Journal of Narrative Theory

I. The Double Vogue of the Harlem Renaissance

By all positive accounts, the Harlem Renaissance generated a literary and cultural explosion that would establish the black artist as a seminal force in its artistic engagement with contemporary issues of ideal literary themes, cultural identity, and psychological reconstruction. Alain Locke boldly argued that literature should be used to reform African American social identities. His introduction to The New Negro (1925) reflects his confidence in young black artists’ commitment to represent black America in newly progressive terms. During the 1920s, African American art and literature indeed gained recognition as a significant component of world culture. Even the white English bastion of the Bloomsbury group was entertained with “coon songs,” Negro spirituals sung by American Henrietta Bingham, and conducted lively discussions of the relationship between blackness and Postimpressionist art.¹ On the other side of the Atlantic, numerous [End Page 49] people of color from the American South and the Caribbean moved to Harlem in New York City, where the blending of cultures helped foster a blossoming of the arts. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North produced a remarkable amount of poetry, novels, plays, music, art, and social commentary in this newly transformed neighborhood between the world wars, a moment now known as the Harlem Renaissance. Also sometimes referred to as the New Negro Movement, this period championed racial pride and uplift as powerful tools for African American artistic expression, as black artists, actors, performers, and writers took up Locke’s call and led the battle against intellectual and artistic bias. The Harlem Renaissance transformed American identity and history, and global culture in general, and according to some, fortified the greater black community. For many scholars looking back on the decade of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance signaled a spiritual emancipation unparalleled in African American experience. Indeed, examining the Jazz Age would be impracticable without understanding the complex role that African Americans—and the black community of Harlem—played in the modern re-identification of American culture. Nevertheless, the other side of this rather sunny narrative of “The Harlem Renaissance” is the political and social reality for blacks living in America (many in the so-called Mecca of Harlem) during the first part of the twentieth century. The Harlem Renaissance has too often been read as a whitewashed myth of progress and cooperation. As James De Jongh reminds us, “Harlem’s promise and sense of liberation made it possible to overlook a widening range of social evils the community was already suffering even in the 1920s” (9).

Claude McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer” (published in his Harlem Shadows collection in 1922) celebrates the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay’s work also reveals a counter-narrative to an idealized or completely celebratory vision of this period; the figure of the Harlem dancer embodies both pride and ambivalence inherent in the black experience. As the focal point of the Harlem club, she “seemed a proudly-swaying palm” who inspires the admiration of “even the girls” (7, 11). All those under her spell “Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze,” while beneath the surface of the dancer’s sensual expression, “her falsely-smiling face” proves to the speaker that “her self was not in that strange place” (12–14). The Harlem dancer must “wear the mask” of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s minstrel sideshow or primitive exotic in striving to maintain a strong [End Page 50] inner power that cannot be exploited by her applauding onlookers. McKay’s poem offers us a complex political context out of which novels by Hurston and Larsen or essays by McDougald and Bonner were produced; in particular, “Harlem Dancer” resonates with the silent, maneuvering women represented in McDougald and Bonner’s essays. These writers parley the dual purpose of Harlem Renaissance literature to celebrate black cultural forms and avoid denigrating or primitivizing the black experience, especially in the eyes of a white audience who projects a double consciousness on both artist and artwork. They leave us with no simple version of the period now known as the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, we must look at this time as representing the vexed kind of double vogue embodied by African American modernism.²

II. McDougald and the Task of “New Negro” Womanhood

Locke’s important 1925 compilation of Harlem Renaissance writings The New Negro included “The Task of Negro Womanhood” (also titled “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation”) by McDougald. This essay is illustrative of the kinds of discussions surrounding race consciousness—especially for black women—that circulated in various periodicals associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. McDougald (1885–1971) grew up a biracial female in an affluent New York City family; her father was a physician and on the founding committee of the National Urban League while her mother was an Englishwoman named Mary Whittle Johnson. McDougald married Cornelius McDougald in 1911 and attended several institutions of higher learning, including Hunter College, Columbia, and the City University of New York. She did not earn a degree, but began teaching in the New York public school system in 1905, where she remained until 1954. She also held positions as the head of the Women’s Department of the U. S. Employment Bureau, as well as positions at the Henry Street Settlement, Manhattan Trade School, and New York branch of the U. S. Department of Labor. In 1924, she became the first African American woman to be a principal in the New York City school system. Over the years, her writings appeared in The Crisis, Opportunity, and Survey Graphic.

