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America through Africa and Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
“A pedigree bloodhound for scenting out Negroana” was what I was called twenty years ago by Cedric Dover, a Eurasian writer unduly neglected today. I am content to accept his verdict on my pursuit of Afro-American and African studies, aldiough there is, perhaps, a little too much of Harriet Beecher Stowe's running dogs in the imagery for my liking and his statement seems to imply that I have spent all of my academic life tracking down disappearing black men and women in the dismal swamp of the past. It is true that I am never happier than when I have brought to light a forgotten figure with African ancestry. But my interests in Africa and America have ramified into other areas, especially into Scotland, at home and abroad; and I have spent some of my researches following Scottish themes. Yet, even here, continental and inter-cultural connections multiply, as the letter from Cedric Dover which I have quoted indicates. We were in correspondence about Robert Duncanson (1817–1872), a pioneer of Afro-American art: “a Scots Canadian mulatto born in New York State,” most of whose later life was spent in Europe, “where classical tradition took him to Italy and paternal tradition to Scotland,” whose “feeling of superiority … caused him to reject the Negro people and identify himself” with his father's country.
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References
George Shepperson was born at Peterborough, England, in 1922. He has taught in American, African and British universities, and has been William Robertson Professor of Commonwealth and American History at Edinburgh University since 1963. Chairman of the British Association for American Studies from 1971 to 1974, he has published in American, African and Scottish history, notably in the work which employs these three approaches, Independent African.
1 Letter of 30 Jul. 1959 from Dover, Cedric (1904–61), author, inter alia, of Half-Caste (London, 1937)Google Scholar; Hell in the Sunshine (London, 1943)Google Scholar; “The American Negro” issue of United Asia (editor, 06, 1953)Google Scholar; “The Black Knight”, Parts I and II, Phylon, 2 (1954) 41–57, 177–89Google Scholar; American Negro Art (London, 1960)Google Scholar. See also Cooper, Wayne, ed., The Passion of Claude McKay (New York, 1973), pp. 316, 348Google Scholar, and Makonnen, Ras, Pan-Africanism from Within (Oxford, 1973), ed. King, Kenneth J., pp. 57–8, 348Google Scholar.
2 Dover, , American Negro Art, p. 25Google Scholar.
3 The version of Show Boat, with Paul Robeson, shown recently on British television did not employ the offensive term in “Ol' Man River.” However, I seem to remember its being used when this film was shown in the 1930s. Or am I confusing the film with gramophone recordings of this song in which I am sure “nigger” was employed ?
4 Rhino: East Africa Fortnightly (Colombo), 1, 7 (1944), 3Google Scholar.
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9 Phylon, 11 (1950). 232–23Google Scholar. This poem was translated into German in 1953 by Janheinz Jahn, under the belief that I was a black poet, for inclusion in his anthology, together with his translation of another poem of mine (“Rain,” Phylon, 12 (1951) 171Google Scholar), of black poetry around the world, Schwarzer Orpheus (Munich, 1954)Google Scholar. When I informed him that I was white, he said he would put me in another anthology which he planned on white poets who wrote on black themes: “I will be glad to put your poetry between Vachel Lindsay and Jose Z. Taillet.” Alas, Jahn's second anthology was never published, and I remain unanthologized!
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21 The last issue of this now extremely rare periodical was apparently for March–April, 1948.
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36 Bontemps, p. 17.