“Layin’ ‘mong de t’ings I’s allus knowed”: Racial Representation and the Residual
Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first successful African-American poet, acquired his national reputation on the back of a series of ‘dialect poems,’ pieces written in the southern vernacular. While he also wrote in Standard English, Dunbar was initially considered valuable because of his literary exemplification of the black oral tradition – a tradition which, arguably in his case, served only to reinforce antiquated plantation-era stereotypes.
In the 1970s, commemorating the centenary of his birth, several African-American poets wrote elegies to Dunbar. In this paper, I will refer to two elegies that typify prevailing strands in the African-American literary imaginary: Ishmael Reed’s ‘Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin’ (1972), and Robert Hayden’s ‘Paul Laurence Dunbar’ (1978). By situating these elegies alongside Madhu Dubey’s argument for a ‘racialised logic of uneven development,’ I seek to elucidate Hayden’s and Reed’s particular commitments to the Dunbar legacy, and to understand how each poet negotiates the difficult realm of identity politics. Such a historicised account also leads to a critical consideration of the residual and dominant categories that generate an ostensibly cohesive minority literature.
Within this context, my paper addresses the following questions: Can poetry make a claim to represent the African-American experience? What is the significance of historical revisionism as an appeal to racial representation? How does the residual inform the postmodern elegy, and how is Dunbar’s corpus finally exhumed?
Stefan is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, Media, and Performing Arts (EMPA) at the University of New South Wales. His research interests include American literature, film, critical theory, and philosophy of religion.