A prominent black educator, social investigator and journalist, McDougald comes from a long line of African American women—which includes [End Page 51] such visionaries as Ida B. Wells, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Sojourner Truth—who were unafraid to speak out about America’s racist and sexist ideologies. Of Wells’s 1887 article “Our Women,” hooks writes:

Wells suggested that within the sphere of white supremacist assault on black womanhood nothing was more hurtful as “deeply and keenly as the taint of immorality; the jest and sneer with which women are spoken of, and the utter incapacity or refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives, and maidens who have attained a true, noble, and refined womanhood.”

(Killing 77)

Flash forward 30 years to McDougald’s description of the lifestyles of African American women living in Harlem in the 1920s, and it seems no surprise that McDougald begins by suggesting that despite various class positions, the New Negro Woman shall be a moral compass for women everywhere: “Throughout the years of history,” she reflects, “woman has been the weather-vane, the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows” (103). McDougald then posits the central anthropological question her essay seeks to answer: “What then is to be said of the Negro woman of today, whose problems are of such import to her race?” (103). McDougald directly confronts the Negro Womanhood Question by examining “a colorful pageant of individuals” whose positions “vary in infinite degree” in order to determine “the multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women” (103).

McDougald’s positive tone might be considered political in itself as she acknowledges the denigrating stereotypes—“the grotesque Aunt Jemimas”—still so prevalent in all forms of contemporary media. Echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known concept of the veil of double-consciousness which plagues the African American psyche, McDougald goes on to address the psychological consequence of these ever-present images of “feminine viciousness [and] vulgarity” (104). This “shadow over her” has convinced the New Negro Woman to internalize a racist stereotype of herself, which in turn creates heretofore unrecognized “mental and spiritual” suffering. Were we to analyze the economic impact of such deep-seated pain, she claims, we would marvel at the “most determined women [who] [End Page 52] forge ahead . . . [those] gifted [with] the zest of meeting a challenge . . . [and those] few who prove their mettle,” despite the overwhelming challenges they face in what hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (Killing 78). Significantly, here, the New Negro Woman must keep quiet about her mental and spiritual anguish while forging ahead to achieve the ever-elusive goal of social equity.

The next section of McDougald’s essay extends this economic analysis in order to “visualize the Negro woman at her job”; to do so, she divides such women by occupation based on economic class (104). The first, a “very small leisure group,” are the still typical Angel-in-the-House women of a bygone era—those who “preside over the family . . . but [are] touched only faintly by their race’s hardships” (104). As members of the rising black middle class and wives of the Talented Tenth, their chief concerns are securing reliable domestic help, finding others of equal social achievement, and extending their holiday trip to Europe where they might find “spiritual relief and cultural stimulation” (105). McDougald then describes women from the two other groups: “women of business, profession and trade,” who are “the hub of the wheel of progress” and “[q]uietly . . . prove their worth” in all facets of employment (106). McDougald implies that their example brings “hope that a less selfish racial attitude will prevail” (106). She pauses to “pay tribute to” working mothers in particular, who, in her estimation, render profound patriotic service to the nation. For McDougald, “Negro mothers” provide inspiring fodder for contemporary artists because they are “self-directed but as loyal and tender as the much extolled, yet pitiable black mammy of slavery days” (106). Here she recognizes the cruel heritage of slavery and African American women’s ameliorative progression from the utterly subjugated “black mammy” of the past to the honorable and valiant working mother of the modern race.

