The City in African-American Literature.

Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler, eds. Cranbury: Associated UP, 1995. 265 pp. $39.50.

Reviewed by

Charles Scruggs University of Arizona 

There are sixteen essays in this volume, plus an editors' introduction which states that the book's intention is to fill a gap in the critical study of African American literature. The editors claim that, while our "national" letters have been primarily "anti-urban" in nature, African American writers have often valorized the city as a fluid space that permits the formation of both self and community, and they imply as well that African American literature has expressed more varied views of the urban experience than has the literature of the established canon. The format of the book attempts to reflect this diversity, for the topics range from Frederick Douglass through the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary writers, and include discussions of Richard Wright, William Attaway, Willard Motley, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, John A. Williams, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and Charles Johnson. The book ends with an essay on the black playwrights of the 1960s.

Donald B. Gibson's article "The Harlem Renaissance City: Its Multi-Illusionary Dimension" illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of this collection of essays. Revisionist in intention, Gibson blames academics and others for reducing the city in literature and life to a mythological dichotomy of good versus evil. His point is that the Heavenly City-Demonic City opposition oversimplies human experience in the city, and he argues further that "the conception of the northern city as the City of God never caused a single individual to raise a single foot to take one step northward." Or westward, eastward, or southward, for that matter, since black people migrated to urban centers throughout the United States even though the myth of the black migration has the North and Promised Land as largely synonymous. He insists that in reality the city is "a dynamic of interrelated forces acting and reacting in relation to each other," and one important "force" that has been neglected by critics of the Harlem Renaissance is the economic issue of social class within the modern city.

Unfortunately, Gibson's article never gets around to relating his ideas to specific texts, which is too bad because a consideration of social class could have illuminated, for instance, the middle section of Jean Toomer's Cane, Claude McKay's Home To Harlem, and Nella Larsen's Passing. Where Gibson goes wrong, of course, is in his dogmatic assertion that myth is not a motivating force, either in giving reasons for migration or in forming a conception of the real city. But anyone who has listened to Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago" or read Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (to say nothing of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Jazz) knows that an idea in one's imagination is as "real" as the actual world he or she perceives.

I dwell upon Gibson's essay because it is one of the most interesting in The City in African-American Literature, and because it points to a problem concerning the book's organization. The book's thesis as defined by the editors is that, generally, white writers ignored Winthrop's "city on a hill" to explore "the open road," whereas black writers looked to the city in order to escape the confined pastoral space of American racism. Thus, despite Gibson's remarks, both myth and genre expectations have already slipped in through the backdoor. Indeed, in her essay "John A. Williams: The Black American Narrative and the City," Priscilla R. Ramsey contradicts both the editors' anti-urban thesis and Gibson's strictures upon myth when she insists that the Puritans brought with them an "urban notion" of "what America would become"; that is, the trope of "a city on a hill" not only inspired them to migrate to the New World but also filtered their perception of it. Other essays in the volume that make use of myth are Donald M. Hassler's "The Urban Pastoral and Labored Ease of Samuel R. Delany" and Robert L. Tener's "The Inner and Outer City: A Study of the Landscape of Imagination in Black Drama." It wouldn't matter if individual essays disagreed with each other or the editors' general thesis, providing there was some sense or order or intention to the debate; but that intention seems to be missing here.

And I would argue further that the book's stated thesis is also suspect. Opening their introduction by quoting Morton and Lucia White's The Intellectual versus the City, the editors imply that the dominant anti-urban tradition in American literature overwhelms all others. While everyone would admit that the anti-urban is one tradition, to claim it is the only one or even the dominant one hardly does justice to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, or William Dean Howells in the nineteenth century, to say nothing of home-grown modernists like Waldo Frank, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, and Lewis Mumford in the twentieth century (to name only a few). Indeed, the editors fall into the trap that Gibson argues must be avoided when talking about African American writers and the city: Following the Whites, they speak in binary terms or in terms of "ambivalence and animosity" when the real issue in discussing the city in literature, whether from a white or black point of view, is far more complicated, involving spatial relationships, cognitive maps, intertextuality, issues of class and gender, and so on. Farrah Jasmine Griffin, for example, in her 1995 book on the city and black literature "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative, rightly expands her focus to include "musical and visual works."

