Book contents
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology, 1930–1940
- Introduction
- Part I Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
- Chapter 1 Black Excesses and Deprivations in Literature and Photography of the 1930s
- Chapter 2 Arna Bontemps and Black Literary Archives
- Chapter 3 Black Women’s 1930s Protest Fiction
- Part II New Deal, New Methodologies
- Part III Cultivating (New) Black Readers
- Part IV International, Black, and Radical Visions
- Index
- References
Chapter 2 - Arna Bontemps and Black Literary Archives
from Part I - Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2022
Book contents
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology, 1930–1940
- Introduction
- Part I Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
- Chapter 1 Black Excesses and Deprivations in Literature and Photography of the 1930s
- Chapter 2 Arna Bontemps and Black Literary Archives
- Chapter 3 Black Women’s 1930s Protest Fiction
- Part II New Deal, New Methodologies
- Part III Cultivating (New) Black Readers
- Part IV International, Black, and Radical Visions
- Index
- References
Summary
The precarity of the 1930s undergirded major transitions in Arna Bontemps’s waged and writerly labor. The flusher years of the 1920s saw him winning prizes, teaching school, and writing poetry, but the 1930s saw him take a decidedly historical turn, penning historical novels Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) and training to be a curator. This tracks alongside broader shifts in African American literature during the decade, both formally, as a bridge to social realism, and politically, through engagement with Marxism. By excavating Bontemps’s archive, this chapter confirms that he was an innovator who repurposed the historical novel to critique racial capitalism. At the same time, he sought to create saleable products and enhance his career. This paradox illuminates how African American literature of the 1930s was generated from the tension between leftist solidarity and the persistent notion of the talented tenth. Ultimately, Bontemps’s work emerges from the nexus of two radical projects: historical preservation and self-preservation, which together enabled the transition from New Negro aesthetics to the protest literature of the 1940s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 , pp. 59 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
Armstrong, Tim. “Slavery and American Literature, 1900–1945.” In The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature, ed. Tawil, Ezra, 204–218. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Bernard, Emily. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna. Arna Bontemps Papers, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna Arna Wendell Bontemps Collection, Fisk University Library, Nashville, TN.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Autobiographical Material.” Box 1, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Introduction to the 1968 Edition.” In Black Thunder, xii–xxix. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Beverly J. Plummer (May 12, 1966),” Box 22, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Buell G. Gallagher (June 18, 1939),” Box 25, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Dillard University (June 2, 1939),” Box 6, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Dorothy West (c. November 24, 1933),” Box 9, Folder 19, Papers of Dorothy West. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Franklin F. Hopper (April 26, 1939),” Box 21, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Howard Hightower (Sept. 24, 1952),” Box 27, Folder 3, Arna Wendell Bontemps Collection.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Marshall Field III (Oct. 16, 1941),” Box 8, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to Ruth French Strout [University of Chicago] (Jan. 3, 1957),” Box 27, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Letter to W.E.B. Du Bois (Oct. 27, 1952),” Box 27, Folder 2, Arna Wendell Bontemps Collection.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Negro Writers in Chicago,” Chicago Sunday Bee (c. 1940), Box 34, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Special Collections of Negroana.” Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1943.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna “Three Pennies for Luck.” In The Old South, 221–238. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1973.Google Scholar
“Bontemps’ ‘Drums at Dusk’ Wins Praise.” Chicago Defender, July 8, 1939.Google Scholar
Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting As Modernist Practice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.Google Scholar
Bull, Malcolm, and Lockhardt, Keith. Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V. “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery.” In Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. London: Verso, 1999.Google Scholar
Chambliss, Melanie. “History in the Making: Black Archives and the Shaping of African American History.” Doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 2016.Google Scholar