In her last several paragraphs, McDougald touches upon the class of progressive young college-educated women who are “anxious to devote their education and lives toward helping the submerged classes” by “doing [their] bit at sacrifice” in the social work, nursing, and teaching professions. She concludes that despite these strides, there is no sex equality thus far. By virtue of her increased access to higher education, “the Negro woman is the cultural equal of her man,” yet male dominance still exists in the private home (107). Much as Virginia Woolf, who connects private and public tyrannies by asserting that all women need money and a room of [End Page 53] their own to reach their intellectual potential and eventually change the social order, McDougald notes that the “growing economic independence of Negro working women is causing her to rebel against the domineering family attitude” (107). Despite this nascent challenge to normative gender relations, “[c]onditions change slowly” (107). She cites Sojourner Truth in the ongoing struggle for gender equality, but perhaps realistically concludes that “[o]n the whole the Negro woman’s feminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex struggle assuming the subordinate place” (107). She heralds the “organized action” of club women—“the progressive and privileged groups of Negro women expressing their community and race consciousness”—in this foremost fight for racial equality (108). Finally, she optimistically portrays the African American woman as steadfastly moving onward and upward—even though “[w]ithin her soul,” she “knows little of peace and happiness”—by “courageously standing erect,” “developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes,” “maintaining her natural beauty and charm,” “improving her mind and opportunity,” “measuring up to the needs of her family, community and race,” and “radiating hope throughout the land” (108). However inspiring, this overwhelmingly heroic (and indeed largely silent) characterization obfuscates the unending drudgery of those women working in the kitchens, laundries, and nurseries of white homes—those who do not have the opportunity to take on this multifaceted yet still primarily bourgeois gendered role. Nevertheless, she urges her reading audience to take heart that “The wind of the race’s destiny stirs more briskly because of her striving” (108). She must essentially grin and bear her sacrifice. For McDougald, the New Negro Woman can only find solace in the fact that although her societal standing is on the rise, she must, for the moment, remain quietly patient and enduring like the statuesque figure that she emulates. McDougald’s final prototype of the New Negro Woman presents a virtually blank image onto which other African American women writers such as Bonner could project their own, perhaps more realistic, version of female selfhood during this time.

III. Bonner and the Silent Buddha of New Negro Womanhood

McDougald’s definition of New Negro Womanhood contrasts sharply with the grueling delineation of the life of the downtrodden 1920s “race [End Page 54] woman” by essayist, playwright, and short-story writer Bonner. Yet Bonner (1900–60) grew up in a middle-class family much like McDougald, raised along with three siblings by her parents, John and Anne Noel Bonner, in Boston. She later attended Radcliffe College where she majored in English and Comparative Literature while also studying German and music composition. At Radcliffe, she was invited to be one of the few participants in Charles Townsend Copeland’s writing seminar. She describes this honor in one of her notebooks: “Students came from all over the world to take his course . . . He urged me to write—but not to be ‘bitter’—a cliché to colored people who write. I wrote and published twenty-four stories between 1924 [and] 1940” (Marita Bonner Papers). While attending Radcliffe, she also founded a chapter of the black women’s sorority Delta Sigma Theta and taught at a high school in Cambridge. When she graduated in 1922, she taught at the Bluefield Colored Institute in West Virginia. She enjoyed some time as part of Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglass Johnson’s circle (the “S” Street Salon) in Washington D. C., where she taught for a short time at Armstrong High School and met her husband William Almy Occomy, with whom she moved to Chicago. Bonner wrote several short stories from 1925 to 1927 and continued to write under her husband’s name into the 1930s and early ’40s. For reasons still unclear, but most likely relating to her raising a family, Bonner stopped writing by 1941. In a July 20, 1968 letter to her daughter Joy, she writes: “I went to D.C. to teach in 1924 and resigned when Billy was coming in 1931. I had five years to return to my job if I had wanted to but by July 1936 Gale was two years old and—pfft!” (Marita Bonner Papers). Unfortunately, yet understandably, motherhood became too absorbing for Bonner to continue her writing career.

An imagistic admixture of manifesto, episodic narrative poem, bitter social commentary, and memoir, Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” was published in 1925 in The Crisis (the journal of the NAACP) and won first place in the magazine’s annual literary contest. In a depiction uncannily similar to Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Bonner sardonically narrates the doubly disadvantaged perspective of the young black woman taught “from kindergarten to sheepskin” that she must strive for work, home and family while a “desire to dash three or four ways seizes you” (109). Like Helga, Bonner takes a sojourn to the South where she ultimately feels isolated within her own [End Page 55] community: “Cut off, flung together, shoved aside in a bundle because of color with no more in common” (109). Resembling Helga, whether in Naxos, Chicago, Copenhagen, or Harlem, Bonner feels the need to escape the suffocating “sameness of type” inherent in “‘colored’ movies, innumerable parties—and cards [which] fascinate . . . and repulse . . . at once” (110). As a young black women entrapped by the forces of racist white hegemony in every geographical locale, Bonner and Larsen acknowledge that nothing will assuage the “[s]trange longing [that] seizes hold of you” or change the fact that, from their perspective, “Anglo-Saxon intelligence is . . . warped and stunted” (110). Inevitably, for both Bonner and Larsen, “[t]hat’s being a woman. A woman of any color” (110).

