In the absence of integration: working in and against Nation in Erna Brodber's Louisiana

Abstract

Animated by the efforts of historians and sociologists over the past decade to conceptualize a ‘long’ civil rights period, this article examines how the conspicuous absence of the 1950s and 1960s from Jamaican writer Erna Brodber's novel Louisiana (1994) constitutes an act of ‘black ellipsis’ that opens up space to envision, from our post–civil rights standpoint, alternative courses of history. Using comparative historicist analyses, the article reads the nation-centric US identity promised by sanctioned forms of integration such as the Federal Writers’ Project against the alternative modes of identity found in Louisiana's recovered diasporic history and the Universal Negro Improvement Association's transnational delegation, for example. Focusing on Brodber's rehistoricization of black diasporic cultural and labor issues in the simultaneously US and global setting of southern Louisiana, ‘In the Absence of Integration’ argues that Brodber overwrites the nationalist thrust of US projects of racial integration by recuperating diasporic affiliations forged earlier in the century and resituating US blackness in global terms.

Keywords:

• African diaspora
• transnational
• integration
• labor
• Brodber
• Garvey
• Federal Writers' Project

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Civil rights activist and organizer Bayard Rustin in 1965 termed the period now commonly referred to as ‘integration’ as the ‘classical’ stage of the civil rights movement (quoted in Hall 2005, 1234).

2. For a history of the legal practices that prioritized labor rights and economic equality in the 1940s and early 1950s and their significance to civil rights, see Goluboff (2007), The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2010). For other works delineating the activists and organizations who helped create a longer civil rights movement, see Hall (2005), ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past’; Singh (2005), Black Is a Country; and Gilmore (2008), Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950.

3. Louisiana, Brodber's third novel, was published in the USA in 1997.

4. Ella explains that she was ‘one of the first to be given this instrument, this precious instrument, first of its kind, donated to the programme by the manufacturers’ for testing (Brodber 1997, 32). In general, FWP oral history interviewers did not have tape recorders (Hirsch 144). However, Stetson Kennedy, Florida FWP Director of Folklore, Life History, and Social-Ethnic Studies, recalls that in 1939:

the Florida project borrowed a recording machine from the Library of Congress [for folkways recording expeditions]. The fact that Zora Neale Hurston had worked with the machine on a recording expedition with Alan Lomax in 1935 may have been a factor in our being entrusted with the cumbersome device. Nevertheless, we were very glad to have the machine and Zora. (Kennedy 1990)

5. For a cultural history of the FWP focused on its fusion of romantic nationalism and cultural pluralism, see Hirsch (2006). For critiques of the FWP's nation-building objectives and analyses of it activities as ‘the governmental making and regulation of a national citizenry’ (Bold 1999, xiv), see Bold (1999) and Harris (1995).

6. The origins of this circuit of kinship between blacks in the Caribbean and the USA lie, of course, in the Atlantic slave trade. As a buttress of multinational European capitalism, the slave economy was necessarily transnational. In terms of contemporary constructions of a global black diaspora, the facts of slave trafficking belie any assumptions of black US exceptionalism. Of the estimated 9,587,000 Africans who arrived in the Americas, less than 5% (387,000) were transported to the USA. In contrast, approximately 1,020,000 (10%) Africans were taken to Jamaica and an estimated 4,667,000 (nearly 50%) were taken to Brazil (‘Map 9’). In addition, Jamaica and Louisiana (both Spanish and early American Louisiana) were inextricably linked in the slave trade, as between 1772 and 1796, slaves in Louisiana ‘originated primarily from the island of Jamaica’. Subsequently, from 1796 to 1803, Louisiana ‘slaves still arrived along Caribbean routes but they now came, for the most part, from Havana’ (Leglaunec 2005, 188).

7. For a history of black dock workers and unions in New Orleans, see Issa (2006), 82–83.

8. Brodber bases what is referred to in Louisiana as ‘that Arkansas devilment’ on the unionization efforts of black sharecroppers in Elaine, AR, in 1919 and the subsequent massacre by whites of an estimated 100–200 black citizens.

9. For histories of African-Americans' relationship to and involvement in New Deal programs, see Sitkoff (1981) and Sklaroff (2009).