
of Seraph on the Sewanee and Moses, Man of the Mountain—Joe Kelsey’s advisory role in Jim’s
rape of Arvay, and wise Mentu’s sexist advice to Moses—before establishing a general pattern or
thesis that might contextualize these troubling scenes. One result is that the chapter sometimes
has an air of special pleading in its exertions to complicate those moments, as when Grant argues
that Mentu’s “is not, finally, a sexist utterance, but rather a fulfillment of a more wholesome
theme . . . the achievement and then the securing of the harmony of the entire nation” (114).
The fact that it is aimed at “nation-building” does not cancel the passage’s regressive import, its
assignment of intellect to man and a supporting role to woman.
Grant’s rationale for bypassing all black fiction between Hurston and Wideman is that in the
period between the Harlem Renaissance and postmodernism, he does not find the pattern he
is seeking:
Naturalism, as the dominant form of literary expression in American writing after about
1940, left little room for male characters, black or white, to combat systematic racial and
class oppression through alterity and, as an element of that alterity, principled associations
with women. If the metropolis as symbol of capitalism had failed man the agent of nature,M O D E R N I S M / modernity
380 then particularly in defense of his generations to follow, he was impelled to meet this foe
with an unwavering, masculine force, while the recipe for such force usually included
women’s subordination. (149)
Toomer and Hurston, Grant argues, expressed “possibilities for new and vibrant senses of the
black masculine” that lay uncultivated until revived by a postmodern sensibility (214-15). He is
by no means alone in positing a continuity between Hurston and certain contemporary writers
that waves away almost everything between. But can this keen, inventive reader, capable of re-
reading “Esther” as a story about Barlo and Seraph on the Sewanee as sympathetically feminist,
really find nothing anywhere in Richard Wright, Chester Himes, or Ishmael Reed that might
also surprise us? Nothing in Maud Martha, Jubilee, or Brown Girl, Brownstones that anticipates
what he locates in Wideman and Morrison? And even if this is indeed the case, might there not
be some value in devoting attention to one or more seemingly antithetical figures?
Perhaps because their very compactness demands it, Grant’s concluding chapters on Wide-
man, Morrison, and Naylor are the best written and most closely argued in the book. And even
with its weaknesses of structure and argumentation, Masculinist Impulses offers more than
enough of value in its acute sifting of texts to recommend it to readers interested in literary
representations of black masculinity.
Daylanne English’s Unnatural Selections, which examines eugenics as a shaping force for
both modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, is even easier to recommend. Eugenics, English
reminds us, was once so ubiquitous in American culture as to have “attained the status of common
sense” (1), and its influence crested at just the Harlem-Renaissance/high-modernist moment.
Moreover, despite its present reputation, eugenics was regarded in its heyday as a forward-think-
ing, even idealistic science and was likely to be espoused in some form by progressives seeking
to improve the lot of humanity or at least of their own “race.” Eugenics crossed racial lines
easily, as black thinkers as well as white agonized over dysgenic intraracial breeding habits. For
African-American leaders, eugenics formed a natural part of “racial uplift” programs.
In this stimulating study, English moves fluently between canonical and noncanonical texts,
black writers and white, literary and cultural studies. Her opening chapters (after a useful in-
troduction) pair W. E. B. DuBois and T. S. Eliot, one a key “arbiter and editor” of the Harlem
Renaissance, the other of Anglo-American modernism. The book then segues to female writers,
first with Gertrude Stein, and then, returning to the Harlem Renaissance, with the authors of
antilynching protest plays dating from 1916 to 1930. A chapter on the eugenic “family studies”
to which hundreds of (white) women employed by male scientists as “field workers” contributed
concludes the analysis. Each chapter holds its share of revelations.
