TY - JOUR
AU1 - Posmentier, Sonya
AB - 1. Lyric Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 grant proposal to the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project begins with a jarring example of the diverse, rich, musical culture she promises to find in her home state of Florida. Each section of Hurston’s “Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas” introduces one of four “areas” of the state and describes the cultural products that might be collected there. The singer who heralds Hurston’s proposal in the epigraph to Area I (Western Florida) with a rhythmically forced ballad lyric is neither a hardworking black laborer nor a spurned lover (like the subjects of much other Hurstonian ethnography), but a rifle-toting manhunter in search of a black victim. These lyrics, the first words in the proposal, remind us from the outset of the physical danger that Hurston—a female black ethnographer who often traveled alone—risks in undertaking this work: Got my knap-sack on my back My rifle on my shoulder Kill me a nigger ’fore Saturday Night If I have to hunt Flordy over. (Sung by Waldo Wishart, Ocala, Florida) (1) The white bounty hunter, as well as violent and appropriative white poetry and song, threatens the materials of black culture, metonymically associated in the lyrics with the black body who will be dead “’fore Saturday Night.”1 And this threat is the major provocation of Hurston’s expedition: to collect those same materials in order to create a record of black diasporic culture. It might be easy to read Hurston’s grant proposal, housed in the archives of the Library of Congress and later published in a collection of Hurston’s Federal Writers’ Project writings, as a bureaucratic document intending to persuade its readers that Hurston’s preservation project deserves funding. But it is also a record of completed work and a primer for how to read, hear, and understand Floridian culture. In this dual aspect, the proposal thus exemplifies the combination of instrumental and aesthetic poetic reading practices in the early twentieth century. While the challenge of Hurston’s proposal remains how to find “material worthy of preservation by recordings,” the proposal must also render that material textually and provide an interpretive context for it. Positing her expedition as a response to the articulated violence of the bounty hunter, Hurston signals her interest in documenting a culture that remains “little touched” and in hearing, reading, and recording poetic alternatives to that violence (1).2 Hurston’s impulse to preserve by documenting exemplifies the anthropological basis of one thread of modern lyric theory, the interpretation of poetry and its relationship to other genres and media, in this case both the medium of song and the genre of the proposal itself. Hurston’s geographical survey of Florida’s culture calls for a reparative reading practice encompassing the experiences of violence, sexual longing, and prayer described through poetic interludes. Along with the epigraphs to each section and other interjections of verse, song, and chant at the end of each of the three areas, Hurston offers instructions to readers who would undertake the expedition she has proposed. These research instructions are the basis of a literary as well as a collecting practice. She suggests “A serious study of blank verse in the form of traditional sermons and prayers” at the end of Area I (2) and twice iterates the suggestion as a command to “Look for the roots of traditional sermons and prayers” in Area II and to “Look for fine examples of those folk poems in blank verse known as sermons and prayers” in Area III (4). Hurston finally answers this call for prayer in the summary section, concluding the program with a “Sanctified Anthem”: O Lord, O Lord Let the words of my mouth, O Lord Let the words of my mouth, meditations of my heart Be accepted in Thy sight, O Lord (Sung by Mrs. Orrie Jones, Palm Beach, Florida)     Respectfully Submitted     Zora Neale Hurston (7) Here all of the other lyrics—terrifying, lusty, hardworking, and heavy with grief—become “the words of my mouth,” emanating from the writing subject, Zora Neale Hurston (emphasis added). She attributes the anthem, Psalm 19, to a particular singer, Mrs. Orrie Jones, and, by assigning printed lyrics to her (rather than a writer), marks the status of the lyrics as a synecdoche for that singer’s performance of the song. At the same time, the lyrics function independently. The speaker within the song lyric prays to God for the acceptance of her words, while Hurston, signifying, prays that her federal benefactors accept her words, insofar as these are the closing words of the “respectfully submitted” grant proposal. Within the textual genre of the grant proposal, song lyric becomes literary lyric. Hurston has both recorded a miscellaneous collection of sound and transformed the sonic realm of “the Floridas” from the racial violence indicated by the epigraph to Area I to a meditative secular prayer in her own voice. “A serious study” of Florida sound, for Hurston, necessitates an ethical transformation from racial terror to lyric prayer (2). Some might call Hurston’s transformation of multiple folk materials into a singular poetic voice lyricization, a critical process of abstracting poems from their material, historical, generic, and biographical contexts in support of a stand-alone, universally available poem called “lyric.”3 Yet the status of Hurston’s lyrics within an instrumental document, a grant proposal, challenges such a reading, even as the proposal expands our sense of the sites and genres in which poetic readings in the early twentieth century took place. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins identify the modernist period during which Hurston undertook many of her “recording expeditions” as important in the process of lyricization. They detail how strategies of close reading in the early to mid-twentieth century conflated “lyric” and “poetry,” producing an idea of the “lyric poem” as a transcendent, universally available genre (159–65). To what extent was Hurston engaged in such a process, parallel to, or distinct from, that of her Anglo-American contemporaries? By assembling the heterogeneous collected material into the voice of a lyric speaker, she lays claim to what Fred Moten calls a “normative lyric subjectivity” (Donham and Moten). But we can also read Hurston as a theorist of “a mode of lyricism that has been explored and cultivated precisely by folks who have both been refused access to that normative subjectivity but who have also refused that normative subjectivity themselves” (Donham and Moten). To read Hurston following Moten’s concise historicizing of black lyric subjectivity is to continue the project of historical poetics—a project of defamiliarizing the “normativity” of lyric subjectivity—while challenging some of its key assumptions. Specifically, Hurston’s anthropological writings and cultural criticism offer a glimpse into the simultaneous, interconnected formation of cultural studies and lyric reading practices in US literary pedagogy. Narratives of literary canonization often credit—or blame—activist student movements of the 1960s with shifting how we read: from the close reading that emphasized the coherence and agency of individual texts to a focus on history, biography, theory, or the instability of subjectivity. Many posit black studies as a late-twentieth-century challenge from the margins to a semi-coherent genealogy of a modern Anglo-American literary criticism centered on practices of textual—especially poetic—interpretation.4 But “race” was not a challenge to literary study that emerged sui generis with the institutionalization of black studies as a discipline. Reading Hurston as a theorist of both lyrics and culture reveals instead that interpretive reading practices focusing on textual aesthetics are rooted in earlier twentieth-century questions about racial ontology and racial history. Reading Hurston as a theorist of both lyrics and culture reveals instead that interpretive reading practices focusing on textual aesthetics are rooted in earlier twentieth-century questions about racial ontology and racial history. In what follows, I turn first to the New Critical classrooms in which the development of literary criticism as a modern discipline took shape. I trace New Critical attempts to disarticulate poetry reading from scientific and social scientific methods in the process of developing a method for close reading that (like the idea of a lyric speaker upon which it is based) “has become so fundamental … it has become virtually invisible.” Turning to Hurston’s essays, I then leave the libraries, classrooms, and textbooks in which “the New Critical fiction of the lyric speaker” has dominated (Jackson and Prins 162). Written just as the New Critical methodologies developed, Hurston’s writings on lyrics invite us to consider what other strategies for reading poetry were available, and how they remain available. Asking which racialized histories and lives have been abstracted and obscured by an idea of poetry as ahistorical, decontextualized, and isolated from other genres and media, this essay thus attends to how black geography and black interdisciplinarity produce ideas of poetic reading.5 Beyond her writing of fiction, Hurston was also a collector of music; a playwright; the producer and choreographer of a Broadway musical; and, underlying all of these modes of cultural production, an ethnographer. She studied anthropology with Franz Boas and traveled throughout the southern US, as well as the Caribbean, collecting stories and songs in black communities, including her hometown of Eatonville, Florida.6 She was also a cultural critic—someone who both produced culture and left us with vital lessons about how to study it. Her multidisciplinary training underscores the connection between reading racial difference and reading literature or culture. Hurston was part of a generation of black writers engaged in both the practice and the theorizing of writing. As Daphne Lamothe argues, ethnographic work was central to the creative production