Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:07:29.550Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - Folklore, Folk Life, and Ethnography in African American Writing of the 1930s

from Part II - New Deal, New Methodologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2022

By
Robin Lucy
Edited by
Eve Dunbar  and
Ayesha K. Hardison
Eve Dunbar
Affiliation:
Vassar College, New York
Ayesha K. Hardison
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Get access

Summary

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

Keywords

Black vernacularBlack musicSterling A. BrownethnographyFederal Writers’ProjectfolkfolkloreZora Neale HurstonNew Deal
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 , pp. 111 - 138
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bordelon, Pamela, ed. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.Google Scholar
Bordelon, Pamela. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Biographical Essay.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 1–49.Google Scholar
Botkin, B. A. “WPA and Folklore Research: ‘Bread and Song.’” Southern Folklore Quarterly 3 (March 1939): 7–14.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “A Literary Parallel.” Opportunity 10 (May 1932): 152–153.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “A Romantic Defense.” In A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Sanders, Mark A, 281–283. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. First published in Opportunity IX, April 1931.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Blues, Ballads and Social Songs.” In Seventy-Five Years of Freedom, 17–25. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Press, 1940.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Count Us In.” In A Negro Looks at the South, eds. Tidwell, John Edgar and Sanders, Mark A., 317–44. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Originally published in Rayford Logan, What the Negro Wants, 1944.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Old Time Tales” Review of Mules and Men, by Zora Neale Hurston. New Masses (February 25, 1936): 24–25.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Our Literary Audience.” Opportunity 13 (February 1930): 42–46, 61.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Pride and Pathos.” Review of The Carolina Low Country, by Members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. Opportunity 9 (December 1931): 381, 384.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “Spirituals, Blues, and Jazz—The Negro in the Lively Arts.” Tricolor 3 (April 1945): 62–70.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “The American Race Problem as Reflected in American Literature.” Journal of Negro Education 8, no. 3 (July 1939): 275–290.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “The Blues as Folk Poetry.” In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, ed. Botkin, B. A., 324–339. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Harper, Michael S.. Chicago: TriQuarterly Books, 1989.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “The Negro in American Literature.” In James Weldon Johnson, n.p. Nashville: Department of Publicity Fisk University, 1938.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. “The Problems of the Negro Writer.” In Official Proceedings, Second National Negro Congress, October 15, 16, 17, 1937 N.p.: National Negro Congress Publications, 1937.Google Scholar
“Unhistoric History.” Callaloo 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 749–766. www.jstor.org/stable/3299744 (accessed June 1, 2021). First published in Journal of Negro History, 1930.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butts, J. J. “New World A-Coming: African American Documentary Intertexts of the Federal Writers’ Project.” African American Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 649–666. www.jstor.org/stable/23316248 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Carmody, Todd. “Sterling Brown and the Dialect of New Deal Optimism. Callaloo 33, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 820–840. www.jstor.org/stable/40962680 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Clay, Eugene. “The Negro in Recent American Literature.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Hart, Henry, 145–153. New York: International Publishers, 1935.Google Scholar
Davey, Elizabeth. “The Souths of Sterling A. Brown.” Southern Cultures 5, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 20–45. www.jstor.org/stable/26236689 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Florida State Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida. Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.Google Scholar
Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Ford, James W. The Negro and the Democratic Front. New York: International Publishers, 1938.Google Scholar
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Jerrold. “Folklore in the Making: B.A. Botkin.” Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 395 (March 1987): 3–38. www.jstor.org/stable/539987 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Art and Such.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 139–145.Google Scholar
“Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Wall, Cheryl A., ed., Folklore R, 830–846.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Go Gator and Muddy the Water.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 68–88.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “High John De Conquer,” American Mercury (October 1943): 450–458.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, ed. West, Genevieve. New York: Amistad Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Perennial, 1990.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Negro Mythical Places.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 106–111.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 61–67.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Shouting.” In Wall, Cheryl A, ed., Folklore, 851–854.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Spirituals and Neo-spirituals.” In Wall, Cheryl A, ed., Folklore, 869–874.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Stories of Conflict: [Review of] Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children.” In Wall, Cheryl A., ed., Folklore, 812–813.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “The Sanctified Church.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 94–98.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “Turpentine.” In Bordelon, Pamela, ed., Go Gator, 128–130.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” In I Love Myself When I’m Laughing… and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Walker, Alice, 169–173. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. First published in Negro Digest, 1950.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk.’” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992): 1400–1408. www.jstor.org/stable/2165942 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Lamothe, Daphne. Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943. Boston: Little Brown, 1972.Google Scholar
Marshall, Thurgood. “The Gestapo in Detroit.” The Crisis 50, no. 8 (August 1943): 232–233, 246–247.Google Scholar
McDonogh, Gary W., ed. The Florida Negro: A Federal Writers’ Project Legacy. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Patterson, William C. (sic; middle initial L. misprinted). “Awake Negro Poets!,” New Masses (October 4, 1928): 10.Google Scholar
Retman, Sonnet. Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Retman, Sonnet “‘Return of the Native’: Sterling Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South and the Work of Signifying Ethnography.” American Literature 86, no. 1 (March 2014): 87–115. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2395528 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Sanders, Mark A. “Sterling A. Brown’s Master Metaphor: Southern Road and the Sign of Black Modernity.” Callaloo 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 917–930. www.jstor.org/stable/3299766 (accessed June 1, 2021).Google Scholar
Smethurst, James Edward. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. April 1938. New York: Library of America, 1995.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. [Review of] “Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Appiah, K. A., 16–17. October 1937. New York: Amistad, 1993.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×