Masquerade narratives: Writing race and imagining democracy in American literature, 1930--1955.

Abstract

Masquerade Narratives takes as its object of study African American and white American writers who wrote political novels in which they gave either the protagonist and/or central secondary characters a racial identity that differed from their own. Focusing on a moment marked by America's policing of its citizens and the nation's concurrent need to represent itself as the epitome of democracy, I argue that this historical context bore a need on the part of some writers to cross the literary-color line and mask controversial and socially taboo subject matter, and thus, give form to what I call a masquerade narrative. In terms of specific texts, this project considers Willard Motley's <italic> Knock on Any Door</italic>, George Schuyler's <italic>Black No More</italic>, a Negro Digest series wherein white writers and celebrities imagined themselves as black, Sinclair Lewis' <italic>Kingsblood Royal</italic>, Lillian Smith's <italic> Strange Fruit</italic> and Ann Petry's <italic>The Narrows</italic>. While white writers experimented with the literary color line in order to demonstrate racial empathy, black writers did so to make claims to their rights as citizens and explore subject matter typically denied them. Neither, however, could free themselves from the racial boundaries and burdens that language and national structure placed on their creative vision, for those who claimed to transcend race often affirmed the very narrative they attempted to critique and preserved what many considered the greatest masquerade of all---American democracy. In an effort to uncover what blackness afforded white writers, and what whiteness afforded black writers, I mine their recordings of race and focus on moments of discursive slippage---spaces wherein writers' public and private declarations about their own work conflict. Because these writers expressed their deepest fears, desires, and assumptions in both public and private records, I make central to this project a series of diaries, autobiographies, political manifestos in newspapers and journals, personal letters, and unpublished versions of specific novels prior to editorial censorship. In bringing together the private and public, the mask and the masked, this project strives unearth how American writers imagined, experienced, and covertly responded to the limited social and economic possibilities during the Depression and post-World War II moment.