Dreiser's Sister Carrie is good example of a novel that not only resists binary oppositions but also had a considerable influence on black writers. Here the city is neither good nor evil but a different milieu in kind from the small town of Carrie's birth. As she moves through the city's various social levels, her perception of it changes as she changes; the city erases memory but enlarges consciousness, both spiritualizes and de-spiritualizes, making her unhappy with her material rewards at the same time that its mass culture defines "spirituality" in terms of them. No wonder, then, that writers like Jessie Fauset (Plum Bun) and Wallace Thurman (The Blacker the Berry) would rewrite Dreiser's novel from their own unique perspectives. Instead of simply dismissing a white American urban tradition out of hand, it might have been more profitable for The City in African-American Literature to have included an essay exploring the possible interplay between white and black urban texts, something similar to what Eric J. Sundquist did in a different manner in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993).

A strong feature of this volume are the discussions of the African American writer's expatriate experience: There are three separate essays dealing with Richard Wright and Paris, with Richard Wright and Africa's Accra and Kumasi, and with the various reactions of black intellectuals (W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes) to Berlin. This subject of the black outsider in the foreign city has received too little critical attention, and it's nice to see an attempt made here to rectify the omission. As we know, Michel Fabre broke the ice with his 1991 book From Harlem To Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980, and in this present collection Fabre gives a detailed, insightful discussion of Wright's last (and still unpublished) novel, "Island of Hallucination," the sequel to The Long Dream. Fabre argues that Fishbelly's pilgrimage to Paris is Wright's as well, stressing that both character and author changed their attitudes toward the "City of Light" as they came to know the city more intimately. Wright never understood Paris as well as Baldwin did, but he seemed aware of his limitations and translated them into fictional possibilities. Like Fabre, Eberhard Bruning in his essay on Berlin also focuses on the unique views of African American intellectuals to an Old World capital. In Berlin's case, the word "Old" is ironic, as the city's relatively recent origins in the nineteenth century prompted Mark Twain to dub it the German "Chicago." For this reason, perhaps, white visitors like Christopher Isherwood and others damned Weimar Berlin as "decadent" - vice is always more respectable if it isn't quite so nouveau. For Du Bois and Johnson, however, Berlin became a center of learning and culture, as it did for Alain Locke, and although both McKay and Hughes were more critical (Hughes noting the "slums" behind the city's facade), McKay found it "brisker and brighter than London." In any event, black American visitors, Bruning argues, were more observant and perceptive than most white foreigners, especially when their views addressed "the basic contradictions and problems of the city's social and cultural reality."

Unfortunately, the essays dealing with black American writers and American cities are not so well done. Some of them seem truncated, like Gibson's. In "Metonymy and Synecdoche: The Rhetoric of the City in Toni Morrison's Jazz," Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua makes the perceptive point that in Jazz the city not only redefines what people love but "frames" how and why they love, but she never develops this interesting theme, especially its implications for the characters' "rememory" of the rural past. Perhaps Susan Willis's excellent discussion of Morrison and mass culture in Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (1987) might have given her an additional critical frame to advance her argument. So too Larry R. Andrews's "The Sensory Assault of the City in Ann Petry's The Street" would have benefited from recent theoretical discussions by Feminist critics on the Gothic as a modality and as a genre and on women and space in an urban context. I single out these two articles because they are both insightful and incomplete, as are others in the volume. Thus, despite this book's occasional virtues, I found it disappointing, especially since its general topic is so rich with possibilities. Not many of them are investigated here, and finally one feels the book makes claims for itself that it does not keep. Indeed, these claims are better fulfilled in Craig Werner's recent Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (1995), a book that, had it been available to the editors of and contributors to The City in African-American Literature, might have provided them with a more expansive, precise, and accurate theoretical framework for their project.