Swinging the vernacular: Jazz and African American modernist literature (Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Michael S. Harper, Albert Murray)

This dissertation identifies a strand of African American modernist literature influenced by jazz, manifest in the work of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Michael S. Harper, and Albert Murray. Looking at each of these writers through the specific aesthetic and social contexts of the contemporaneous jazz styles by which their work was shaped, the project shows how black literature uses signal elements from the music like irony, stylistic revision, and dialogism to effect both a radical black political intervention in American culture, and a “traditionally” modernist brand of aesthetic innovation. In their social and aesthetic interventions, each of these writers embodies what Ann Douglas calls “mongrel modernism,” namely the distinctly American twentieth-century literary style that thrives on the cultural hybridity unique to the United States. Theoretically, my study departs from the work of scholars like Douglas and Michael North who foreground the importance of race in the formation of a distinctly American modernist tradition in the 1920s and 30s. Though both Douglas and North argue that it is the cultural interaction of so-called “blackness” and “whiteness” that defines American modernism, they limit their studies mainly to reading how this affects the work of white writers. My work, on the other hand, examines how African American writing embodies this cultural hybridity as well. My conceptualization of America's “cultural hybridity” is extended by the work of M. M. Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, all of whom examine how the intersection of diverse social groups affects cultural heterogeneity. Methodologically, my work relies on the work of these scholars, as well as on literary theory like Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey (1988) and Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984) and Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), all of which elaborate a theory of African American literature and literary “tradition” through an understanding of black vernacular culture and its necessary political underpinnings. As well, this project builds on studies by ethnomusicologists like Samuel Floyd, Paul Berliner, and Ingrid Monson, all of whom have written on the jazz aesthetic and have argued how the music's improvisational freeplay inherently mediates expressive interests and social concerns.