{"id":33873,"date":"2013-09-25T21:11:15","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T21:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=33873"},"modified":"2016-12-29T01:39:23","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T01:39:23","slug":"uptown-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=33873","title":{"rendered":"Uptown Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Uptown Girls<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sunday Book Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times
\n2013-09-22<\/p>\n

Martha A. Sandweiss<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of History
\nPrinceton University<\/em><\/p>\n

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, by Carla Kaplan<\/a> Illustrated. 505 pp. Harper.<\/p>\n

Time hasn\u2019t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>. As philanthropists and activists, authors and patrons, they sought a place for themselves in that remarkable outpouring of African-American art during the 1920s and \u201930s. Some, constrained by social expectations, effaced the records of their work. Others made it difficult for historians to treat them with much seriousness. What, after all, can we do with someone like Nancy Cunard<\/a>, a British steamship heiress raised on a remote English estate, who felt no shame in proclaiming \u201cI speak as if I were a Negro myself\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cMiss Anne\u201d \u2014 the dismissive collective name given to white women \u2014 makes bit appearances in the literature of the era as a dilettante or imperious patron; later, she\u2019s depicted as a thrill-seeking \u201cslummer<\/a>.\u201d Always, she lurks in the shadows of her male counterparts in scholarly studies of the movement. But she was there, encouraging writers, underwriting cultural institutions, supporting progressive political causes. And many leading Harlem Renaissance figures \u2014 including Langston Hughes<\/a>, Alain Locke<\/a> and Nella Larsen<\/a> \u2014 had reason to be grateful to her. At least for a while. Like everything else about Miss Anne, those relationships got complicated…<\/p>\n

…The book is full of fresh discoveries. \u00adKaplan learns that Lillian Wood, author of the radical 1920s anti-lynching novel \u201cLet My People Go,\u201d was actually white, not black<\/strong>, as other scholars have imagined…<\/p>\n

…But the focus of the book remains squarely on the larger issues of racial identity raised by Miss Anne\u2019s deep personal identification with African-American life. Miss Anne wanted to suggest that race was a constructed ideal, yet she stumbled over the internal contradictions of her impulses. She fought against racial essentialism and the perverse logic of America\u2019s one-drop rule<\/a>, which proclaimed that even a trace of African heritage made one black, but she also celebrated the seeming vitality and distinctiveness of black culture. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler<\/a> wrote in her diary the night before her wedding: \u201cTo my mind, the white race, the Anglo-Saxon especially, is spiritually depleted. America must mate with the Negro to save herself.\u201d In a similar expression of romantic racialism, the philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason<\/a> lauded \u201cthe creative impulse throbbing in the African race.\u201d As Kaplan suggests, white men could sometimes get away with ideas like this; a dose of black culture offered a useful inoculation against the debilitating sterility of the industrial world. But white women who sought an intimate connection with African-\u00adAmerican life were seen as traitors to the race, even sexual deviants.<\/p>\n

What was race anyway? That\u2019s the big question Miss Anne\u2019s actions raised. If race was simply a myth or fiction, could one reimagine racial identity as something based on affiliation rather than blood?<\/strong> Some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance asked much the same thing. In Nella Larsen\u2019s \u201cPassing<\/a>\u201d and James Weldon Johnson\u2019s<\/a> \u201cAutobiography of an Ex-Colored Man<\/a>,\u201d for example, light-skinned protagonists of African-American heritage successfully pass<\/a> as white, demonstrating that racial identity could hinge on voluntary association and careful self-presentation. Their radical acts blur the color line and expose the absurdity of the one-drop rule. Approaching the color line from the other side, Miss Anne reframed the issues. If race wasn\u2019t determined by biology, why couldn\u2019t a white woman feel black?<\/strong> Why couldn\u2019t she repudiate her own culture to embrace another?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Uptown Girls Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2013-09-22 Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History Princeton University Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan Illustrated. 505 pp. Harper. Time hasn\u2019t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. As philanthropists and activists, authors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,20,25],"tags":[756,1631,55,3562,3561,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-33873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-carla-kaplan","tag-harlem","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-martha-a-sandweiss","tag-martha-sandweiss","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50986,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873\/revisions\/50986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}