of this generation of black writers. Among the most notable of those writing in the 1930s was Sterling Brown, who challenged the decontextualizing practices of the New Criticism, famously in a 1973 retort to Robert Penn Warren’s degradation of African American poetry, and much earlier in a primer he wrote for the 1931 edition of James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry.7 A writer and editor for the Federal Writers’ Project, Brown was director of “Negro Affairs” for the American Guide Series from 1936 to 1939. According to Lauren Sklaroff, he sought to create a balanced portrait of black participation in US civic and social life through representation of African Americans in the state guides (81–121). His work there, as well as for the WPA collection of slave narratives, influenced his poetry, pedagogy, and literary criticism.8 Unlike Brown, a professor of English at Howard University, or J. Saunders Redding, a professor credited by some as having established the first critical literary canon of African American writing in his 1939 To Make a Poet Black, Hurston was not explicitly engaged in literary study as a discipline, nor was she concerned with the canon-building activities of white literary critics.9 Like Brown, however, she read lyric poetry in a multivalent way, as generated in and through specific geographical, racial, and social experiences. As the example of her proposal for future research suggests, analyzing Hurston as a lyric theorist reveals how these reading practices were related to the anthropological study of racial differences. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) and “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Hurston’s abstraction of poetic and musical genres does not parallel the New Critics’ universalist claims. Rather, the specific contexts of geographic migration and racial violence that defined many black lives in the early twentieth century produce her lyric readings. Her ethnographic writings comprise an archive of diverse genres and media, as well as an alternative modern poetics. Hurston’s varied modes of research and expression remind us that black studies was interdisciplinary long before it became what Roderick Ferguson has called an “interdiscipline”—a field of study institutionalized at universities and colleges with buildings, offices, faculty lines, and concentrations (19–30). As spaces where black subjects produce, interpret, and theorize poetry, Hurston’s sites of ethnographic encounter yield a new perspective on the relationship between scientific and literary observations in lyric theory. Reading Hurston as a theorist of racial identity and a theorist of critical reading practice, and uncovering the mutual formation of those theories, I contend that the suppressed interdisciplinarity of “close reading” unsettles the oft-supposed extradisciplinarity of blackness to literary study. 2. Reading Poetry To the extent that the New Critics retrained critical attention on the “poem itself,” they established the footing for later scholarship treating the interdisciplinary fields of black studies and ethnic studies as a threat to the pure study of the poem.10 In their Understanding Poetry, the 1938 textbook that Jackson and Prins single out for its pivotal role in the process of lyricization, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren sought methods of reading poetry that transcend the material contexts of ordinary lives. The scholarly consensus has been that the New Critics subsumed not only the history of poetic genre but also matters of race, culture, ethics, history, and politics to the rhetorical analysis of the “text itself.”11 Tracing the linkage between the values of the Southern Agrarians and New Critical theory, Lindon Barrett has demonstrated how the dichotomous pairs whiteness/blackness and literary/extraliterary share a mutual formation, such that the latter division generates and violently maintains the boundary within the former pair (131–82). Thus, scholars largely describe the challenges black studies and cultural studies pose for New Critical reading practices as after the fact of literary criticism’s formation as a discipline.12 Against this grain, I juxtapose the writings of Brooks, Warren, and the other acknowledged architects of close reading with the literary epistemologies of their black contemporaries. In light of disciplinary thought of the 1920s and 1930s, literary and cultural studies share a more entangled history than we have often imagined. I am not identifying a genealogical relationship of influence between Hurston and the New Critics. One could trace a more direct line between the Anglo-American founders of close reading and New Negro critics by considering, for example, Brown’s explicit animosity toward the New Critics and Agrarians, or I. A. Richards’s introduction to the British publication of Claude McKay’s poems, Spring in New Hampshire: And Other Poems (1920). Reading Hurston alongside the New Critics insists instead on their simultaneous but distinct approaches to the problem of emergent disciplinarity, revealing how the study of race and the study of poetry alike are indebted to a range of scientific, pseudoscientific, and social scientific methods of interpretation and classification. The organization of Understanding Poetry reflects its first teaching principle: that “emphasis should be kept on the poem as a poem” (Brooks and Warren ix), as opposed to the “study of biographical and historical materials” or a poem’s function as “inspirational” or “didactic” (iv). As Brooks and Warren write in the “Letter to the Teacher” that prefaces Understanding Poetry, it is hoped that the present arrangement stands on a ground different from the arbitrary and irrational classifications frequently found in textbooks … such as “lyrics of meditation” and “religious lyrics” and “poems of patriotism,” or “the sonnet,” the “Ode,” the “song,” etc. ( xii) Although the editors concede that they organized this textbook in part out of “pedagogical expediency” (ix), they also dismiss attempts to define and divide by genre, theme, or occasion as “irrational classifications.” For them, “poetic communication” is a generalizable phenomenon: “the analyses and questions appended to each poem aim at making the student aware of the organic relationship existing among these factors in poetic communication. Obviously, any poem whatsoever would, finally, raise the questions associated with all of these topics” (x–xi). The title itself, Understanding Poetry, suggests that the individual selections represent the general noun, poetry. For Brooks, Warren, and others in the Anglo-American academy, lyricization—the abstraction of poems from their material contexts—also involved efforts to discipline literature against the epistemological authority of science or social science. Beyond offering a “justification for poetry,” they arrange their famous textbook to resist such categorization. For these apostles of New Criticism, the function of poetic form is to “preserve” the “ordinary business of living,” which, they insist, is humanistic, “not scientific or practical” (27). Efforts to avoid “approximat[ing] a scientific form” contribute to the explicit structure of lyric reading. Among scholars describing reading practices in the first half of the twentieth century, poetry anchored the struggle to assess whether reading constitutes a scientific practice of interpretation. Lyric poetry had an important role because it could apparently be contained as an object of study. If poetry could not make the case for the privileged status of literary language and the inviolability of aesthetic premises of analysis, what could? The experimental rubric of Richards’s 1929 Practical Criticism, one of the foundational texts of close reading, seems to exemplify the depoliticization and decontextualization that accompanied lyric reading. Richards, a British professor and critic, taught in the US for many years and influenced the methods of reading developed by critics like Brooks and Warren. In Practical Criticism, he stripped the authorship and contextual information from 13 poems given to his Cambridge undergraduates in order to produce “the record of a piece of fieldwork in comparative ideology” (6). In other words, he performed a classroom experiment testing readers’ responses to poetry out of context, engaging the “scientific or practical” approach to poetry his students and contemporaries later disavowed (Brooks and Warren 27). Richards’s “experimental method” parallels Hurston’s “field work.”13 The connection between them, however, also extends to knowledge beyond the “scientific or practical.” In Practical Criticism, the need to account for “feeling” distinguishes poetic reading from other disciplinary reading practices. As we shall see, preoccupation with managing “feeling” was, in the same historical moment, central to Hurston’s method for “knowing” race. This is important because thinkers like poet Audre Lorde later invoked “feeling” to distinguish between the Cartesian organization of knowledge in the Western university and the alternative methodologies that ethnic studies offered: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (38). Lorde’s embrace of the dichotomy between “thinking” and “feeling” places rationality and objectivity within dominant discourse and claims affect and subjectivity as alternative, more “authentically” black and feminine ways of knowing. The title assertion of the essay in which these lines appear is “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” aligning feeling with the genre of poetry.14 Taken together, Richards’s and Hurston’s earlier efforts to describe feeling in poetry and racial identity provide an opening between the two sides of Lorde’s dichotomy and between two disciplinary lineages: theories of the lyric and theories of racial subject formation. Richards describes reading in relationship to the psychological functioning of the brain, taking “feeling” to be one of the “four aspects” of “nearly all articulate speech” with which we must reckon when considering how to read poetry, along with sense, tone, and intention (175).15 “Understanding feeling” is one of the primary tasks of the reader and critic, but conveying and interpreting “feeling” in poetry is also difficult, lacking a method and technique (311). This is why feeling was one of the biggest obstacles his undergraduates faced in trying to interpret poetry stripped of its contexts. Because literary analysis can result in “misunderstandings both of sense and feeling,” Richards sought other critical means of interpreting feeling, including behavioral psychology (205). Even as Richards distinguishes the more “logical” work of determining sense from the more subjective work of perceiving feeling, he insists that the latter can be taught and systematized. Through the “protocols” of his classroom experiment, Richards taught “ways and means of controlling feeling through metaphor” to students of poetry (212). Brooks was skeptical of Richards’s embrace of behaviorism, choosing instead to distinguish both poetry and poetic reading from scientific and social scientific methods.16 Yet, as John Guillory and Joshua Gang have demonstrated, uncovering the psychological roots of close reading challenges assumptions about a disciplinary practice that sets itself apart from the sciences and social sciences (Guillory, “Close Reading” 12–13; Guillory, “The Origins of Close Reading”; Gang 13–20). Gang further suggests that even the New Critics, who took up this mantle while distancing themselves from the objectivity Richards proposed, depended upon the very psychological concepts that informed Richards’s ideas of reading poetry, “translat[ing] behaviorism into poetic formalism” (Gang 13). In other words, the most significant theory of literary interpretation in US classrooms derived from the discipline’s attempt simultaneously to legitimate itself in relationship to and distinguish itself from scientific methods. For Richards, the key to ascertaining feeling (a form of “knowledge”) in poetry lay in recognizing that “[l]anguage has become its repository, a record, a reflection, as it were, of human nature” (208). For the combined method of analysis he proposes, Richards takes as his analogy the relationship between geology and physics: “As geology, in the early stages of inquiry into radioactivity, came in to supply evidence that experiments could not elicit, so the records, hiding not in rocks but in words, and accessible only to literary penetration, may combine with groping psychological analysis to produce results as yet unprofitable to conjecture” (208–9). By bringing together psychology and literary analysis, Richards wanted to claim a “technical” rigor” for literary criticism, “something parallel to the recent advances in physics” achieved through geology, but he was haunted always by the social (208). The social and the psychological are therefore part of the history of New Criticism but have been suppressed both in that history and in conventional assumptions of what close reading is (a practice that concerns itself with the poem and not with its surroundings). Cultural studies thus figures in narratives of literary critical history as an after-the-fact challenge to a falsely stable version of literary critical practice. But if the New Critics’ lyricization made the extraliterary invisible while generating a transcendent, universal poetics, black writers did not so easily disarticulate science and social science from culture. In the work that Hurston and her contemporaries were doing to define “culture” as something other than biology, black modernist reading practices were rooted in the scholarship of racial difference. To study Hurston’s writing as modern poetry criticism, then, requires that we understand her modern racial theory. 3. Reading Race Hurston’s contributions to black social life and social study challenge the separation of the disciplinary histories of cultural studies and poetics. Her struggle to describe feeling invites comparison with Richards’s parallel one. Linking these two aesthetic philosophies of feeling is their investment in method, technique, and experiment—a vexed scientific logic that is at once part of and the other to literary interpretation. To read them as such is to trace the shared (though not identical) epistemological histories of racial thought and “lyric reading.” Like the early practitioners of “close reading,” Hurston, as a theorist of black aesthetics, recognized the necessity and the slipperiness of accounting for feeling, and she did so while evoking the specter of empirical or scientific knowledge. While Richards drew on a science of the interior and the individual (psychology) to account for feeling in poetry, Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” wrestles with a science of the outer (anthropology) to account for feeling as created in and through social space.17 She explicitly evokes “feeling” as an epistemological category for knowing race, and implicitly characterizes “feeling” as an aesthetic category. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is now featured in anthologies and college literature syllabi, discussed by literature professors, quoted in books of poetry, performed in staged readings, and transformed into works of visual art that hang in museums. Originally, it was published in the May 1928 issue of the Christian socialist and pacifist journal The World Tomorrow, whose avowed aim was “Looking Toward a Social Order Based on the Religion of Jesus” (195). That issue’s cover bears the subheading “Recent Gains in Industrial Relations” and includes pieces on the Pullman porters’ strike, “Pacifism and the Use of Force,” as well as the League of Nations and the idea of national self-defense. Hurston’s piece is unique in the issue’s contents because of its lengthy autobiographical consideration of racial identity and experience. The contributors’ notes identify her as “one of the younger negro writers, a winner of Opportunity prizes” (194). She is abstracted, identified, quite conventionally, both by her race and by her participation in a certain milieu (Opportunity was the magazine of the Urban League, and its prizes the golden rings of the Harlem literary scene), her essay a placeholder for the discussion of race in a journal concerned with social issues writ large. In this sense, Hurston’s essay must do social work through the discourse of feeling, a labor the essay alternately takes up and disavows. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” might seem to disavow that race is a feeling at all, inviting us to read the title as ironic, as if feeling and color have nothing to do with one another. We can hear the condescending white liberal inquiry to which Hurston is responding, “How does it feel, Zora, to be colored?” We heard it unasked in Souls of Black Folk (“How does it feel to be a problem?”), and we hear it again from Fanon (“Look, a Negro!”) (Du Bois 7; Fanon 109). To the extent that she refuses to answer, Hurston calls into question the question itself, the assumption that one can generalize or pathologize racial experience. As Barbara Johnson argued nearly 30 years ago, the essay reflects ironically on the question and a range of possible answers to it (174). Instead of an answer, Hurston provides the negative affect of racial ontology. Her response unfolds as a series of negations: “I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief” (“How It Feels” 826). If we break this sentence down, we can see how Hurston piles negative upon negative: “but,” “nothing,” “except,” “not.” The opening sentence also constitutes a refusal to provide the gift of affect promised by the title and so often associated with black writers. She will not join what she calls “the sobbing school of Negrohood” (827), nor will she provide for whites what she has so often been accused of offering: a limited range of black feeling that swings, as Richard Wright has critiqued, “between laughter and tears” (Wright 25). Hurston rejects and even mocks affective expectation, refusing to fill in the gaps Sianne Ngai describes in her reading of the “irritated” surface of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (Ngai 178–80). In doing so, Hurston also rejects the facticity of racial difference or the “fact of blackness,” as Fanon would have it. Hurston’s refusal to perform tragic feeling seems at first a form of racial disidentification and a throwing off of the yoke of history. In this reading, feeling is regulatory rather than liberatory. Refusing to be “tragically colored,” Hurston insists, “No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (“How It Feels” 827). Hurston proposes to work with the finer blade of the oyster knife, rather than the axe, unlatching the weight of history: Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get Set!”; and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. (827) Here Hurston marshals the arguments of the worst apologists for history (slavery is in the past). We can also understand this moment, however, as a denial of white liberal desires for black performances of suffering.18 Hurston’s refusal to “feel” a certain way, or rather to perform a certain feeling, is wrapped up in claiming her racial autobiography as an individual. “Hurston’s text,” Johnson writes, “enacts the question of identity as a process of self-difference that Hurston’s persona often explicitly denies” (178). Hurston’s narrative begins by renouncing one kind of genealogy and then describes the process of “becoming” a racialized subject. One does not become “colored,” Hurston suggests, through one’s familial genealogy or history. Neither does being the granddaughter of Indians nor “the grand-daughter of slaves” define “how it feels to be colored.” Rather, one acquires one’s race through a socialization process through which one comes to realize one’s own difference. In narrating this process, Hurston tells of her transformation from “their Zora,” “everybody’s Zora,” “Zora of Orange County” in her “exclusively … colored town” to “a little colored girl” (“How It Feels” 826–27). Her coming of age (and coming of race) at 13 involves transformation from identity defined by name, communal belonging, and geography, to identity defined by