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In my dissertation, I explore the ways in which racial identity is made complex through various onlookers' misrecognition of race. This issue is particularly important considering the current state of race relations in the United States, as my project offers a literary perspective and account of the way black authors have discussed racial identity formation from the turn of the century through the start of the twenty-first century. I highlight many variations of misrecognition and racial performance as a response to America's obsession with race.

My dissertation examines four Black speculative novels from the turn of the twentieth century, published between 1892-1904. Texts from this tradition tend to be grouped under an umbrella of “proto-Afrofuturism” or “proto-science fiction” and considered as early, surprising instances of a speculative mode that would only fully emerge several decades later. This categorization, while accurate in some respects, flattens out the diversity of the Black speculative imagination at the turn of the century. Therefore, I prioritize demonstrating the uniqueness of each author’s vision. At the same time, I argue that these texts share a fundamental similarity in their approach: they anticipate Arthur Schomburg’s famous injunction that the “Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” They use the affordances of the speculative mode to experiment with a shared Black history and explore the possibilities and limitations of that history for a viable and desirable Black future. The authors that I examine challenge the conclusions of racial science that were used to justify a racially stratified society. In doing so, these authors speculate about the imminent future of Black Americans. But even though the perspective of these texts is the imminent future, their central preoccupation is actually Black history. Each of these texts experiment with a different possible shared history with which Black Americans can anchor a collective political identity. This approach is in distinct contrast to the typical approach of turn of the century utopian texts. If we can say axiomatically that white utopian texts, though they often extrapolate and project a distant future, actually function to estrange the present moment; then we can say, in contrast, that Black utopian texts from this era, although they are concerned about an imminent future, more fundamentally estrange the past. / English

MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race. / text

Ce projet de thèse explore les identités culturelles de la Renaissance de Harlem, aussi bien que les croisements épistémologiques et les agentivités littéraires et artistiques de cette période. Dans un premier temps, le projet s’intéresse à mettre en évidence les discours et les pratiques épistémiques qui traversèrent la Renaissance de Harlem lors de son débout. Notamment, les parrains et activistes de la Renaissance (Du Bois, Locke) sont étudiés dans leur rapport intellectuel avec le discours nationaliste américain; cet étude est situé dans le contexte d'urbanisation et réglementation des corps et des espaces tel qu'il eut lieu à New York au début du XX siècle, époque de la Grande Migration des noirs du Sud au Nord des États Unis. L'analyse se complexifie en considérant comment les pratiques artistiques mais aussi ludiques de Harlem s'approprient des identités genrées et racisées produites par le pouvoir étatique national, et comment les modernistes blanc.hes s'insèrent dans ces processus à niveau épistémique, discursif et poétique. Deuxièmement, le projet engage une lecture approfondie de l’œuvre de l'écrivain noir jamaïcain Claude McKay. Les écritures de McKay permettent de dégager des axes thématiques révélatrices des préoccupations communes aux parrains de la Renaissance: notamment le rapport à la performance des identitées racisées et gendrées dans les discours politiques et propagandistes nationalistes du début du XX siècle. D’ailleurs, les écrits de McKay dépassent la formalisation idéaliste du “black folk” (Du Bois) portée par les élites culturelles de la Renaissance de Harlem, pour se situer sur un terrain plus matériel et existentiel. A partir du style dialogique des écrits de McKay, et de leur rapport aux écritures nationalistes européennes, le projet réfléchit donc à la notion d’intersubjectivité, alors que la littérarité des ouvrages de la Renaissance de Harlem est mise en avant et étudiée en relation aux subjectivités noires et blanches qui s’affrontent ou rencontrent dans le panorama national de l’époque. Troisièmement, le style et les figures culturelles et poétiques déployées dans la fiction de McKay guident l’étude des oeuvres signées par Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, aussi bien qu’une discussion des ouvrages par des auteurs et autrices blanches. Ici, la question méthodologique de la mort de l’auteur, mise à l'épreuve des concepts de race et de genre, sera ultérieurement approfondie afin de dégager un éventail d’identités culturelles le plus vaste et riche possible, et d’interroger les rapports de pouvoir liés à la performance de ces identités dans les arts et la littérature de l'époque. / This research project explores the cultural identities and the literary and artistic agencies of the Harlem Renaissance. Firstly, discourses and epistemological practices that traversed the Harlem Renaissance are highlighted in a short intellectual genealogy of the movement. In particular, the relationship of the godfathers of the Harlem Renaissance (W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) to the American nationalist discourse is given front stage. Such relationship is considered on the background of early-XX-century New York urbanization and regulamentation of bodies and spaces, as the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North was taking place. The analysis is complexified by considerations on how, in Harlem, artistic and recreational practices appropriated gendered and racialized identities generated by national state power; also, white modernists' epistemic, discursive and poetic participation to the process is explored. Successively, the research project engages with the reading of black Jamaican author Claude McKay’s literary works. McKay’s writings allow us to trace some thematic axes that show commonalities with the Renaissance godfathers’ concerns, notably in relation to the performance of raced and gendered identities in political and propagandistic discourses of the beginning of the XX century. Yet, it appears that McKay’s writings exceed the idealist formalization of the “black folk” (Du Bois) supported by the cultural elites of the Renaissance, to occupy a ground which privileges a material and existential outlook. Elaborating from the dialogism that characterizes McKay’s writings, and from their relation to European nationalist fictions, the thesis reflects on the notion of intersubjectivity as the literariness of the Harlem Renaissance works is considered and put in relation to black and white subjectivities that clash or meet on the national panorama of the time. Thirdly, the style and cultural figures that appear in the McKay’s fiction provide some guidelines to the study of the works by black writers Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, as well as of the works by white writers such as Carl Van Vetchen. Contextually, the methodological question of the death of the author will be further explored in order to extricate a vast and complex specter of cultural identities, and to question power relations linked to the performance of such identities in the arts and writings of the time.

Abstract Over the last fifty years scholars have worked to recover the work of late nineteenth, early twentieth-century writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Many scholars have acknowledged the impact of New Orleans culture and history in her writing as well as attempted peel back the layers of her stories in order to understand her commentary on structures of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This hybrid paper, both creative and academic, subjective and objective, is a reading of her work through the Creole lens. Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson through a Creole lens illuminates the radical nature of her work which has not always been seen through alternative lenses. This paper is a viewing of the work of Dunbar-Nelson from the marginal space which it illustrates and from which it comes. Through personal narrative and analytical thought this paper explores a different approach to literary criticism.

My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism examine how enslaved black labor contributed to the expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth century, but little is known about artistic representations of the Mississippi in the twentieth century. While scholars point primarily to the Mississippi River’s impact on slavery in the nineteenth century, I’ve Known Rivers reveals how black writers and artists capture the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and the Mississippi River. I consider a wide variety of texts in this study, from Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and early 20th century Blues music, to late 20th century novels such as Toni Morrison’s Sula. This broad array of interdisciplinary texts illustrates a literary tradition in which the Mississippi’s representation in twentieth-century African American literature serves as both a reflection of the continuously changing economic landscape and a haunting reminder of slavery’s aftermath through the cotton empire. Furthermore, I’ve Known Rivers demonstrates how traumatic sites of slavery along the river are often reclaimed by black artists as source of empowerment, thereby contributing a long overdue analysis of the Mississippi River in African American literature as a potent symbol of racial progress.