Resisting primitivism: Race, gender, and power in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

This study investigates the politics of primitivism in American novels of the 1920s and contemporary theoretical debates about identity and writing. Primitivist discourse is a wide-ranging collection of tropes about the "not-civilized"--usually evoking the realms of the body, the emotions, and the non-rational--that can perform both hegemonic and resistant cultural work, (and, often, complex combinations of the two). Primitivist discourse represents the "primitive" as lying within the self, in the form of repressed erotic and psychological forces, or without, in "other" places, periods, cultures, or social groups. While primitivism is generally a dominant course, it is not inevitably allied with hegemonic forces; similar tropes can have different critical meanings in different contexts. Writers who identify with marginalized groups may in fact draw on primitivist discourse in order to imagine new forms and terms for subjectivity. Because primitivist discourse often centers on the frequently enmeshed imagery of Africa and the maternal, it also constitutes a productive site for analyzing the manifold interconnections between representations of gender and race.;Drawing on the tools of African-Americanist, feminist, and black feminist literary criticism, especially as informed by psychoanalytic and narrative theory, I analyze what roles primitivist tropes play in how narratives encode and resist hegemonic ideologies in Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter, H.D.'s Bid Me to Live, Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand. I also argue that primitivism reappears in contemporary African-Americanist and feminist theory by Houston Baker, Audre Lorde, and Helene Cixous, a recurrence that illuminates current debates about essentialism and the "difference" of marginalized groups. Crucial to analysis of the political investments of primitivism is attention to the historical, literary, and social contexts in which it occurs. I focus on the discursive history of race and gender from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s; the textual contexts of imagery and the dynamics of narrative; and the racialized and gendered subject positions of the writers and the groups they represent in their writing.