Bonner writes bitterly about the weight of oppression on the black female, but argues that with critical thinking, she might overcome that oppression. In order to do so, she must cultivate “[d]iscrimination of the right sort,” “the kind . . . that looks clearly past generalization and past appearance to dissect, to dig down to the real heart of the matter” (110). According to Bonner, the central obstacle to this enlightenment is the prevailing racist and sexist stereotype projected onto African American women. She asks, “Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination?” (111). Like McDougald and Larsen, Bonner points to the internalized social mask of primitivism, what she calls out as “[a]n empty imitation of an empty invitation. A mime; a sham; a copy-cat. A hollow re-echo” (111). Bonner then directly challenges her fellow black females with a question—“Do you need to be told what that is being?”—implying that it is being the black female exotic Other (111). She counsels her own generation of black women to let go of the “Old Negro,” “[o]ld ideas, old fundamentals,” because “they are useless to you in Their world” (111). The alternative is grim: “Every part of you becomes bitter” and rage inevitably ensues because “[y]ou long to explode and hurt everything white” (111).

Bonner contends that the best response to the forces of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the creation of a protective outer shell that renders the New Negro woman “steely and brittle” yet mentally astute. As she develops this solidity, she must be careful to “go about it gently and quietly” in order to “find out and discover just what is wrong” (111). Bonner argues that with this inner resolve, subversively coupled with an outer [End Page 56] compliance and a gendered expectation of calm, young black women can analyze the world around them. As we might expect, Bonner perceives the economic dominance of the whites in power—who have “[m]oney to build with, money to destroy. Money to swim in, Money to drown in. Money”—as the leading impediment to young black women’s search for self-empowerment. Nevertheless, she notes the disintegration of past civilizations whose “stupendous mass of things” crumbled into loss: “The Greeks . . . were lost because they did not understand” (111–12). The predominant white supremacist capitalist patriarchy of the ages has “shut Wisdom up and . . . forgotten to find the key that will let her out. They have trapped, trammeled, lashed her to themselves with . . . theories” (112). Here Bonner speaks fiercely about the intellectual domination that has silenced black women—what hooks describes as the “racialized sexist hierarchies [that cause even] Black male thinkers [to] act in complicity with a white power structure wherein sexist thinking supports devaluing black women as critical thinkers” (Killing 233).

In the end, Bonner recommends that young black women remain silent while doing the intellectual work necessary to resist the dual oppressions of race and gender: “So—being a woman—you can wait . . . quiet. Like Buddha—who, brown like I am—sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself, motionless and knowing, a thousand years before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands” (112). She then refers to the enduring wisdom of women with the glib remark, “Perhaps Buddha is a woman” (112). Bonner concludes that a woman of the 1920s, especially a black woman, must “with a smile . . . draw understanding into [her]self” and summon inner power for “when Time is ripe” (112). At such a time, she will “swoop to [her] feet” in a “single gesture” of freedom that will conquer the double inequality.

IV. Larsen and Hurston’s (Double) Take on Silence

The biracial character Helga in Quicksand represents yet another discordant evocation of race and gender within the framework of the New Negro Renaissance. For a luxuriant but brief time during her first visit to New York City, Helga feels a sense of wholeness within her surrounding community in the “primitive jungle” of “Harlem, teeming black Harlem,” the prime example of that feeling occurring in the now well-known nightclub [End Page 57] scene: “She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music,” though “the shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that she enjoyed it . . . began to taunt her” (43, 59). Here Helga resists categorization as a typical “savage,” over-sexed black woman; her total abandon in the dance would only reinscribe that sensationalized, exoticized stereotype of the black female primitive (a la Josephine Baker).