race and gender: I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. (826) Placing herself in “the little Negro town,” Hurston proceeds to racialize the geography of Florida. Paradoxically she did not “bec[ome] colored” while living in her “exclusively … colored town” but rather when “I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl” (827). In this account, becoming black is a process of abstraction from specific context. The narrator’s racialization takes shape through an evacuation of self that is also a separation from her physical and civic environment (“I was not Zora of Orange County”). She “became colored” when removed from the borders and the dramatic, toxic flora of Eatonville. Perhaps race is not, this autobiography suggests, about “feeling” at all, so much as a kind of narrative becoming and unbecoming: she “became a fast brown—warranted not to rub or run” (827) and, at the same time, stopped being “everybody’s Zora.” “Feeling colored” seems to have little or nothing to do with black culture as she conceived it in “Proposed Recording Expedition to the Floridas,” where Hurston represents blackness in the specific geographic context of enforced displacement from Africa, Caribbean immigration, and US migration as well as the explicit sociopolitical context of antiblack violence. Yet in rejecting the expectation of racialized affect, Hurston does not reject feeling racialized; rather, she depicts it as the means for knowing racial history. As she articulates her disclaimer of slavery’s relevance, it is as a failure of feeling (“it fails to register depression with me” [827]). The failure to register depression over the past is parallel with the failure to “feel colored,” which Hurston announces as an achievement a few sentences later: “I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira” (828). Hurston establishes an equivalence between historical depression and race feeling (or resistance to race feeling), even in wishing to be rid of both. Disavowing the possibility that one can know racial feeling in any absolute sense, Hurston renders feeling as a way of knowing, itself a science of the social and a component of black interpretive practice animating Hurston’s aesthetic (and poetic) theory. Feeling is the epistemological territory of “How It Feels,” that which Hurston claims as the basis of an “I” capable of narration and a “modus” for interpretation. No sooner does the essay negate racial feeling than it immerses us and the narrator in it: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.  For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again. (828) At times, the essay seemingly juxtaposes the status of being “colored” on the one hand and authentic ontology on the other (“At certain times I have no race, I am me” [829]). But here the feeling of being “most colored” is compatible with being. Whether submerged in whiteness or revealed by it, “I am.” The ubiquity of natural (and oceanic) metaphor here suggests a naturalized (rather than performed) black ontology, while it also places the unchanging “I” of these lines in a deeper history, resubmerging her in the waters of the middle passage over and through which black subjects were transported into the history Hurston now refuses to rehearse. Her persona “feel(s) my race” in both a historical geography (the Atlantic of the slave trade) and one of the present (“Beside the waters of the Hudson” and “at Barnard”), simultaneously abstract and specific. Context makes “feeling colored” known, readable. As an anthropologist, Hurston studied black culture in relationship to context, history, and geography, and her essay in The World Tomorrow reflects that training even as it challenges the objectivity of such disciplinary practice. Toward the end, we feel the pull of Hurston’s training as an ethnographer and the push of her investment as a creative artist in subjectivity and the appeal of the sensory. But these methods are united: describing racial difference in “How It Feels,” like describing and interpreting poetry in “Proposed Recording Expedition,” requires a transcription of sound and performance. In a climactic scene, Hurston describes entering a jazz club with a white friend. At first they have “any little nothing … in common,” while the music seems to be universally affecting. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, reared on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. (828) But Hurston reveals the “sharp contrast” between herself and the other: the difference in their perception of sound, evident in the narrator’s insistently first-person experience of the music. “I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it tee to the mark yeeeeooww!” First, the orchestra members are “those heathen” whom Zora follows into their music (through the Du Boisian veil of separation between white observer and black observed). Then, the narrator herself becomes the primitive ethnographic object “living in the jungle way.” But Zora’s gaze falls too on “the veneer we call civilization,” as she describes her white friend “drumming the table with his fingertips” in response to the music. “The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored” (828–29). Distinguishing herself from her friend, Hurston claims “feeling” as a “colored” alternative to his “so white” empirical way of knowing: “only” hearing. Her ability to interpret (to feel, and thereby know, and thereby write) the sound of the music, an ability Hurston identifies here with “how it feels to be colored me,” parallels the lyric transcription she would later undertake in “Proposed Recording Expedition.” And yet this passage also undoes the same “sharp contrast” between black and white it claims to represent. Hurston’s jungle rhapsody seems to parody primitivist renditions of blackness in which “My face is painted red and yellow, and my body is painted blue.” As Hurston in the club “creep(s) back slowly,” so too does the narrator creep back from the imaginative fancy in which black foreground becomes multicolored background (828). As contemporary painter Glenn Ligon has shown us in the thick oil—black on white, or is it white on black?—with which he letters Hurston’s “I do not always feel colored,” the background and the foreground are not distinguishable in Hurston’s racial theory. The contrast intensifies and mutes and reverses as the fragments, smudges, and remainders of Ligon’s oil stick scatter and collect in unexpected places, marking and filling in the wood. We are most aware not of the distinction between “the veneer we call civilization” and the jungle, but of the ease of travel between them. And while division between the white friend and the narrator has widened in the essay, the division within the narrator’s self, between “feeling” and observation, reconciles as Hurston claims the racial particularity she has earlier critiqued. I wish to draw attention not so much to the undecidability about racial difference (which Johnson has underscored), as to the idea that racial difference (like aesthetic perception) is a matter of feeling—not black feeling or white feeling, but “great blobs of purple and red emotion” (Hurston, “How It Feels” 828). Hurston reveals feeling and rationality to be part of the same ethnographic practice. Elsewhere she describes the “feather-bed resistance” of “the Negro” in response to the ethnographic questioner: “That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries,” emphasizing the role of the objects of study (and of black feeling) in producing and resisting ethnographic study (Mules and Men 10). In Mules and Men (1935), for example, Hurston is both part of the community she studies and the questioner herself. In order “to reveal that which the soul lives by” in her communities (10), she must shed the “tight chemise” of her upbringing and see through the objective “spy-glass of Anthropology” (9). “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” therefore traffics in territory similar to that of the later essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” where Hurston adopts a more ethnographic mode of listing for readers of Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology. “Characteristics” is structured as a list of attributes Hurston upholds as common, specific, and at times essential to “Negro Expression”: drama, will to adorn, angularity, asymmetry, dancing, negro folklore, culture heroes, originality, imitation, absence of the concept of privacy, the jook (830–46). The piece unfolds as a series of generalizations about “the Negro,” written as if to translate her or him to an outside population: “So we can say the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics” (830–31); “On the walls of the homes of the average Negro one always finds a glut of gaudy calendars, wall pockets and averting lithographs” (833). At the same time, we perceive the difficulty Hurston has in extricating herself from the subject of her inquiry and adopting an objective view of “Negro Expression.” We come away with the feeling that it is just as difficult to characterize such expression as it is to describe “how it feels to be colored me.” But we also come away with a viable theory of black expression, an essay on the black aesthetic before its time. Indeed, critics most often turn to “Characteristics” as a source of pithy and accurate descriptions of black art. It is difficult to reconcile these two ways of reading Hurston’s best-known critical essay: as a text to be deconstructed for its slippages and gaps, its recording of the difficulty of ethnographic categorization on the one hand, or, on the other, as an autochthonous critical apparatus that we can apply to works of black art. As Hortense Spillers implies in her essay on the figure of Hurston in Barbara Johnson’s A World of Difference, if “Characteristics” is cultural theory, so too “How it Feels” is a text of “deconstructive possibilities” (96); “feeling” and “characteristics” are part of the same evolving, complex critical method (94–97). Hurston’s description of “being colored” as at once a “feeling” (subjective, personal, and dynamic) and a set of “characteristics” (objective, shared, and fixed) emerged from her disciplinary training as an ethnographer. Indeed, the tension between observable characteristics and subjective experience as measures of racial difference came to define modern cultural anthropology through the work of Hurston and her coterie. Hurston’s proto-version of “black culture theory” (Spillers 95), in turn, brings the epistemological problems of anthropological practice to the task of literary reading. 