Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America

Conjuring the Folk addresses the dynamic relation between metropolitan artistic culture and its popular referents during the Harlem Renaissance period. From Jean Toomer’s conclusion that the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away to Zora Neale Hurston’s discovery of a rich field for folk-lore in a Florida lumber camp, Harlem Renaissance writers made competing claims about the vitality of the African-American folk. These competing claims, David Nicholls explains, form the basis of a discordant conversation on the question of modernity in African America. In a series of revisionary readings, Nicholls studies how the folk is shaped by the ideology of form. He examines the presence of a spectral folk in Toomer’s modernist pastiche, Cane. He explores how Hurston presents folklore as a contemporary language of resistance in her ethnography, Mules and Men. In Claude McKay’s naturalistic romance, Banana Bottom, Nicholls discovers the figuration of an alternative modernity in the heroine’s recovery of her lost folk identity. He unearths the individualist ethos of Booker T. Washington in two novels by George Wylie Henderson. And he reveals how Richard Wright’s photo-documentary history, 12 Million BlackVoices, places the folk in a Marxian narrative of modernization toward class-consciousness. A provocative rereading of the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance, Conjuring the Folk offers a new way of understanding literary responses to migration, modernization, and the concept of the folk itself. David G. Nicholls is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago.