Constructing and contesting authenticity in the postwar African-American novel (James Baldwin, Chester Himes)

This thesis examines issues surrounding the question of “authenticity” in writing by African-Americans in the period 1945–1962. I argue that many white critics in what was perceived as an increasingly consumerist, corporate and media-dominated era sought to situate blackness as a last repository of a rapidly disappearing “real,” while narratives by African Americans began to be considered integral to American literary identity. Thus, questions of whose voice was sufficiently “authentic” to translate black experience for a white readership began to gain their now familiar resonance. In this context, I consider Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The End of a Primitive (1956), which undermine the stability of the protest novel as the preferred narrative mode for postwar black writing. Subsequently I look at the “raceless” African-American novel, juxtaposing Willard motley's 1947 bestseller Knock on Any Door and James Baldwin's 1962 Another Country . Baldwin's Italian-American protagonist Vivaldo Moore is an answer to Motley's Nick Romano and a meditation on the co-option of black experience by whites who conflate class and ethnic identity with race. I look then at Ann Petry's The Street (1946) and The Narrows (1953) alongside and Ellen Tarry's 1955 autobiography The Third Door . My contention is that Petry's novels enjoy the status of realism largely because they conform closely to normative ideals of raced female identity, while Tarry, considered too middle-class to be “relevant” as a black writer, in fact uses class to force a reconsideration of “authentic” black writing. I close with a discussion of pseudo-translations of non-existent African-American novels by white French writer Boris Vian. These pseudo-translations draw attention to the quality of translation allegedly necessary to repackage (American) blackness for white (French) consumption. At the same time, they force a re-examination the question of what, if any, reliable textual markers exist for “authentically black” narratives.