4. Disciplining Race In Hurston’s writing, the push toward affective experience goes hand in hand with science, social science, or pseudoscience, particularly in her oeuvre devoted to cultural theory, where Hurston theorizes racial feeling through and against the observational work of geographers, ethnographers, and collectors. We can discern in Hurston’s writings on racial identity a broader intellectual shift away from race science toward racial feeling. As a student of Boas, Hurston was part of a generation of social scientists who insisted that nineteenth-century race science—science that explained racial difference as biological difference—was not a legitimate method for describing culture. Moreover, as we have seen, just as Hurston insisted upon the subjectivity of race feeling, anthropology as social science remained part of her interpretive method. Hurston learned from anthropology during that discipline’s shift from hard science to social science. This broad transition mirrored a more specific shift from biological to social modes of perceiving racial difference taking place under Hurston’s mentor Franz Boas. Boas’s ideas about racial difference were dynamic over the course of his long career, but he consistently challenged how “anthropologists have endeavored to classify races, basing their attempts on a variety of traits, and that only too often the results of these classifications have been assumed as expressions of genetic relationship, while actually they have no more than a descriptive value, unless their genetic significance can be established” (Race, Language and Culture 245). For Boas, hereditary traits could not account for cultural difference (what we might now call “race”), nor could climatic or geographic difference. Instead, cultural difference indexed historical and environmental (in the sense of cultural) development. He did not dismiss “descriptive value”; he aimed to uncouple description from essentializing discourse. Boas drew from his earlier writings on geography to establish anthropology in the twentieth century as a historical and human science depending on empirical observation. Addressing the shift “From Physics to Ethnology” in Boas’s early work, George Stocking, Jr., underscores Boas’s interest in the relationship between affective experience and observable “characteristics,” or, between subjectivity and objectivity: “Boas was in a general way concerned with the relationship of the external and the internal, the physical and the psychic, the inorganic and the organic” (143). As geographical editor of Science, in 1887 Boas argued against basing “The Study of Geography” on the pure methods of physics. Whereas physics dictates that we study phenomena value in producing or confirming abstract laws, Boas makes the case for “the thorough understanding of phenomena” for their own sake (“The Study of Geography” 138).19 He insists on the value of subjective, not only objective, connections among phenomena, expressing his primary interest in the “personal feeling of man towards the world” as the basis of a geographic study (139). We can understand Hurston’s many-layered description of “how it feels” to be black as an example of the “personal feeling” Boas describes (139). Although many scholars have theorized Hurston’s embrace of racial feeling as a rejection of the anthropological, the scientific, the methodical, I agree instead with Cynthia Ward that Hurston’s anthropological writings are consistent with Boasian thought (to the extent that either Hurston or Boas was in any sense “consistent”).20 Hurston praised Boas’s inductive method, “his genius for pure objectivity. He has no pet wishes to prove. His instructions are to go out and find what is there. He outlines his theory, but if the facts do not agree with it, he would not warp a jot or dot of the findings to save his theory” (Dust Tracks on a Road 687). To some extent, she emulated Boas’s inductive strategies of observation in the field. Together, they used the tools of scientific empiricism to disprove the central tenets of race science, indeed to establish that the study of culture could be what we now call “cultural.”21 The relationship between objective methods (that is, empiricism, description, induction) and subjective means of knowing (that is, feeling) was in flux during this moment of disciplinary formation, which is significant for our inquiry into modern methods for reading poetry. For Hurston, questions of lyric interpretation were rooted in the study of racial difference. Hurston enacts an inductive method in her ethnographic writing. Consider this passage from Tell My Horse, her 1938 ethnography of Jamaica and Haiti: What I was actually doing was making general observations. I wanted to see what the Maroons were like, really. Since they are a self-governing body, I wanted to see how they felt about education, transportation, public health and democracy. I wanted to see their culture and art expressions and knew that if I asked for anything especially, I would get something out of context… . So I just sat around and waited. (294) Here Hurston practices an inductive, descriptive method: “making general observations” and only then proceeding to analysis and interpretation, just the method she cites as the strength of her mentor’s anthropological practice. Of course, it’s well known that Hurston was more than a quiet observer in the field. Throughout her ethnographic writings, she augments description with opinion. In an argument with “a young man of St. Mary’s,” for example, she objects to his characterization of women as weak or inferior (288). While representing herself as a listener, she lets on that “Of course I did not agree with him and so I gave him my most aggravating grunt” (289). Hurston “hunt[ed] the wild hog” with the descendants of Maroons in Accompong, Jamaica (293–308), and went through hoodoo initiation as part of her research in New Orleans (Mules and Men 182–92). Even research in her home state of Florida required initiation and participation, as when she demonstrated her knowledge of John Henry verses in order to acquire more “material,” a scene in Mules and Men that performs the connection between Hurston’s ethnographic work and her lyric theory—her mastery, interpretation, recording, and performance of verses (67–68). Hurston’s anthropology thus reflects Boasian anthropological theory not only, as Ward has argued persuasively, in its supposed “objectivity” (304), but also in its inclusion of subjective perspectives. Mules and Men links writing and fieldwork by equating their materials. Just as Hurston collects stories by listening but renders them meaningful through interpretation and analysis, she represents hoodoo materials and practices as contingent upon interpretation. Hurston’s methods of literary interpretation are a product of both her training in anthropology at Barnard and her training in black epistemology in the field. In the Hoodoo chapters of Mules and Men, Hurston describes her apprenticeship to Luke Turner, a hoodoo doctor and the supposed nephew of Marie Leveau. After she eventually wins his confidence, Dr. Turner shares an interpretive problem just like that which haunts Hurston’s oeuvre: Now, some white people say she hold hoodoo dance on Congo Square every week. But Marie Leveau never hold no hoodoo dance. That was a pleasure dance. They beat the drum with the shin bone of a donkey and everybody dance like they do in Hayti. Hoodoo is private. She give the dance the first Friday night in each month and they have crab gumbo and rice to eat and the people dance. The white people come look on, and think they see all, when they only see a dance. (183) The tension between “seeing all” and “see[ing] a dance” is parallel to the distinction Hurston makes between herself and her white compatriot in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: “He has only heard what I felt” (828). Both scenes raise the question, in different ways, of who has authority and knowledge to perceive and interpret black performance: in the scene Turner recalls, those who think they “see all” are misreading “pleasure” as ritual. To “only see” is, paradoxically, to see authentically. But the cabaret scene inverts this dynamic: here, to “see all” is paramount and is parallel to “feel[ing].” As an anthropologist, a music listener, and as “colored me,” Hurston wants to see all. In Tell My Horse, she reminds us that “I was too old a hand at collecting to fall for staged-dance affairs. If I do not see a dance or a ceremony in its natural setting and sequence, I do not bother” (294). Hurston associates access to the “real” with extrasensory or hypersensitive perception. She and Dr. Turner share the belief that black art and culture call for black modes of perception, interpretation, and knowledge. As an anthropologist Hurston has seen all, but as a writer she cannot or will not yield all. Turner’s description of the “white people” who can “only see” instructs Hurston (“he enlightened my ignorance and taught me” [183]), warning her about hoodoo’s privacy. Withholding “all” also becomes part of Hurston’s descriptive method in the chapter. After lengthy passages in Turner’s voice, describing Marie Leveau’s blessings and curses (in turn, in Marie Leveau’s voice), Hurston returns for her initiation. Although she describes this ritual in great detail, Hurston insists that the specifics “do not matter” and that it is “the meaning, not the material that counts” (189, 188). She compares the physical materials of the rite to “a college diploma without the four years’ work” (188). In Hurston’s treatment, “meaning” is substance or interpretation. She communicates both the urgency and the impossibility of “see[ing] all” (183), playing down the details or withholding them all together. “I studied under Turner five months and learned all of the Leveau routines,” she assures us, “but in this book all of the works of any doctor cannot be given” (193). Indeed, Hurston attributes to anthropologists and to hoodoo doctors the capacity for a vision and perception that readers and writers may not have. There is methodological contrast between anthropological and literary work, but there is also methodological contact. For Hurston’s work in the field, her collection of stories, and hoodoo initiation, depend equally on a balance between near-scientific observation and analysis, between her attention to “the material” and her ability to see, hear, and feel its meaning. In her writing, attention to the “setting,” the context, and the background always illuminates the materials. At the same time, Hurston emphasizes the materials’ vitality by including quotations, lists, catalogues, and lyric transcriptions. The need to account for both materials and their contexts reflects her anthropological training in an objective method and her study, in the field, of the black arts of interpretation. This dual need in turn defines the parameters of “objectivity” when it comes to reading closely and to reading poetry. 5. Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive In 1928, the same year in which she published “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and a year before the 1929 publication of Richards’s Practical Criticism, Hurston wrote to her friend Langston Hughes while she was collecting materials from Magazine, Alabama. She describes reading aloud from his Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) to start off the storytelling contests she held among the community of men she was studying. Here, she reports, “you are being quoted in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, and Turpentine stills, etc.” (“To Langston Hughes” 121). Hurston then describes the process by which the workers respond to and adapt his poems:  So you see they are making it so much a part of themselves they go to improvising on it.  For some reason they call it “De Party Book.” They come specially to be read to & I know you could sell them if you only had a supply. I think I’d like a dozen as an experiment… .  They sing the poems right off, and July 1, two men came over with guitars and sang the whole book. Everybody joined in. It was the strangest and most thrilling thing. They played it well too. You’d be surprised. One man was giving the words out-lining them out as the preacher does a hymn and the others would take it up and sing. It was glorious! (122) While many critics have studied Hughes’s poems (along with Sterling Brown’s) as influenced by folk musical forms, Hurston’s letter suggests not only that these poems are “more than mere transcriptions,” to cite James Weldon Johnson’s description of Brown’s poems (17), but also that the path of influence is far more circular than we often account for, so that the musical inspirations for Fine Clothes, the print publication and distribution of that book, the recitation aloud by Hurston of the poems, the church hymns, the “improvising on it,” and chanting in games and singing, all constitute and create black modern poetry.22 The laborers’ camps are crucial sites of black reading and lyric reading. I began by traversing such “fields” of literary interpretation, spaces we often associate with everyday life, labor, or ethnographic study, in which both a history of modern poetry and a history of lyric reading have taken shape. I now return to Hurston’s “Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas” to test my assumption that this bureaucratic text—a proposal for a grant to record music and other sounds in Florida—concerns itself with poetry at all. I think of this as a work of poetic interpretation in part because it looks like one: printed epigraphs of verse (transcriptions of music) begin each section, a lengthy chant offers itself up for description and interpretation, and a delineated “Sanctified Anthem” closes the document. These quotations appear to be from poems because their lines are shorter than the prose margin and because they make visual use of the page. Even Hurston’s use of the lyrics as epigraphs underscores their poetic quality. If these are poems because they look like poems, Hurston also reminds us that they are textual representations of the lyric poem’s sister medium, the song. Following each of the first five quoted verses, a parenthetical attribution names not the writer but the singer of the song and the site of the recording: “Sung by Waldo Wishart, Ocala, Florida,” “Sung by Willie Joe Roberts, Jacksonville, Fla,” and so on. The epigraph to Area IV takes things a step further: “Evalina, Evalina you know the baby dont favor me, Eh, Eh, you know the baby dont favor me.” (Sung by Lias Strawn, Miami, Fla. Drummed by “Stew Beef”) (4) Hurston notes both the singer of the lyrics and the player of the accompanying drum, thus reminding us of the collective production of lyric. Attentive readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) will remember that Lias and Stew Beef are migrant workers from the Bahamas who play music as part of group dancing as a hurricane bears down on the Florida Everglades. We also know, thanks to Anthea Kraut’s work on Hurston’s choreography of the Broadway musical The Great Day (1932), that these were names of performers who traveled with Hurston around the US performing such dances (227). In her transcription, Hurston collects not the existence of a “folk” song in general but a particular instance of its performance. While transforming violence into poetry and producing the voice of a lyric speaker, Hurston’s grant proposal bears the traces of the unassimilable, discrete genres of anthem, prayer, sermon, chant, folk song, folk poem, ballad, and more. These categories are sometimes hard to distinguish, as when Hurston refers to a “psalm” as an “anthem,” but they resemble the generic and formal “classifications” that Brooks and Warren dismissed. Ballads (the chosen form of many of Hurston’s epigraphs) are instructive examples of Brooks and Warren’s abstraction of poetic genre.23 As Derek Furr has argued, the New Critical representation of ballads de-emphasizes voice, eliding their sonic and performative dimension, and marginalizing black cultural expression while attempting to democratize poetry for all readers (241–47).24 By contrast, when citing folk ballads as epigraphs, Hurston insists upon their authorship as well as their contexts in performance, play, ritual, and work. In this way Hurston departs from postbellum collections of spirituals like the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, which minimizes authorship by emphasizing collective composition, and from her most well-known precedent in musical epigraphs, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), which inaugurates nearly every chapter with one line of musical score of a spiritual paired with a verse from European poetry. According to Alexander Weheliye, “Instead of being placed within a particular historical framework, the spirituals now signify and stand in for a general black American future-past” (93). The lyric abstraction in Souls suggests that Du Bois ought to be a central figure in our literary history of the modern lyric. More broadly, the problem he identifies at the beginning of the twentieth century as its central concern—the color line—has shaped our understanding of what the modern lyric is.25 Indeed, Du Bois’s juxtaposition of poetic epigraphs and musical notation invites us to read Hurston’s musical epigraphs as poems. Rather than “a general black American future-past” (Weheliye 93), however, her proposal evokes particular instances of music-making in particular places in the present. Rather than preserve or make available each instance, Hurston’s textual lyrics remind us of the gap between the performance of the music and the text of the proposal, what Brent Edwards calls the “fuzzy area between the song lyric and the literary lyric” (583), and what Moten calls the lyricism of the surplus (26). Hurston’s ethnographic proposal suggests that our study of works as poems is inseparable from their other uses. Reading lyrics in this way suggests the potential contradiction between the first principle of teaching poetry that Brooks and Warren enumerate—that “emphasis should be kept on the poem as a poem” (ix)—and the second: “The treatment should be concrete and inductive” (ix).26 The “concrete and inductive” method Hurston praises in Boas produces a contextual account of poetry in relationship to its particular geographies, cultures, languages, and social functions. Hurston organizes the sections of her proposal according to the concrete observable category of geographic region (unlike the abstract quality of “ascending difficulty” that organizes Brooks and Warren’s volume [x]), linking each type of lyric to a specific location, cultural group, and/or social purpose. For example, she describes the “lusty songs of road and camp” that “sprout” in Area III “like corn in April”; plus, she notices that “The shipyards and the like are the culture beds of other maritime folk creations.” For their immediate communities, throughout Florida, “real characters” are “poured into song and shaped into legend” (“Proposed Recording Expedition” 4); for the ethnographer on an expedition, “it is possible to make recordings that bear on the economic and sociological set-up” of the State (2). In this way, Hurston confers a purpose to the work of “expedition” beyond scientific observation, one that also extends beyond the study of “the poem in itself” that Brooks and Warren seek as the alternative to science. I’ve temporarily put lyric aside to establish Hurston’s proposal as a work of poetry criticism, and to speak of reading race and reading poetry more generally. In doing so, we have seen how in 1939 Hurston was writing and thinking about lyrics and poetry from the margins of, and at times outside of, the institutions in which such things were accruing their modern meanings. Hurston’s economic, geographic