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Rachel Farebrother, The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance

The concept of collage is surely not a new discovery in the Harlem Renaissance aesthetics; in fact, many authors of that period themselves explicitly identified it to be a key aesthetic device for their work. Considering this, Rachel Farebrother’s Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance proves surprisingly rewarding. When discussing John Locke’s The New Negro, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Zora Neal Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain, she enriches the concept of collage with anthropological ideas of the time. Therefore, the title of this study with its emphasis on the aesthetic is almost a bit misleading in its seeming restriction to form. The term ‘collage’ is here used as a trope to refer not only to an aesthetic and its political implications in literature, but also with Franz Boas to a process of transformative cultural exchange and appropriation understood to be formative of a specifically African American identity. Although the connections between the anthropologist Boas and Harlem Renaissance writers have not gone unnoticed by critics, Farebrother provides new insights through her thorough tracing of how Locke, Toomer and Hurston read and, more importantly, further develop Boas’ anthropology to critique American society. Thus the complex interrelations between anthropology, literary form and cultural politics that undergird African American modernist experimentation become evident. The trope of collage encompasses multifaceted meanings: in its formalist sense ‘collage aesthetic’ refers to techniques of juxtaposition and stylistic incongruity as well as the patching together of diverse sources and fragmentary cultural pieces, which are combined and revised to make something new; these are not only deliberately employed by the authors, but are in turn to be also held in view by the reader. This modernist conceptualization of visual collage found on both sides of the Atlantic at the time is used by Farebrother to retrieve a critical vocabulary through which literary as well as cultural patterns of synthesis and fragmentation may be analyzed. Drawing on Franz Boas, who describes culture in collage-like terms “as a thing of reconstructed fragments” (2), Farebrother convincingly identifies the aesthetic form of collage as a potent means of cultural strategy and political intervention. When adopting the artistic trope of collage from visual art (e.g. Aaron Douglas) to describe the aesthetics of Harlem Renaissance texts, she is well aware of the fundamental differences between the media; verbal collage is inevitably sequential and suspended in time rather than space. She therefore focuses on “adjacencies or points of contact between art and literature at a cultural moment that witnessed unprecedented collaboration between artists and writers” to develop “a set of reading practices through which to interpret the complex patterning of cultural pieces in the pages of Harlem Renaissance texts” (14). With this approach, Farebrother positions herself on middle ground between the two major opposing scholarly strands of analyzing the relation between the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. For her, it is neither an exclusively African American form of modernBESPRECHUNGEN 548