Irish modernism and the Harlem renaissance : race, ethnography, and transatlantic literary culture

Abstract

My research examines the significance of ethnography in the writings of Irish modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and considers the various intersections and influences of these two literary movements across the Atlantic. I consider how these movements responded to an emerging imperative for a new grammar of representation for colonised and marginalised subjects. The centrality of ethnographic discourse to both movements stemmed from their shared interest in race, national identity, and the recovery and reimagining of cultural history, and my research considers these issues in relation to discourses of nationalism, racialisation, and colonialism. These are in turn contextualised by the developing discipline of anthropology as it turned from the ‘evolutionist’ model associated with James Frazer to the various ‘modernist’ schools associated primarily with Bronisław Malinowski. I therefore position the similarities between the literary practices of these movements in relation to the ways in which ethnography provided new methods of formal experimentation and a space to revive interest in folklore and dialect, often in opposition to the prevailing corpus of white, colonial ethnographic studies that contributed to narratives of racial essentialism and primitivism. I also demonstrate, however, that this radical employment of ethnographic style and method was frequently mediated by more traditional attitudes to race, nation and empire (as in the case of the influence of Matthew Arnold on W. B. Yeats), and how texts produced from these movements often struggle against the complexities of identity and heritage, exemplified by the famous question of ‘what a nation means’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses and the recurring imperative in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance to answer, ‘What is Africa to me?’