Helga’s self-alienation is also palpable as she watches a minstrel show in Copenhagen. At first it seems that the song puts her in another state of stasis; apparently transfixed, she is the only audience member who is “silent, motionless” (82). Her calm rumination abruptly transforms into a “fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. . . . The incident left her profoundly disquieted” (83). Helga simultaneously despises the objectionable and primitivist play of the performers and fears that the show reveals some deeper truth about her own position in a white world. Even Europe, a cultural location supposedly more progressive about race than middle-class America, painfully puts Helga back in her racial place: disturbingly reminding her that she evokes all the primitivist stereotypes of savage exoticism projected upon her by white society because her appearance emulates that of the “cavorting Negroes” (83).

Helga constantly struggles with her racialization as an exotic, hyper-sexual woman, a construction produced by the whiteness of her surveyors. From the moment when she arrives in Copenhagen, she behaves as a “Silent, unmoving” museum piece, similar to Bonner’s Buddha figure (65). As a kind of primitive token for the arrogant Axel Olsen and her Danish relatives in Copenhagen, she at first relishes the freedom of expression that Denmark culture allows her, dressing in vibrant and gaudy clothing that “make[s] an impression, a voluptuous impression” (74). Helga participates—although with reticence—in the literal construction of her body as sexual, exotic, and available to men.

Helga’s impending romance with the aptly named Anglo artist Axel Olsen, who paints her portrait, further emphasizes her status as an unspeaking, captivating prop. As a mute object of the white male gaze, she is at once silenced and approvingly surveyed by this man: “Helga . . . had a stripped, naked feeling under his direct glance” (86). Estranged by her position as ultimate outsider in Copenhagen, Helga continues her stint as a primitive art piece before finally finding her voice of protest. The finished portrait itself literalizes her status as a thing admired for its foreignness [End Page 58] and sexual appeal, and its unveiling profoundly disturbs Helga: “It wasn’t . . . herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features” (89). Here Helga recognizes that she is not the stereotype; she cannot accept a formulaic primitivist version of herself. Unfortunately, “sensual creature” seems the only persona afforded Helga within a racist and sexist culture, a limitation that continually obstructs her access to any kind of whole existence.

Both Larsen and Bonner, as modernist women writers, suggest that the male gaze continually places women’s bodies on display, subjecting them to sexualization and manipulation. The female figure’s physical and emotional self is cut up, fragmented, alienated, masked, muzzled, objectified, and ultimately silenced, essentially made into an exoticized art piece by relying upon constrictive tropes of race, gender, and sexuality to perform as docile within a patriarchal, white supremacist culture that does not value them for anything else. The question we might consider as we compare these works is to what extent Bonner and Larsen (and McDougald, for that matter) have created empowering critiques of these interlocking systems of dominance. Helga’s refusal to tolerate Olsen’s offensiveness reveals a feminist resolve somewhere between Bonner’s “Quiet Buddha” and McDougald’s “striving” Negro woman “expressing [her] community and race consciousness” outside the framework of conventional sexist primitivism (108).

The sorrowful ending of Quicksand illuminates Larsen’s political genius in fictional form and provides yet another instance of silence used as maneuver. Through Helga’s habitual wordlessness, Larsen shows the stark reality of life for a black woman who succumbs to the tyranny of a racist and sexist society. Helga’s chief obstacle to finding wholeness is that she has no self-affirming life story to carry her through the trials of interfacing with a white supremacist world. The first words that she utters in the novel, fatefully, are “No, forever!” (Larsen 3). This two-word declaration foretells Helga’s ongoing refusal to create either an affirming narrative of self or meaningful relationships with the ever-distant community around her. Hampered by a profound silence that renders her incapable of communication, Helga lacks the language to articulate her desires or envision a full identity. Throughout the novel, Helga appears increasingly alienated from herself and, ultimately, from her reading audience. Quicksand reveals to contemporaneous and contemporary readers the profound tragedy [End Page 59] of a black woman who cannot grasp any wholeness within herself or her society. Helga’s unrealizable need, her lack of voice, balanced sense of self, or communal vision as regards to race and gender, prompts audiences to fill in that gap through affective reading. If we can imagine convergence between self and other within a literary text—one that the African American female protagonist cannot form herself—then perhaps we can understand the complexities and resistances of Helga’s way of (un)knowing herself. We can then view Larsen’s novel as a complication of modernist narratives of gender, race, and community, and as a vital call for social justice that Hurston will answer in her own novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in the aftermath of the Harlem Renaissance a decade later. Ultimately, Larsen offers us, as implicit readers who might create our own redemptive community, the opportunity to recuperate Helga’s fate.

