RETHINKING PATRONAGE

On the one hand we could argue that the racial politics of a sexual liberation that we see at work in Chopin's The Awakening simply extend in similar form through the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Chopin's dependence on the notion of black libidity as lynchpin for white female liberation looks a precursor to modernist primitivism. By the 1920s racial “diseases” (once more commonly aligned with nonwhite populations, as Chapter Three suggested) were increasingly associated with whites, a racial malaise whose symptoms included sexual apathy, low fertility and waning cultural vitality. Such genteel anemia, many began to think, could benefit from a dose of African-American “vigor,” as Howells had anticipated. What Roderick Nash called the “nervous generation” of 1917 to 1930 found a cure for post-World War I disillusionment more in cultural than medical fixes, particularly in “primitivism.”

Many have already noted that modernism's fascination with perceived racial atavism and sexuality formed the cultural underpinnings for the “Negro vogue” during the Harlem Renaissance. It is certainly true that throughout the entire span of the twentieth century, popular culture and literature continued to represent African Americans as both social bane and opportune site of marginality from which to launch social critiques – critiques, it should be noted, often quite unrelated to self-identified black racial concerns during any given period.