'There was a whole lot of grayness here': Modernity, geography and 'home' in Black women's literature, 1919--1959.

摘要

Black women's literature from 1919–1959 illuminates the complex changes of racial geography in urban, modern America. My dissertation argues that examining representation of “place” and more specifically, “home” and “domesticity” in the urban narratives of black women from 1919–1959 is crucial to understanding American modernization and urbanization. While African American male narratives of modernization and urbanization, such as Richard Wright's Native Son, have been a part of the literature on modernity, black women's texts have not been examined in the context of modernization. However, the writings of Marita Bonner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Lorraine Hansberry and Paule Marshall constitute a large unaccounted source of urban geography; in my dissertation, I argue that racialized and gendered spaces through which black women's struggles are portrayed, reveal unequal social processes and power relations and articulate resistance to racism and segregation in particular. In doing so, I compare the texts written by Chicago and New York writers in order to highlight the differences as well as the similarities. Marita Bonner's Frye Street & Environs and Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha are read as a critique of the dominant Chicago sociologists' narratives of modernization. In Quicksand and Plum Bun, the figure of the black flaneuse in New York is read as an embodiment of the paradoxical desires of homesickness and freedom. Ann Petry's The Street critiques the uneven geography of America by juxtaposing Lutie's home in the street and the Chandler home in Connecticut. In the last chapter, I read Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstone and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as reflecting the common desires of both Chicago and New York women to move into a quintessential American home in the suburbs. However, an alternative home in Africa is imagined in both of these stories as the dream of owning a home in segregated America is proven to be futile and meaningless. Consequently, my dissertation theorizes an alternative account of modernity and attempts to “mount an effective critique” against modernity and modernization.