We might recall that Hurston’s novel features Janie Crawford, who is put on trial for the murder of her lover Tea Cake and must plead her case to an all-white, all-male jury. Literary scholars have criticized Janie for not having a powerful black female voice because she remains mostly silent at the trial.³ However, I maintain that Hurston uses Janie’s performance of silence to show us her instinct for self-preservation. Janie’s silence is, as Carla Kaplan puts it, an enactment of the social history of the African American voice: “Janie is silent, like African Americans denied the right to testify, vote, or learn to read and write. And Janie also speaks, taking on the role of post-Reconstruction blacks who agitated and argued on their own behalf” (114). To Janie preventing the jury from misunderstanding her true self is more important than preventing it from convicting her and sentencing her to death. Hurston allows Janie to be silent when it most behooves her circumstances, while also demonstrating her desire to converge with her community: “suggesting that black female voices are still constrained, although perhaps now in more covert, complex, and less absolute ways” (114). Janie performs the multiple roles of black womanhood on the verge of realization at this quintessentially modern moment in history. Because she knows that the southern courtroom is wholly against her during an era of Jim Crow and picnic lynchings, her silence exemplifies great personal power. As Alice Walker insists, “women did not have to speak when men thought they should”: “they [c]ould choose when and where they wish to speak because while many women had found their voices, they [End Page 60] also knew when it was better not to use it” (qtd. in Washington, Foreword xii). In other words, Hurston—and I would argue McDougald and Bonner as well—acknowledges that to be silent in crucial moments is the right, perhaps even the necessity, of every autonomous woman. The courtroom scene, like the figure of the African American woman as a silent brown Buddha or an inspired yet quietly enduring beacon for her race, is a metaphor for Harlem Renaissance writers that represents the constant cultural mediation of identity that black women in particular were forced to engage. As Toni Morrison reminds us, there is no such thing as a race- or gender-free social space, only a negotiation of that societal order through our consistent awareness of how we might contend with this reality.⁴ The answer for these writers is a seditious silence.

V. But Can the Subaltern Speak?

With McDougald and Bonner’s writings in mind, we can once again consider Spivak’s question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The dilemma implied in this question persists even when we substitute the term “subaltern” with any other oppressed subject position in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture: the working class, the person of non-“normative” sexual orientation, the black woman writer in 1920s America, and so on. We are all aware that the subaltern (of any identity category) can speak and write because global archives hold their discovered and undiscovered texts. By most academic accounts, speaking and writing is always already everywhere, and there is resistance to dominant discourses and oppressive power. On the other hand, as Charles W. Mills points out in The Racial Contract, “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” (1). The omission of that fact in standard documents written by whites is not accidental, but instead is a direct result of the blind assumption of their own subject position and themselves as the norm—as deserving the benefits of a politics of racial domination. Those in power do not even recognize this politics as political because they take their racial privilege completely for granted, therefore subsuming the discourses of protest into the realm of the subaltern:

What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situating discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging [End Page 61] the assumptions of white political philosophy . . . a recognition that racism (or . . . global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.

(Mills 2–3)

This intervention into the established code of whiteness hearkens to the intersection between postcolonial and critical race studies, although we must be very careful in considering Spivak’s “subaltern” alongside “the racial contract” and question exactly which voices are left out by the dominant ideology.

If we look more closely at Spivak’s essay, we find that she does not ask whether the subaltern does speak but whether the subaltern can speak. What we assume to be the subaltern speaking may only be an appearance of speaking—as deemed possible by our own theoretical positioning. Spivak criticized the Subaltern Studies Group for appropriating Antonio Gramsci’s term “subaltern” (referring to the economically dispossessed) in order to identify and establish a collective and vocal locus of agency in postcolonial India. According to Spivak, in an interview with Leon de Kock, the subaltern is not

just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. . . . They’re within the hegemonic discourse wanting a piece of the pie and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.

