Becoming African Americans 1919-1936
People Involved
Project overview
Africa was vital to interwar black politics and culture in the United States. Black Americans used their ideas about Africa to challenge dominant concepts of citizenship and what it meant to be an American. This intellectual preoccupation laid the groundwork for a major, nation-wide realigning of black identity, evident in African Americans’ outrage when Italy invaded Ethiopia in late 1935. It also provided much of the content of a vibrant black counterpublic sphere, found on the streets of Harlem and major cities throughout the country, as well as in the cultural production associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Project details
Using an intertextual analysis of a wide range of material, including plays, pageants, musicals, films, novels, short stories, poetry and visual arts; newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals; and the archival collections of some twenty individuals and several organizations, I demonstrate the centrality of Africa to debates about black American identity.
These debates in turn created a black counterpublic sphere that looked beyond the borders of the nation for its subjects and citizens, but which at the same time was circumscribed by a tendency to regard only elite, urban black men as eligible for membership. The project therefore aims also to show how black women contested their exclusion from not only mainstream American society but also from the black counterpublic sphere.
“Making African Americans” extends our understanding of the transnational dimensions of the identity of significant minority of the American population. The received wisdom is that black Americans did not consider Africa important to their individual or group consciousness until the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. This project demonstrates that a transatlantic and diasporic identity emerged much earlier.
Supported by a Senior Scholar Award from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005, and a Writing Fellowship for semester 2, 2007, from the University of Sydney Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS).
Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans, 1919-1936 (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2009)
