History and Memory in African-American Culture PDF
Preview History and Memory in African-American Culture
History and Memory in African-American Culture This page intentionally left blank History and Memory in African-American Culture Edited by GENEVIEVE FABRE ROBERT O'MEALLY New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1994 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Introduction © 1994 by Gencvievc Fabre and Robert O'Meally. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History and memory in African-American culture / edited by Genevieve Fabre, Robert O'Meally. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-508396-2; 0-19-508397-0 (pbk) 1. Afro-Americans—History. 2. Afro-Americans—Historiography. 3. Afro-American arts. 4. American literature—Afro-American authors. I. Fabre, Genevieve. II. O'Meally, Robert G., 1948- E185.H546 1994 973'.0496073—dc20 93-37582 Since this page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices, the following page constitutes an extension of the copyright page. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Permission to reprint the following selections is gratefully acknowledged: "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston," by Hazel Carby, from New Essays on "Their Eyes Were Watching God," ed. Michael Awkward © 1991 by Cam- bridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. " 'Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island'; Or, Ethnic Literature and Some Redefini- tions of 'America,' " by Werner Sollors, from Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experience, ed. Donald Horowitz and Gerard Noiriel © 1992 by New York University Press. Reprinted by permission of New York University Press. "What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly," by Karen Fields © 1993 by Baylor University. Reprinted by permission of Baylor University. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," by Pierre Nora © 1989 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7-25, by permission of the publisher. Permission to quote from the following is gratefully acknowledged: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Copyright © 1947, 1948, 1952 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Angle of Ascent, New and Selected Poems by Robert Haydcn. Copyright © 1975 by Livcright Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yng, Copyright 1980, History of Chinese Detained on Island Project. Reprinted with the permission of University of Washington Press. Selected Poems by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1954 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Copyright © 1987 by Toni Morrison. Permission granted by Interna- tional Creative Management, Inc. "Joal" and Section III of "To New York" from The Collected Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor, translated by Melvin Dixon. Copyright 1991 by The University Press of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Portions of "Dahomey" are reprinted from The Black Unicorn: Poems by Audre Lorde, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde. " 'Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville" is reprinted from Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems by Robert Hayden, by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1975, 1972, 1970, 1966 by Robert Hayden. "Heritage" by Countee Cullen. Copyrights held by the Amistad Research Center, Tulane Univer- sity, La. Administered by JJKR Associated, New York, N.Y. This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements First of all, the editors and writers wish to thank Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research for hosting our fa- culty working group and for supporting our explorations in black history and memory. Most especially we are grateful to the Institute's Randall Burkett, whose leadership was indispensable to the seminar's progress. We thank the Ford Foundation for its generous funding of the seminar. We are particularly grateful for Sheila Biddle's supportive guidance. Harvard was our seminar's home, but we also convened at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. We are deeply indebted to the center's director, William Ferris, for his rich col- leagueship. We are grateful for the welcome we received at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where we attended an unforgettable blues and gospel festival. We also met in New York City. We wish to extend our warmest thanks to Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cul- ture of the New York Public Library. We offer thanks to James Hatch and Camille Billops for introducing us to the Hatch Billops Collection; and to Julia Hotton, who welcomed us at the Manhattan East Gallery. For our final meeting, an international conference held at The Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, we thank The Rockefeller Foundation and all of our hosts at the center. For their assistance in preparing the manuscript, we thank Soo Ji Min and Jeanne Marie Liggio, English majors at Barnard College. The project's friend in its final stages has been Sanda Lwin, a graduate student in English at Columbia University, whose skills as a researcher and writer helped make the book a reality. We are grateful to Barnard and Columbia for their sponsorship of these student workers. Finally, we wish to thank Oxford's editors, Elizabeth McGuire, Elda Rotor, and Henry Krawitz, for their steadfastness and their excellent professionalism, and Patricia Perrier for the superb index. This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. Introduction 3 Robert O'Meally and Genevieve Fabre 2. The Black Writer's Use of Memory 18 Melvin Dixon 3. The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston 28 Hazel Carby 4. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory 45 David W. Blight 5. African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century 72 Genevieve Fabre 6. National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: "Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island"; or, Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of America 92 Werner Sailors 7. International Beacons of African-American Memory: Alexandre Dumas pere, Henry O. Tanner, and Josephine Baker as Examples of Recognition 122 Michel Fabre 8. On the Wrong Side of the Fence: Racial Segregation in American Cemeteries 130 Angelika Kriiger-Kahloula 9. What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly 150 Karen Fields 10. History-Telling and Time: An Example from Kentucky 164 Alessandro Portelli 11. Memory and Mass Culture 178 Susan Willis
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