Cooke, Marvel. “Critic Hails New Historical Novel by Arna Bontemps.” New York Amsterdam News, May 13, 1939.Google Scholar
Dickson-Carr, Darryl. “African American Literature and the Great Depression.” In The Cambridge History of African American Literature, eds. Graham, Maryemma and Ward, Jerry W., Jr., 288–310. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Dolinar, Brian. Editor’s introduction to The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers, ed. Dolinar, Brian, ix–xliii. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Marxism and the Negro Problem.” The Crisis 40, no. 5 (1933): 103–104, 118.Google Scholar
Edgerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Introduction: The ‘Autonomy’ of Black Radicalism.” Social Text 19, no. 2 (2001): 1–13.Google Scholar
Federal Works Agency and Work Projects Administration. “Questions and Answers on the WPA.” Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1939.Google Scholar
Figa, Elizabeth, and Macpherson, Janet. “Brown v. Board of Education and Its Effect on Libraries and Library and Information Science Education: Mapping and Storytelling a Historical Journey Fifty Years in the Making.” In Unfinished Business: Race, Equity, and Diversity in Library and Information Science Education, ed. Wheeler, Maurice B., 3–41. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Fisher, Holly. “Oakwood College Students’ Quest for Social Justice Before and During the Civil Rights Era.” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 110–125.Google Scholar
Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Helton, Laura E. “Remaking the Past: Collecting, Collectivity, and the Emergence of Black Archival Publics, 1915–1950.” Doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2015.Google Scholar
Holton, Adalaine. “Decolonizing History: Arthur Schomburg’s Afrodiasporic Archive,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 218–238.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston “To Negro Writers.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Hart, Henry, 139–141. New York: International, 1935.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Hutner, Gordon. What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.Google Scholar
Jones, Kirkland C. Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Jones, Thomas E. [Fisk University]. “Letter to Arna Bontemps (March 24, 1943),” Box 8, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Latimer, Catherine Allen. “Where Can I Get Material on the Negro.[sic]” The Crisis 41, no. 6 (1934): 164–165.Google Scholar
“Librarian, Discharged for ‘Red’ Books, Asks Hearing.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 21, 1932.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. “Dry Fields and Green Pastures.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 18, no. 1 (1940): 4–10, 28.Google Scholar
MacLeish, Archibald. Archibald McLeish: Reflections, eds. Drabeck, Bernard A. and Ellis, Helen E.. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.Google Scholar
McReynolds, Rosalee. “The Progressive Librarians’ Council and Its Founders.” Progressive Librarian 2 (1990–1991): 23–29.Google Scholar
Mills, Nathaniel. “African American Historical Writing in the Depression.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s, ed. Solomon, William, 180–198. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.Google Scholar
National Negro Congress Fine Arts Committee. “Reception in Honor of Arna Bontemps,” Box 21, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Preer, Jean L. “‘This Year—Richmond!’: The 1935 Meeting of the American Library Association.” Libraries and Culture 39, no. 2 (2004): 137–160.Google Scholar
Quinn, Kelly. “Langston Hughes and Prentiss Taylor: The Golden Stair Press.” Archives of American Art Journal 52 (2013): 17–21.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Robbins, Louise S. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Shockley, Ann Allen. “Special Collections, Fisk University Library.” The Library Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1988): 151–163.Google Scholar
Smith, Jessie Carney. “Special Collections of Black Literature in the Traditionally Black College.” College and Research Libraries 35, no. 5 (1974): 322–335.Google Scholar
Smith, S. L. “The Passing of the Hampton Library School.” Journal of Negro Education 9, no. 1 (1940): 51–58.Google Scholar
Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Trounstine, John J. “Letter to Arna Bontemps (Aug. 2, 1939),” Box 26, Arna Bontemps Papers.Google Scholar
Trounstine, John J. “Letter to Arna Bontemps (April 6, 1939),” Box 26, Arna Bontemps Papers;Google Scholar
Trounstine, John J. “Letter to Arna Bontemps (Aug. 28, 1940),” Box 26, Arna Bontemps Papers;Google Scholar
Whitmire, Ethelene. Regina Andrews: Harlem Renaissance Librarian. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. “Introduction.” In Drake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace R.. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, xvii–xxiv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.Google Scholar