Sharon L. Jones. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 176 pp. $62.95. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Sharon L. Jones, African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. women writers of the Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance, term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North such as Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. , and Dorothy West
(German; “novel of character development”) Class of novel derived from German literature that deals with the formative years of the main character, whose moral and psychological development is depicted. and the Kunstlerroman to illuminate the role race, class, and gender play in the source and development of their art. But who exactly reads these writers according to a strict division of aesthetic categories--the folk, the bourgeois, and the protest/proletarian? It is certainly true that Hurston tended to be read in an earlier epoch in terms of her presentation of the folk, and that past critical discussions of Fauset and West have centered on their depiction of middle-class, bourgeois life. Yet many contemporary critics--such as Hazel Carby Hazel V. Carby is professor of African American Studies and of American Studies at Yale University. She is a marxist feminist. Her work deals mainly with detecting and probing discrepancies between the symbolic constructions of the black experience and the actual lives of African , Carla Kaplan, and Deborah McDowell, to name just a few--have been attentive to overlapping aesthetic practices from various traditions in these writers' texts. Jones creates an incomplete argument about how recent critical discourse has constructed these authors and then reacts against it. Another problem is that these three aesthetics (the folk, the bourgeois, and the proletarian) are loosely defined in Jones's book so that, for example, any treatment of racial injustice in any of the texts becomes a "protest" or "proletariat" aesthetics. Finally, there is little discussion of how these writers appropriate or reconstruct the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman. The book might therefore be appropriate for undergraduates interested in obtaining a very general understanding of Fauset's, Hurston's, and West's major works, but the student or scholar interested in a nuanced or original reading of these authors or the Harlem Renaissance is likely to be disappointed. After an introduction that provides a brief historical overview of the Harlem Renaissance, Jones argues that Fauset deconstructs the black bourgeois through her appropriation of the Kunstlerroman. Fauset often portrays black bourgeois life, but she is not a writer removed from the folk or the masses and lacking a political agenda. Yet "the masses" and the folk are defined in this chapter as anyone who has an "ancestry of slavery." Earlier Jones had defined the folk in terms of specific aesthetic practices and focuses, but here, in order to solidify her argument, she drops this definition in favor of something less subtle. Similarly, when she discusses "protest" or "proletariat" elements of Fauset's works (it is never clear why these two terms are conflated), she states that Plum Bun Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset first published in 1929. Written by an African American woman who, during the 1920s, was for many years the literary editor of The Crisis "exemplifies the proletarian strain through the valorization val·or·ize tr.v. val·or·ized, val·or·iz·ing, val·or·iz·es 1. To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action. 2. of the folk as the center of black art as well as Angela's admission of her black heritage to protest discrimination against Miss Powell." But Jones never explains how the folk are "proletarian" by their very nature, and a protest against discrimination does not in and of itself indicate a proletarian strain. Angela certainly does lambast racial discrimination, but there is little critique of capitalism Capitalism has been critiqued from many angles in its history. Markets The "free market" Though many associate the free market concept with capitalism, there are some critics —notably mutualists and some other anarchists – who believe that a as a system in the novel as a whole. The next chapter provides a wealth of biographical detail and a long summaries of the plots of Hurston's four novels and several of her short stories. Jones argues that "Hurston connects the narrative techniques of the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman with formal elements such as theme, character, plot, and symbolism to mediate on folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics." Yet there is little discussion of how Hurston appropriates and redefines these genres, and the chapter ignores many sustained critical controversies over issues in Their Eyes Were Watching God, such as Janie's voice, her sexuality, and her growth in the three marriages. It also disregards the circular structure of this novel, which tends to militate against mil´i`tate a`gainst´ v. t. 1. To argue against; to cast doubt on; - used in reference to facts which tend to disprove a hypothesis; as, the absence of a correlation of budget deficits with inflation militates against any causal relation a straightforward adoption of the Kunstlerroman form. Again, what makes a book proletarian is any protest against racial injustice, connected to capitalism and economics or not: "While not overtly a protest or proletarian novel, [Their Eyes Were Watching God] contains incidents that reveal that Hurston does not avoid criticism of racism in the United States." This chapter does provide interesting connections between Hurston's short stories and her longer fictions, and a good general discussion of some of her lesser criticized novels, such as Seraph on the Suwanee and Moses, Man of the Mountain. The final chapter--on Dorothy West--argues that her work is "a proletarian outcry against injustice, proving the presence of a revolutionary mind." However, the chapter as a whole is not convincing because the meaning of the term proletarian becomes conflated with a search for social justice or a protest against intraracial or interracial in·ter·ra·cial adj. Relating to, involving, or representing different races: interracial fellowship; an interracial neighborhood. discrimination. Furthermore, West seems an odd selection for the final chapter because all of her writing was published after the "official" end of the Harlem Renaissance. In general, it is unclear why Jones focuses on this particular "triumvirate Triumvirate (trīŭm`vĭrĭt, –vĭrāt'), in ancient Rome, ruling board or commission of three men. Triumvirates were common in the Roman republic. in the canon of African American literature African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reached early high points with slave narratives ." Nella Larsen gets barely a mention, despite the fact that she too could be said to exemplify Jones's argument about the blending of these three aesthetics. Jones's overall insight--that Harlem Renaissance writers must be read in terms of overlapping and interconnected aesthetic practices--is certainly valid. Yet the book does not explicate this insight and its other points with enough specificity to satisfy scholars or even advanced undergraduates. And with its high price ($62.95) and short length (176 pp.), the book mainly seems destined des·tine tr.v. des·tined, des·tin·ing, des·tines 1. To determine beforehand; preordain: a foolish scheme destined to fail; a film destined to become a classic. 2. for the shelves of research libraries. Martha J. Cutter Kent State University |
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