and social contextualization of lyrics highlights the wider implications of revisiting the lyricization thesis in light of black cultural production. Her lyric reading of Florida music emerged from the ethnographic encounter, and in response to the threat of racial violence that enveloped the US South. Furthermore, in Hurston’s hands as in Du Bois’s, the lyricization of poetry (and the accompanying textualization of lyrics) established and maintained a black literary history. At the very moment that robust genres were dissolving in the dominant strains of modern literary criticism, other ways of reading, other institutional and extra-institutional spaces for reading and teaching poetry, remained vital to our various senses of what poetry can mean or be. Footnotes 1. While the author of the bounty hunter’s lyric, and his race, are unknown, the 1940 US Census records a person with the singer’s name: Waldo Wishart of Ocala, FL, a white man (43 years old as of the date of the census) whose father was a turpentine operator (United States Dept. of Commerce, Census Bureau; 1940 US Census; Population Schedule; Florida, Marion County, Ocala City; US Dept. of Commerce, 6 Apr. 1940; ED No. 42-1; Sheet 1-B. National Archives and Records Administration. Web). Hurston’s cultural criticism, therefore, not only creates and instructs an audience for black poetry, but also critiques and transforms the racist effects of some white poetry. Alexandra Vazquez first encouraged me to think and write about Hurston’s proposal. For the opportunity to reflect on the significance of the racial violence conveyed in the first quoted epigraph, I am grateful to the Department of English at Williams College, where I delivered an earlier version of this essay. 2. The readings of Hurston’s “Proposed Recording Expedition” and Hurston’s 1928 letter to Langston Hughes in this essay constitute a revision of my discussion of these materials in a different context. See Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (2017), pp. 169–73, 176–78. 3. I am drawing on the use of the term lyricization established by Virginia Jackson in Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lytic Reading (2005), in which she argues that modern criticism of poetry (with Dickinson as an exemplary case) has made “lyric” and “poetry” synonymous, in the process obscuring a range of other poetic and extrapoetic genres, materials, and modes of address. Jackson calls for a more rigorously “historical poetics” to illuminate the developmental history of poetry. A concise version of this argument can be found in the introduction to that book (especially pp. 8–10), and has been elaborated more broadly in Jackson’s “Who Reads Poetry,” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 181–87, as well as in her entry on “lyric” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (2012), pp. 826–34. Jackson, in turn, builds on Yopie Prins’s description of processes of lyric reading in Victorian Sappho (1999), and the two together have crystalized the argument that “the lyricization of poetry is a product of twentieth-century critical thought” in the general introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader (7). 4. Catherine Gallagher identifies 1965 as a turning point against the “temporary stability” of the New Criticism (133). While she does not name black studies as the agent of this turn (and never uses the words “black” or “race” in the essay), she identifies the “political disaffection” of “minorities” as one of the “challenges” that “hit” literary studies during this period (144–45). More recently, Joseph North has described “race critique” as part of a “storm” of challenges to midcentury critical norms that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and collectively represented a false sense of literary study’s “political” potential (56). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., importantly, does not describe the New Criticism and Practical Criticism as apolitical or ideologically neutral; however, he subscribes to the common depiction of these theories as concerned mostly with “composition” or “philology and etymology” (47)—that is, as formalistic modes of reading. In this representation of the New Critics as having defined the theoretical norm against which various marginalized groups would eventually push, Gates outlines a fairly common (and still prevalent) narrative of the methodological rift between multiculturalism and canonical literary study. See Gallagher, “The History of Literary Criticism,” Daedalus, vol. 126, no. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 133–53; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1993); Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017). 5. As Phillip Brian Harper has argued in Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (2015), literary, visual, and musical abstraction has a particular history in the context of black cultural expression. Harper recovers abstraction as a viable mode of black aesthetics, contending that “abstractionist aesthetics” carry their greatest social value in literature. While Harper refers largely to the abstraction of social experience and embodiment, his argument implicitly critiques the idea that literary abstraction obscures social reality. At the same time, outlining why we have not often turned to abstractionist aesthetics as producing social meanings, Harper also acknowledges how artistic abstraction can violate black life. 6. Both Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Sonnet H. Retman have offered compelling analyses of how Hurston’s use of her status as participant-observer in ethnographic writing compromises (Sánchez-Eppler) or transforms (Retman) the field of anthropology itself. Retman’s work is an important touchstone here, as she defines the narrative genres that emerge out of Hurston’s ethnographic work; I wish to extend this line of thinking by insisting upon Hurston as herself a theorist of literary genre. Sánchez-Eppler, “Telling Anthropology: Zora Neale Hurston and Gilberto Freyre Disciplined in Their Field-Home-Work,” American Literature History, vol. 4, no. 3, 1992, pp. 464–88; Retman, Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (2011), pp. 152–63. 7. I have previously offered a detailed reading of Brown’s primer as evidence of Brown’s imagining, creating, and instructing a black audience for poetry in “Blueprints for Negro Reading: Sterling Brown’s Study Guides,” A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2015), ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, pp. 119–36. See also Ben Glaser’s discussion of prosody in Brown’s primer in “Folk Iambics: Prosody, Vestiges, and Sterling Brown’s Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes,” PMLA, vol. 129, no. 3, May 2014, pp. 417–34. 8. Evan Kindley offers a necessary account of Brown’s work for the Federal Writers’ Project in relationship to Brown’s poetry. Kindley’s argument is significant for establishing Brown’s centrality as a twentieth-century critic, but his insistence upon the turn in Brown’s career away from poetry and toward the social sciences (while biographically accurate to some degree) curiously underestimates Brown’s enormous significance for the literary history of black poetry (both through his own writings and through his long career as a literature professor at Howard University). See Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (2017), pp. 87–109. 9. See especially Gates, Introduction, To Make a Poet Black (1988), by J. Saunders Redding. 10. Marjorie Perloff, for example, upholds a distinction between “anthropology and history” on the one hand and the “‘merely literary’” concerns of poetics (to which she longs to return) on the other in her 2006 MLA presidential address, in which she also implicitly attributes the decline of literary study to the rise of “critical race studies and related models” (654–56). Barbara Christian refers to the long critical history of such divisions in “A Race for Theory”: “I am studying an entire body of literature that has been denigrated for centuries by such terms as political. For an entire century Afro-American writers, from Charles Chestnutt in the nineteenth century through Richard Wright in the 1930s, Imamu Baraka in the 1960s, Alice Walker in the 1970s, have protested the literary hierarchy of dominance which declares when literature is literature, when literature is great, depending on what it thinks is to its advantage” (54). See Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. 6, 1987, pp. 51–63; Marjorie Perloff, “Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change,” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 3, 2007, pp. 652–62. 11. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., puts it, in the 1920s and 1930s, “Race, along with all sorts of other unseemly or untoward notions about the composition of the literary work of art, was bracketed or suspended. Race, within these theories of literature to which we are all heir, was rendered implicit in the elevation of ideas of canonical cultural texts that comprise the Western tradition in Eliot’s simultaneous order, with a simultaneous existence” (Loose Canons 47). A wave of more recent criticism seeks to complicate understandings of the New Criticism as ahistorical and reactionary. See also Rereading the New Criticism (2012), eds. Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre. Robert Archambeau, for instance, in his contribution “Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism,” outlines the connection between Romantic aesthetics, I. A. Richards, and the New Criticism, drawing attention to a continuous connection between ethics and aesthetics in the work of Richards and his students (30–33). 12. One recent version of this critical view is Paula M. L. Moya’s The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2015). Moya reads Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), for example, as a critique of the historical institutionalization of contemporary racialized (and racist) reading practices (138). 