(45–46)

Yet some might also claim that an academic’s recouping of a collective cultural identity only reinscribes the subordinate position and creates a totalizing, essentialist monolithic that fails to account for the real heterogeneity [End Page 62] of the colonized body politic. hooks speaks to the particular relationship between the academic and the subaltern subject:

No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk.

(“Marginality” 42)

Conversely, expanding Spivak’s concept of the subaltern beyond the boundaries of postcolonial discourse and connecting it with critical race theory to uncover the voices of those silenced by the regime of whiteness, I would claim that McDougald and Bonner’s essays illustrate the fact that black women of their era struggled with an unacknowledged need and a lack of language for imagining an unfettered or autonomous sense of self with regard to race and gender. These women were very much aware of their (subaltern) status of alterity and, significantly, their work reveals their own attempt to speak out against those hegemonic powers of whiteness that would otherwise seek to subdue them.

V. The Legacy of Harlem Renaissance Era Women Writers

It is important to remember that the artistic and intellectual achievement of such Harlem Renaissance writers as McDougald and Bonner did not win for blacks—especially black women—political, economic, or educational parity with whites. For black artists, there was little escape from the dominance of white sponsorship (and often outright ownership) of their art.⁵ The reality of life for nonwhites in the 1920s and ’30s, of course, remained much the same as before—especially in America. Blacks continually struggled against master narratives that represented them as Other. Although several hundred thousand black Americans fought in the First World War, widespread lynchings, race riots, and deportations occurred once those soldiers came home. In the face of fascism and white Americans’ perpetuation of blacks’ second-class citizenship, many blacks’ former belief in whites’ mutual respect was shattered. Even Harlem, a [End Page 63] place of refuge and solace throughout the 1920s for many African Americans and immigrants from Africa and the West Indies, suffered economic and social deterioration by the 1930s.

Significant realizations of these writers’ cultural currency came from later readers, revealing how aesthetics can extend and impact the literary establishment. None of these writers—McDougald, Bonner, Hurston, or Larsen—were fully recognized during their lifetimes, although they enjoyed varying degrees of success as they published their works; their feminist reimaginings of self came from future understandings and readings. Theirs was a predominantly elite enterprise, yet their works reminds us of the power and possibility inherent in our revised readings of literature to reshape the canon, to recreate the academy, and to forge new academic departments and disciplines in studies of twentieth-century literature and culture in general. Regrettably, there has not been much critical exploration of Bonner’s work since about the year 2000,⁶ and there is little work on McDougald at all. Criticism of Bonner reached its peak in the late 1980s and seems to have slowed in the past several years. Silence about their work appears to remain as critics have exhausted explorations of these writers and readership has not grown significantly.

An encompassing communal impulse inflects my understanding of these modernist texts, which would not exist without the recognition of art’s redemptive force once it gets into the hands, hearts, and minds of open audiences. Kaplan’s work is instructive in showing how literary scholars might recognize Hurston’s success in particular:

By including oneself in Hurston’s blanket indictment, assuming that one is, for whatever reason, a different reader than Hurston’s idealized, eroticized, and romanticized projection, one can learn to listen, to listen differently, and to help, thereby, create the very conditions under which black female longing for narration and self-revelation might, someday, be satisfied.

(121)⁷

By realizing, through our reading practices, this ability to listen differently, we might change our daily encounters with alterity. We might then benefit from these writers’ still overlooked but potentially transformative visions of African American female identity. Perhaps those of us studying [End Page 64] and teaching their works in an increasingly global twenty-first century (and some would even say post-racial in reference to Barack Obama’s presidency) can fill in the gap of silence that these women felt compelled to employ through our own affective reading; we can thereby begin to appreciate the integrity of black womanhood that they strived to express. As hooks writes,

Until progressive women and men engaged in anti-racist, anti-sexist work fully recognize that continued devaluation of black womanhood undermines these struggles neither movement can progress. . . . The struggle black women began in the nineteenth century to challenge and transform white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ways of seeing black womanhood must continue.

(Killing 85)

If we recognize McDougald and Bonner as black feminist intellectuals boldly speaking out by writing about race, gender, and even silence in a time when the New Negro was briefly in vogue, we can view their work as a vital call for social justice that we might still answer today. Finally, then, these formerly subaltern voices can truly speak.