Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe

       Chapter 1

       Ethnography and the New Negro Imagination

      In 1925, after having won second prize in an Opportunity magazine contest for her short story “Drenched in Light,” the intrepid Zora Neale Hurston made her way from Eatonville, Florida, to the crowded streets of New York City in search, like so many other Southern migrants, of education and opportunity. Soon after her arrival in the city, she enrolled at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with Franz Boas. It did not take long for Hurston to become a vital member of Harlem’s social and literary scene, even as she gained credentials as an anthropologist. In 1927, and again in 1934 after having been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study folklore, she took the education and cultural capital that she had accumulated in New York with her on her fieldwork in the South. She was intent on documenting the particular contributions of Southern Blacks to American society, but consequently, she found that the return to the South demanded that she negotiate the spaces—both real and rhetorical—between the familiar and the strange, the insides and the outside of a culture that she knew so well yet learned to value only once she moved away and saw it through the eyes of a stranger.

      Hurston, like so many of her New Negro peers, would build a career at the borders of American interracial and cross-cultural encounters. Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography represents one attempt to examine the geographical locations identified by, and socially mediated gazes used by, Black intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century. These writers and artists adopted and adapted anthropology, folklore, and sociological discourses to name and create a cohesive, collective, and modern Black identity. I refer to the texts they produced as “sites of culture” in order to underscore the attempts of writers like Hurston to create counter-narratives to American society’s racist discourse on blackness by mapping African American culture across particular geographical spaces, while viewing it from their socially mediated “sights,” or perspectives.

      For Hurston, making visible the process of collecting folklore and writing culture was the counter-narrative, the alternative to totalizing, simplistic, and dehumanizing representations of blackness found in so much of popular American culture. This is a project she will continue to develop in her second ethnography, Tell My Horse (1938), but even in Mules and Men (1935) she felt compelled to dissect the complicated work of collecting, transcribing, and translating cultures. She writes, for example:

      Folk-lore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are the most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

      The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.”¹

      Hurston’s shift from third-person (“they”) to first-person plural (“we”) takes place at the precise moment when the subject of evasiveness—the “featherbed of resistance”—arises. It underscores her duality as both the looker and a subject under scrutiny, as does her slippage from writing about listening to folktales, to writing about her audience reading her narrative. By linking her text so closely with a community that is never willing to completely expose itself to scrutiny, Hurston subtly challenges the assumption that one can attain complete, unmediated access to this culture by reading the ethnographic narrative. “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind,” she insists and the reader wonders if the speaker is the informant or the ethnographer.

      The answer, of course, is that Hurston is both native informant, by virtue of her racial identity and place of origin, and ethnographer, by virtue of her training. This duality, resulting