Abstract
The art moderne architecture on Chicago’s streets and its Century of Progress Fair in 1933 influenced the Empire Exhibition and the urban form in Johannesburg in 1936 but in the shadow of the white cities, as their promoters called them, black lives were threatened by planned and unplanned violence. Owing more to property speculation and informal vigilantes than to legislation, Chicago’s black South Side in this period was more segregated than Johannesburg’s inner districts like Doornfontein. Starting with this counter-intuitive fact, the chapter compares critical responses to segregation by African Americans and black South Africans, and the literary expression of these tensions in fiction. Richard Wright’s Native Son and Modikwe Dikobe’s Marabi Dance combine sociological and ethnographic research—by Horace Cayton and St Clair Drake in Chicago and Ellen Hellman in Johannesburg—with melodrama and life-writing to depict with passion and realism black women and men who negotiate informal maps, gender and racial stereotypes, and planned and unplanned violence in their striving to fully inhabit their native cities.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Johannesburg-by-the-Lake’ was used by South Africans interviewed in John Matisonn’s reports on race relations in Chicago and Johannesburg. Interviewees included exiles who had been living in Chicago since the late 1970s as well as younger exchange students who took advantage of new opportunities after 1990 to visit Chicago. The series aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, January 17–22, 1991; see Keming (1991).
- 2.
As a self-governing dominion in 1910, the Union of South Africa was postcolonial in a literal sense, even if its dependence on British imports would be described today as neocolonial. This dependence lessened when skyrocketing gold revenue triggered by South Africa’s departure from the gold standard in 1932 transformed Johannesburg’s urban core, with dozens of skyscrapers complete or under construction by 1936.
- 3.
‘Negro’ was the standard sociological term for African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s but Wright emphasized Black identity in 12 Million Black Voices, as did Horace Cayton and St Clair Drake in Black Metropolis. Further, unlike Negro, Black (often capitalized for emphasis) is in active use today, as in Black Lives Matter, hence my choice of terms here.
- 4.
Nightingale uses ‘arch-segregationist’ to describe British colonial ‘influx control’ of migration to Johannesburg ca. 1905, as well as apartheid from 1950. He also argued that the difference between US and South African segregation has been a matter of degree rather than kind (227–379), with segregation in Chicago no less violent for being ‘camouflaged’ (295). The emphasis on extreme segregation tends however to mask the persistence of mixed districts in Johannesburg into the 1960s and their reappearance already in the 1980s.
- 5.
After the success of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Wright received a Guggenheim fellowship to complete Native Son, and the novel reached a wide audience as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. In contrast, The Marabi Dance took decades to evolve from notes in the 1940s, when Dikobe also wrote the stories introduced by Couzens (1979). The novel was published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1973 only after prominent South African writers, whom Dikobe thanks, edited and promoted it (1973: v).
- 6.
In the socialist New Masses, Sam Sillen argued that Wright’s affirmation of ‘meaning in the suffering of an oppressed group’ (1940: 31; original emphasis) was grounded in ‘Marxist analysis’—Wright was a Communist Party member at the time. The New York Times’ emphasis on Wright’s depiction of ‘race’ and ‘environment’ (Poore 1940: 25), alongside praise for his narrative skill, suggests the wider legitimacy of critical realist fiction. Marabi Dance was marketed as an ‘authentic’ picture of life in the Doornfontein yards, as in the New Society blurb on the back cover and confirmed by Hofmeyr (1977) and Couzens (1979).
- 7.
Carla Cappetti describes Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy (1945) as a ‘belated product of the 1930s sociological imagination’ (1995: 90) and its author as ‘participant observer’ (91), but is content to state that his writing follows the paradigm ‘individual vs group’ without examining Wright’s dialectical synthesis of collective conditions, social types and individual desire.
- 8.
The Book-of-the-Month-Club edition which circulated until 1990 excised elements like the scene in which Bigger and friends masturbate while watching the white-slavery pulp film Trader Horn (Rampersand 1993: xxii), but this scene was restored in 1993.
- 9.
Couzens invites further speculation when he compares the Molefe Yard, which was Dikobe’s home turf as well as the novel’s location, briefly to Rooiyard (1979: 91).
- 10.
Marabi refers both to the musical synthesis of African polyphony and melodic lines from diverse sources (Coplan 2008: 432) and to the ‘dance hall’ culture that flourished around it (441). Reuben Caluza’s hit song ‘Ama-Oxford Bags’ (1930; Caluza 1992) celebrates marabi style. Although marabi provoked disdain from self-consciously ‘new African’ intellectuals emulating American ‘new Negroes’ (Couzens 1985), George’s literacy and white-collar job put him in proximity with this group, whose members included the London-educated impresario and marabi composer Griffiths Motsieloa and the New York-educated Caluza.
- 11.
Abrahams and Modisane presented their texts as accounts of their lives but both strain to make their life narratives both exemplary and exceptional and, as Mark Sanders (1994) argues, heightened their narrative selves to meet expectations of authenticity they anticipated from editors overseas.
- 12.
As Dorothy Driver notes (1990), women life-writers, from Dikobe’s contemporary Jabavu to Soweto activist Kuzwayo, whose Call me woman focuses despite its title on collective struggle, tend in contrast to their male counterparts to depict their native daughters as members of communities rather than as individual exceptions.
- 13.
Although neither Wright nor Dikobe distinguish unequivocally between innocents and villains in a way conventionally associated with melodrama (Brooks 1976: 11–12), they conjure heightened displays of feeling and sensationalist language that stretch the bounds of realism in order to engage the reader’s empathy. The distinction between melodrama and realism is complicated, however. While Mrs. Thomas’s appeal in the prison recalls tear-jerking scenes imagined in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the sensationalist headlines in Native Son mimic actual Chicago newspapers in the 1930s; and while Stowe gives Tom a saintly death, Wright withholds Bigger’s from view, ending instead as the prison gate ‘clanged shut’ (502) on the last line of the novel, reminding the reader of the structural violence threatening black lives in the segregated United States.
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Kruger, L. (2018). White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native Maps in Richard Wright’s Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe’s Johannesburg. In: Boehmer, E., Davies, D. (eds) Planned Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_2
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