English’s first chapter rebuts previous critical studies that have attempted to dissociate Du-
Bois from eugenics. The superiority of the “Talented Tenth,” she demonstrates, had an assumed
biological basis, and DuBois fretted, as white eugenicists did, over “the evils of differential birth
rate (the period’s code term for overpropagation by the lower classes)” and the deficient breed-
ing of the elite. English reads his 1928 novel Dark Princess as a “eugenic fantasy” that looks
forward to the triumph of an “emerging eugenic breed,” a projection of his Talented Tenth (48).
Under DuBois’s editorship, the Crisis often told this “family story” pictorially—for example, in
its “Men of the Month” pages, designed to resemble family photo albums and thus to create an
illusion of kinship among unrelated individuals. The ill-conceived marriage between DuBois’s
own daughter, Yolande, and the gay poet Countee Cullen forms the centerpiece of the June 1928
Crisis, and DuBois uses his editorial in that issue to pontificate on African-American “breeding”
and the beginnings of “a new race.” Both privately and publicly, English concludes, DuBois’s
politics were “shaped by his particularly utopian, heterosexual vision of a world ‘remade’ by the
united intellectual, political, and reproductive efforts of first-rate men and women of color”
(59). At the same time, DuBois’s eugenics remains closely related to his political progressivism,
his feminism, his defense of the mulatto against racial purists, and other generally admired
elements of his thought.
In the rather startling chapter that follows, English shows that Eliot, by contrast, was hardly
attracted to eugenics at all. His “troubling racial and class politics,” she suggests, have ledreview essay
critics—Donald Childs most recently—to misread Eliot as a committed eugenicist when, in 381
fact, he repeatedly satirized, mocked, and otherwise disparaged eugenic thought. Ironically, it
was Eliot’s commitment to religion, his conservative rejection of progressive politics, and his
“squeamish” response to sexuality that saved him, so to speak, from eugenics. The prospect of
science intervening in human reproduction was repellent to Eliot for any number of reasons;
and, pluralist as well as elitist, he had no desire either to “eliminate” or to improve the genes
of society’s “lower layers” (77). Stein’s Three Lives, on the other hand, emerges from English’s
analysis as either a feminist text complicated by eugenic anxieties or a eugenic text complicated by
feminist sympathies. Each chapter in Stein’s triptych, English argues, registers “a preoccupation
with fertility and its failed regulation” (109-110), which she interestingly connects with Stein’s
ambivalence toward “medical authority”—including her own as an ex-medical student—at the
moment of the medical profession’s takeover of obstetrics. A sustained close reading shows that
the text, despite good intentions, “pathologizes” its black, immigrant, and working-class hero-
ines. Melanctha’s hybridity, for example, determines her fate, for in Stein, as in eugenic theory,
mulattoes are essentially unfit.
Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and other New
Negro women writers had their own uses for eugenic ideas as they indicted the “racial terror-
ism” of lynching in plays that depicted black women as renouncing motherhood in horrified
protest. On stage, it is always the “very best” African-American men who are massacred and
their equally eugenic female counterparts who opt for childlessness or even commit infanti-
cide rather than offer up children to the lynchers of the future (126). Eugenics thus yields a
modern language for voicing revulsion against the practice of lynching; that is, lynching can be
portrayed as grotesquely dysgenic. English further contends that the antilynching dramatists’
key trope of elective childlessness linked racial with feminist protest. Besides producing new
victims of racial oppression, childbearing for educated, middle-class black women—especially
the repeated childbearing urged on them by male race leaders concerned with differential birth
rate—threatened to debar them from the hard-won opportunities of New Womanhood and New
Negrohood. The antilynching playwrights, English asserts, “were clearly protesting interracial
oppression . . . but they were protesting, as well, a specifically modern intraracial and gendered
oppression—that is, African American ideologies of uplift that emphasized black women’s do-
mestic and reproductive value” (122). In this way, English recuperates the plays from the critical
consensus that dismisses them as aesthetic failures—maudlin, repetitive, and incredible—and
resuscitates them as important cultural documents touching on “an extraordinarily complex,
vexed, and recurrent topic” for the African-American middle class (26). Her fine close reading
of Grimké’s Rachel bears out this thesis.
