Juxtaposing Irish American and African American Panoptical Neuroticism in Early 20th Century US Literature
Abstract
The paper exemplifies the most pronounced analogies between Irish- and African-American communal self-vigilance perceptible in the early 20th century literary community in the United States. The level of underprivilege and prejudice which the Irish Americans suffered in the 19th century was not quite on par with racial slavery and the post-bellum status of African Americans, yet it can be argued that both communities retained a considerable amount of panoptical uneasiness about the possibility that too outspoken or ideologically unhinged art (and literature in particular) may tarnish the public image of the ethnic community by pandering to the prejudices of mainstream audiences.
The modernist decades saw an increasing interest in folklore, which was widely seen as a rejuvenation of stale literary paradigms. Many African American and Irish cultural vigilantes, however, saw artistic celebration of folk primitivism as ideologically unsavoury, because it presumably cemented the very stereotypes which those leaders sought to eradicate.
This tension between the larger communal interest and individual artistic autonomy exploded in several heated public debates, perhaps most notably in response to John Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World and Claude McKay's novel Home to Harlem. Given the historically hindered emancipatory trajectory of African American literature, it is no surprise that these two iconic public disputes are more than two decades apart.