Abstract
In the wake of the failures of Reconstruction, in the midst of increased violence against African Americans, and on the eve of the Harlem Renaissance, Arthur Schomburg offered this call in “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925): “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. […] History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset” (937–38). Schomburg, the founder of one of the world’s largest repositories of African American texts, insists that the task of African Americans in modernity is to restore, preserve, and celebrate that culture. Like Schomburg, many African Americans writing between 1880 and 1940 countered the hegemonically imposed break with the past by re-creating a link to it and preserving it at the moment it was being severed. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), art by African Americans “is as new as it is old and as old as new” (1002), suggesting that African American art resists the modern’s break with the past by synthesizing the past with the present.
The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.
—Arthur Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (942)
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Notes
For a survey of African American writers, see Gates and McKay. The first known piece of writing by a person of African descent living in what is now the United States was a poem, “Bars Flight,” written by Lucy Terry (1730–1821) in 1746 and published posthumously in 1855. Before the poem’s publication, a volume of poetry by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–84) was published in England in 1773. The earliest known published work of African American fiction was by Victor Séjour (1817–74), whose “Le Mulâtre” was published in 1837. The first known novel written by an African American was William Wells Brown’s Clotel (published in London in 1853), followed by Harriet A. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House (1859), the first novel published in the United States by an African American. The Bondwoman’s Narrative (thought to have been written in the 1850s but not published until 2002), by Hannah Crafts, is among the first novels written by an African American and is the only known novel written by an enslaved woman in the United States.
In the 1920s, Chesnutt’s work, especially The House Behind the Cedars, did enjoy some revived interest on the part of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and the Chicago Defender, among others. But his few literary efforts in the final three decades of his life, including a handful of short stories and a four-act play in 1906 entitled “Mrs. Darcy’s Daughter,” failed to gain him the kind of literary attention he sought. See Gillman, “Micheaux’s Chesnutt” for a discussion of the similarities between The Marrow of Tradition and Micheaux’s silent film Within Our Gates (1919–20), which was rediscovered in the 1970s in Spain.
See also Du Bois’s essay, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926). The different philosophies about the role of the folk led in part to Hughes, Hurston, and Wallace Thurman’s creation of their own magazine Fire!! in 1926 in reaction to the publication of The New Negro.
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© 2007 Alicia A. Kent
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Kent, A.A. (2007). African Americans: Moving from Caricatures to Creators, Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston. In: African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605107_2
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