English’s final chapter on the eugenic field workers, who ranged over the countryside to
identify and study supposedly dysgenic families, makes for fascinating if appalling reading.
The field workers, English argues, must be regarded as New Women because of their profes-
sionalized status and relative independence; yet their work, carried out with all the idealism of
earnest reformers, brought the full force of pseudo-science and misguided government to bear
on unsuspecting rural men and women who failed to meet emergent middle-class standards of
industriousness, domestic virtue, and prudence. Thousands of those deemed “feebleminded”
were removed from the gene pool through institutionalization or compulsory sterilization. In
this chapter, English focuses on the field workers’ status, discomfiting to us, as professionally and
socially mobile, energetically activist, yet thoroughly regressive New Women; on their “expert”
understanding of eugenic and dysgenic qualities in their subjects; and on the relation of their
work to the transformations of gender, class, and values with which it coincided. She also claims,
intriguingly, that the field workers “created a new genre” in their largely unpublished writings,
“[c]ombining personal narrative, travel narrative, interviews, genealogical data, and statistical
analysis” (175). Regrettably, the chapter offers little actual discussion of that genre, which English
describes in passing as “compelling” and “remarkable.”
Like most critical works of such ambitious scope, this one has its foibles. One is the frequent
recurrence of a small set of favorite quotations; for instance, Eliot’s statement that he sought
writers for the Criterion who represented “the best people of each generation and type” is quoted
on five different occasions. Lines from Calvin Coolidge, Nella Larsen, and others are similarlyM O D E R N I S M / modernity
382 replicated, giving the impression that English has mined the available evidence to exhaustion,
which is actually far from the case. One wonders, too, about some of her examples of eugenic
discourse. When the editors of the Messenger disparaged the “old crowd” of African-American
race leaders for failing “to adapt itself to the changed conditions,” recommending “young men
who are educated, radical and fearless” as substitutes, were they really employing “social Dar-
winist terms” in a “quasi-biological self-selection as racial leaders” (61)? Likewise, the quotation
from Eliot that I cited a moment ago is, in its original context, strictly literary-critical in import,
and it appears less “metaphorically eugenicist,” as English would have it, than metaphorically
classist. And the book’s conclusion, which gestures somewhat sketchily at eugenic survivals in
present-day social policy, does not inspire the same confidence as the substantive chapters.
Still, Unnatural Selections is a compelling critical study—one that absorbs and enlightens as
it brings together diverse texts and argues persuasively for theses that are often unpredictable
and even counterintuitive. With its thoughtful and unembarrassed side-by-side consideration of
white and black modernism; its sensitive attention to the intersection of race, gender, and class;
and its productive cultural turn, English’s book illustrates some of the best attributes that the
New Modernist Studies and the New Harlem Renaissance Studies hold in common.
Notes
1. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995).
2. The novel did receive extensive critical treatment, however, in a 2000 article by Christina Sim-
mons, which McKible graciously cites. See Simmons’s “Modern Marriage for African Americans,
1920-1940,” Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000), 273-300.
3. See, for example, Wilson J. Moses, “The Lost World of the Negro, 1895–1919: Black Literary
and Intellectual Life before the ‘Renaissance,’” Black American Literature Forum 21 (1987), 61-84.
A recent source for further information is The Black Washingtonians: the Anacostia Museum Illus-
trated Chronology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), which mentions Williams’s Letters of Davy Carr on
p. 178.
4. While such boundaries are of course never entirely impermeable, potential violations can at least
be put out of mind. Davy, for example, consciously refuses “to wonder too much” how far the possibly
adulterous relationship between his friends Don Verney and Mary Hale has progressed (238). That
the long and scarcely concealed intimacy of this loving pair remains unconsummated would seem
incredible in most other social contexts, yet the possibility remains in play here and remains, too, the
only one that Davy can countenance.
5. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986), 207.
6. The stories by Graham and Thompson in Ebony Rising were collected previously (with one
substitution) in Marcy Knopf, The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993).You can also read
