Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:07:48.862Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar's Georgics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Margaret Ronda
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay argues that the georgic poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar offer his most incisive representations of the hardships faced by African Americans after Reconstruction. Written in the context of Jim Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, and other coercive means of restricting the mobility of southern blacks and extracting compulsory labor from them, these poems present the hard agrarian work characteristic of the rural Black Belt. They confront the pervasive rhetoric of racial uplift through labor, popularized by Booker T. Washington, that dominates American social discourse on race in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries, by revealing the negative freedom of black agrarian labor. At the same time, these poems assert the humanity and blamelessness of African Americans in the face of institutional racism. The essay aims to recast Dunbar's legacy by turning attention from his dialect poetry toward his georgic analyses of the uneven modernization of racialized labor.

Type
Special Topic: Work Coordinated by Vicky Unruh
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 4: Special Topic Work , October 2012 , pp. 863 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph. “An Essay on Virgil's Georgics.” 1697. The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison. Ed. Bohn, Henry G. Vol. 1. London: Bell, 1883. 154–61. Print.Google Scholar
Ampadu, Lena. “The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Influence of African Aesthetics: Dunbar's Poems and the Tradition of Masking.” Harrell, We Wear the Mask 3–16.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. Print.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston Jr. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism / Re-reading Booker T. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.10.1215/9780822380054CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balestrini, Nassim. “National Memory and the Arts in Paul Laurence Dunbar's War Poetry.” Harrell, We Wear the Mask 17–31.Google Scholar
Blount, Marcellus. “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the African American Elegy.” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 239–46. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Blount, Marcellus. “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance.” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 582–93. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Braxton, Joanne. Introduction. Dunbar, Collected Poetry ix–xxxvi.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama. 1937. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Print.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling. Southern Road. 1932. Boston: Beacon, 1974. Print.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature-Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. Los Altos: Hermes, 1959. Print.Google Scholar
Carr, Elston L. Jr. “Minstrelsy and the Dialect Poetry of Dunbar.” Harrell, We Wear the Mask 49–58.Google Scholar
Cohen, Michael. “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Genres of Dialect.” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 247–57. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Collins, Michael. “Risk, Envy and Fear in Sterling Brown's Georgics.” Callaloo 21.4 (1998): 950–67. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Denning, Michael. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–97. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Dowling, William. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ed. Braxton, Joanne. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “A Corn-Song.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 59.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Deserted Plantation.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 67–68.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Disappointed.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 60.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Fourth of July and Race Outrages.” Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader 50–51.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Hapless Southern Negro.” Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader 43–45.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “He Had His Dream.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 61.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Is Higher Education for the Negro Hopeless?” Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader 45–47.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Keep A-Pluggin' Away.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 46.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Our New Madness.” In His Own Voice. Ed. Martin, Herbert Woodward and Primeau, Ronald. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. 181–83. Print.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader. Ed. Martin, Jay and Hudson, Gossie. New York: Dodd, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Poet.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 191.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Poet and His Song.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 4–5.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Seedling.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 12.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “To Dr. James Newton Matthews.” 26 July 1892. Dunbar, Paul Lawrence Dunbar Reader 410.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “To the South, on Its New Slavery.” Dunbar, Collected Poetry 216–18.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “To William Dean Howells.” 19 Sept. 1896. Dunbar, Paul Lawrence Dunbar Reader 436.Google Scholar
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Gabbin, Joanne. “Intimate Intercessions in the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 227–31. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village.” Selected Writings. Ed. Lucas, John. New York: Routledge, 2003. 51–63. Print.Google Scholar
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1971. Print.Google Scholar
Harrell, Willie J. Introduction. Harrell, We ix–xviii.Google Scholar
Harrell, ed. We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality. Kent: Kent State UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Heinzelman, Kurt. “Roman Georgic in a Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33.2 (1991): 182–213. Print.Google Scholar
Howells, William Dean. Introduction. Lyrics of Lowly Life. By Paul Laurence Dunbar. 1896. New York: Dodd, 1906. xiii–xx. Print.Google Scholar
Hsu, Hsuan L. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. Preface. The Book of American Negro Poetry. Ed. Johnson. 1922. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983. vii–xlviii. Print.Google Scholar
Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Juguo, Zhang. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Quest for the Abolition of the Color Line. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Keeling, John. “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Mask of Dialect.” Southern Literary Journal 25.2 (1993): 24–38. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Kutchen, Larry. “Timothy Dwight's Anglo-American Georgic: Greenfield Hill and the Rise of United States Imperialism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 33.2 (2000): 109–28. Print.Google Scholar
“Labour.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 18 May 2011. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Lilly, Marie Loretto. The Georgic: A Contribution to the Study of the Vergilian Type of Didactic Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1919. Print.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro. Ed. Locke. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1992. 3–18. Print.Google Scholar
Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Print.10.1515/9781400857609CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lutz, Alfred. “The Politics of Reception: The Case of Oliver Goldsmith's ‘The Deserted Village.‘” Studies in Philology 95.2 (1998): 174–96. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. 1867. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Mulligan, Martin. Amherst: Prometheus, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Print.Google Scholar
Negri, Antonio. The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor. Trans. Mandarini, Matteo. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.10.1215/9780822392019CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nurhussein, Nadia. “Paul Laurence Dunbar's Performances and the Epistolary Dialect Poem.” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 233–38. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Peabody, Megan. “Dunbar, Dialect, and Narrative Theory: Subverted Statements in Lyrics of Lowly Life.” Harrell, We Wear the Mask 59–70.Google Scholar
Pellicer, Juan Christian. “‘I Hear Such Strange Things about the Union's Fate’: Charles Carter Lee's Virginia Georgics.” Early American Literature 42.1 (2007): 131–55. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. Print.Google Scholar
Richardson, Heather. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Scott-Childress, Reynolds. “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Project of Cultural Reconstruction.” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 367–75. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Sweet, Timothy. American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Print.10.9783/9780812203189CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Liveright, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Toomer, Jean. “Harvest Song.” Toomer, Cane 69.Google Scholar
Turner, Darwin. “Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Rejected Symbol.” Journal of Negro History 52 (1967): 1–13. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.10.2307/2716597CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Virgil. The Georgics of Virgil. Trans. Ferry, David. New York: Farrar, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking ‘the Race Question’ in the U.S.” New Left Review 13 (2002): 41–60. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
Wagner, Jean, and Douglas, Kenneth. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Introd. Louis Harlan. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Webb, Jeff. “Literature and Lynching: Identity in Jean Toomer's Cane.” ELH 67.1 (2000): 205–28. JSTOR. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar
“Work.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 18 May 2011. Web. 23 July 2012.Google Scholar