| The practice of "improvisation," and the literature that describes it, serve as a touchstone for understanding the dynamics and complexity of community building in African American literature and culture from the turn of the century to the Harlem Renaissance. Traditionally, critics have approached improvisation as a specifically musical concept expressed primarily in jazz. Recently, however, the burgeoning field of critical improvisation studies has started to apply improvisation to a much wider set of cultural texts. The critics who have pioneered this field acknowledge improvisation's roots in the dialogical and performative exchanges among jazz musicians, music, and audiences. At the same time, they see improvisation as a model for the process of community formation. My project seeks to graft the insights of improvisation studies on to the way African American writers from the late nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance, addressing key issues in African American literary criticisms; most notably the relationship between cultural practice and political resistance.;Combining musical and literary perspectives, I am proposing a new term, "improvised community," defining it as a temporary sense of community created through the practices of improvisation, whether in music, dancing, writing, oratory, or the improvisation of self in everyday life. The improvised community, as I define it, is characterized by its unique way of bringing members of potential communities together. Encouraging audience members to share the moment of improvisation, the improvised community articulates a vision of membership authorized not solely by the shared sameness (shared biology or territory), but also by a shared sense of time. African American writers examined in this study---Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and Sterling Brown---visualize community with an additional dimension---time---showing how the sense of shared temporality can be the basis for making and remaking communities. |