13. Richards would soon shift the “field” of his pedagogical experiments from Cambridge to China, where he tested the viability of C. K. Ogden’s Basic English (1930) for teaching English as a second language. See Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (2003). 14. For Lorde, poetry is not a luxury for black women because the need for an alternative epistemology (feeling) is connected with psychic and material survival. While a full exploration of the relationship between Lorde’s racially specific epistemology and essentialism is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Lorde identifies a “Black mother within each of us”; that her notion of black maternal poetic feeling is specific, but not necessarily essential (38). 15. In a footnote, Richards clarifies that “Under ‘Feeling’ I group for convenience the whole cognitive affective aspect of life—emotions, emotional attitudes, the will, desire, pleasure-unpleasure, and the rest. ‘Feeling’ is shorthand for any of this” (175n2). 16. Richards’s interest in psychology was seen as a problem that even otherwise sympathetic critics like Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., would reject (Gang 14); Brooks would much later observe that he had held on to Richard’s practice but not his theory (Brooks 589–91). 17. Anjuli Raza Kolb helped me formulate this distinction between psychology and anthropology as interior and exterior social sciences, respectively. 18. As Lesley Larkin has argued, foregrounding the act of “speakerly reading” in this and other works, Hurston also “remind[s] her readers that black performances do not exist solely for the entertainment of white audiences” but rather are equally if not more available to black audiences (70). See Larkin, Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett (2015). 19. Note, here, the resonance between Boas’s argument and Richards’s interest in the same “advances in physics” as a parallel for the relationship between language and psychology (Richards 208). 20. Ward reminds us that “Boas was well known for his resistance to theory and revised his own ideas continually over the course of his career” and Hurston’s writings are famously rife with contradictions and evolutions (306, 302). 21. In an infamous example: researching the relationship between geographic origin, race, and intelligence, Hurston, Boas, and Melville Herskovits measured immigrants’ heads on the streets of Harlem—but they did so in order to disprove an anthropometric or biological basis for racial difference. Several bibliographic accounts of Hurston’s life recount versions of this story of Hurston’s research at Barnard, including Deborah G. Plant, Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit (2007), pp. 36, 65; and Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (2003), p. 261. 22. Retman has observed the tension between Hurston’s “preservationist theory” on the one hand and her investment in “cultural exchanges … as a highly creative and contemporary process” on the other, both approaches at work in her anthropological and literary writings (160). 23. The poems in section one of Understanding Poetry are ballads, for the most part by “some ordinary person” (Brooks and Warren 32). These anonymous poems demonstrate the potential for poetry to transform everyday experiences of “general interest” into “a form that preserves it” (27). The volume’s authors turn to Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” to instruct in the difference between folk ballad and “literary ballad.” 24. Furr’s essay, “Re-Sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad,” compellingly juxtaposes the New Critical treatment of the literary ballad against Lomax’s collection of folk ballads and mid-century African American poet Margaret Walker’s textual and recorded ballads from the 1940s. We might view Hurston’s collecting, transcription, and interpretation of ballads (some of which she collected with Lomax) as a crucial part of this mediation between the aural and the textual, the folk and the literary, in a somewhat different vein than Walker's award-winning poetry. 25. At the start of his last chapter, “The Sorrow Songs,” Du Bois offers both the lyrics and the music of one such song, “Lay This Body Down,” which he calls, simply, “Negro Song” (204), The process by which “Lay This Body Down” becomes “Negro Song” is one early-twentieth-century example of lyricization. 26. The third and final principle is that “A poem should always be treated as an organic system of relationships, and the poetic quality should never be understood as inhering in one or more factors taken in isolation” (Brooks and Warren ix). Works Cited Barrett Lindon. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double . Cambridge UP, 1998. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Boas Franz. Race, Language and Culture . The Macmillan Company, 1940. ———. “The Study of Geography.” Science , vol. 9, no. 210, 11 Feb. 1887, pp. 137– 41. PubMed  Brooks Cleanth. “I. A. Richards and ‘Practical Criticism.’” The Sewanee Review , vol. 89, no. 4, 1981, pp. 586– 95. Brooks Cleanth,, Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students . 1938. H. Holt and Company, 1943. Donham Housten, Moten Fred. “‘POETRY BEGINS WITH THE WILLINGNESS TO SUBORDINATE WHATEVER THE HELL IT IS THAT YOU HAVE TO SAY’ : AN INTERVIEW W/ FRED MOTEN.” Open House, 20 July 2015. Web. Du Bois W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk . 1903. Edited by Hayes Edwards Brent, Oxford UP, 2007. Edwards Brent Hayes. “The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces.” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture , edited by O’Meally Robert G., Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 580– 601. Fanon Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Lam Markmann Charles, 1st Evergreen ed., Grove Press, 1967. Ferguson Roderick A. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.  U of Minnesota P, 2012. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Furr Derek. “Re-Sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad: Alan Lomax, Margaret Walker, and the New Criticism.” Twentieth-Century Literature , vol. 59, no. 2, Summer 2013, pp. 232– 59. Gang Joshua. “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading.” ELH , vol. 78, no. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 1– 25. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS PubMed  Guillory John. “Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue.” ADE Bulletin , vol. 149, 2010, pp. 8– 14. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   ———. “The Origins of Close Reading: I. A. Richards and the Neurophysiology of Reading.” Annual Faculty Lecture. New York University, New York. 3 Oct. 2012. Hurston Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” 1934. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, Library of America, 1995, pp. 830–74. ———. Dust Tracks on a Road.  1942. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings , Library of America, 1995, pp. 556– 808. ———. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” May 1928. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings , Library of America, 1995, pp. 826– 29. ———. Mules and Men. 1935. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings , Library of America, 1995, pp. 1– 267. ———. “Proposed Recording Expedition into the Floridas.” May 1939. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Zora Neale Hurston Corporate Subject File. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Web. ———. Tell My Horse.  1938. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings , Library of America, 1995, pp. 269– 555. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God.  1937. U of Illinois P, 1978. ———. “To Langston Hughes.” 10 July 1928. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters , edited by Kaplan Carla, Anchor Books, 2003, pp. 121– 22. Jackson Virginia, Prins Yopie, editors. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology . Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Johnson Barbara. A World of Difference . Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Johnson James Weldon. “Introduction to the First Edition.” The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown , edited by Harper Michael S., Triquarterly Books, 1996, pp. 16– 17. Kraut Anthea. Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston . U of Minnesota P, 2008. Lamothe Daphne. Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography . U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. Ligon Glenn. Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored). 1990, oil stick and oil on wood, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Lorde Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing P, 1984. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Moten Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition . U of Minnesota P, 2003. Ngai Sianne. Ugly Feelings . Harvard UP, 2005. Richards I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. 1929. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Mariner), 1956. Sklaroff Lauren Rebecca. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era . U of North Carolina P, 2009. Spillers Hortense J. “A Tale of Three Zoras: Barbara Johnson and Black Women Writers.” Diacritics , vol. 34, no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 94– 97. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Stocking George W.Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology . The Free Press, 1968. Ward Cynthia. “Truth, Lies, Mules, and Men: Through the ‘Spy-Glass of Anthropology.’” Western Journal of Black Studies , vol. 36, no. 4, Dec. 2012, pp. 301– 13. Weheliye Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity . Duke University Press, 2005. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   The World Tomorrow. Vol. 11, no. 5, May 1928. Wright Richard. “Between Laughter and Tears.” New Masses , 5 Oct. 1937, pp. 22– 26. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajx047
DA - 2017-12-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/lyric-reading-in-the-black-ethnographic-archive-rdcDlU2tdL
SP - 55
EP - 84
VL - 30
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -