Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

304 Pages·2000·1.13 MB·English

by  Saadi A. Simawe

BLACK ORPHEUS
BORDER CROSSINGS
VOLUME 9
GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES
VOLUME 2097
B C
ORDER ROSSINGS
DANIEL ALBRIGHT, Series Editor
Richard L.Turner, Professor in the Humanities
University of Rochester
ENCRYPTED MESSAGES
IN ALBAN BERG’S MUSIC
edited by Siglind Bruhn
SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE ARTS
Music, Visual Arts,
and Non-Print Media
edited by Lois Oppenheim
BRONZE BY GOLD
The Music of Joyce
edited by Sebastian D.G.Knowles
NABOKOV AT THE LIMITS
Redrawing Critical Boundaries
edited by Lisa Zunshine
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS
IN THE WORKS OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
edited by Charlotte M.Cross
and Russell A.Berman
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE AGE OF
MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
edited by Pamela L.Caughie
T.S.ELIOT’S ORCHESTRA
Critical Essays on Poetry and Music
edited by John Xiros Cooper
BLACK ORPHEUS
Music in African American Fiction from
the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison
edited by Saadi A.Simawe
WALT WHITMAN AND MODERN Music
War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood
edited by Lawrence Kramer
B O
LACK RPHEUS
M A A
USIC IN FRICAN MERICAN
F
ICTION FROM THE
H R
ARLEM ENAISSANCE TO
T M
ONI ORRISON
EDITED BY
SAADI A.SIMAWE
GARL AND PUBLISHING, INC.
A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP
NEW YORK & LONDON
2000
Published in 2000 by
Garland Publishing, Inc.
A member of the Taylor & Francis Group
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Copyright © 2000 by Saadi A.Simawe
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Black Orpheus: music in African American fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to
Toni Morrison/edited by Saadi A.Simawe
p. cm.—(Garland reference library of the humanities; v. 2097. Border
crossings; v. 9)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8153-3123-1 (acid-free paper)
1. American fiction—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 2. American
fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Music and literature—History—
20th century. 4. Afro-American music—History and criticism. 5. Afro-American
musicians in literature. 6. Afro-Americans in literature. 7. Music in literature
I. Simawe, Saadi II. Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 2097.
III. Garland reference library of the humanities. Border crossings; v. 9.
PS374.N4 B59 2000
813'.509357–dc21 99–086215
Cover: Sargent Johnson, Singing Saints, 1940, 12 1/8 × 9 1/4, lithograph. In the Collection
of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of
Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. 1996.8.9
“Middle Passage” copyright © 1966, 1962 by Robert Hayden, from Angle of Ascent: New
and Selected Poems by Robert Hayden. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing
Corporation.
“Militant,” “Note on Commercial Theatre,” “Freedom 1,” “Bound No’th Blues,” “Success,”
“Homesick Blues,” and “Hey!” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by
Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes.
Reprinted by permission of Alfred A.Knopf, Inc.
“Songless” from Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, copyright © 1984 by
Alice Walker, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
“Hymn” from Once, copyright © 1968 and renewed 1996 by Alice Walker, reprinted by
permission of Harcourt, Inc.
ISBN 0-203-90440-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-90444-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
For my sons and best friends
Rani Simawe and Ihab (Aby) Simawe

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Series Editor’s Foreword
Daniel Albright xi
Introduction: The Agency of Sound in
African American Fiction
Saadi A.Simawe xix
1. Singing the Unsayable: Theorizing Music in Dessa Rose
Jacquelyn A.Fox-Good 1
2. Claude McKay: Music, Sexuality, and
Literary Cosmopolitanism
Tom Lutz 41
3. Black Moves, White Ways, Every Body’s Blues: Orphic
Power in Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks
Jane Olmsted 65
4. Black and Blue: The Female Body of Blues Writing
in Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones
Katherine Boutry 91
vii
viii Contents
5. That Old Black Magic? Gender and Music in
Ann Petry’s Fiction
Johanna X.K.Garvey 119
6. “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”:
Jazz’s Many Uses for Toni Morrison
Alan J.Rice 153
7. Shange and Her Three Sisters “Sing a Liberation Song”:
Variations on the Orphic Theme
Maria V.Johnson 181
8. Nathaniel Mackey’s Unit Structures
Joseph Allen 205
9. Shamans of Song: Music and the Politics of Culture in
Alice Walker’s Early Fiction
Saadi A.Simawe 231
Contributors 269
Index of Names 273
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the cooperation and assistance of many individuals
who contributed in different ways to the production of this volume.
Professor Daniel Albright, the series editor, elegantly helped in my
early correspondence with him in defining the orphic theme. His
insightful and incisive comments on the early draft of the volume were
very helpful in revising and improving the overall quality of the
treatment of the orphic moment in the interaction between African
American music and literature. I would like to thank all the contributors
to this volume for their cooperation. My work with everyone of them
proved to be intellectually rewarding. My initial interest in this project
was encouraged and supported by my colleague Mary Lynn Broe,
Louise R.Noun Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Grinnell
College. Many thanks to her.
I am also very grateful to Linda Price, our secretary at Grinnell College,
for her efficient word processing skills that gave an elegant shape to the
final draft of the manuscript. My thanks to Andrew Rabin, my research
assistant, for his thorough and perceptive proofreading and indexing of
the manuscript. Many thanks also to Kay Wilson, curator of the Grinnell
College Art Collection, who participated in selecting and locating the
lithograph Singing Saints by Sargent Johnson, illustrated on the cover.
Finally, I would like to thank Grinnell College’s Grant Board for
funding some aspects of this project.
ix