The Real Negro : The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

Historicizing the demand for racial authenticity in 20th-century American literature, Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in "the real negro" transforms the question of what race an author belongs to into a question of what it takes to belong to that race.

In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called ''the real Negro'' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in ''the real Negro'' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar''s Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not ''imitation'' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a ''real'' black, they were not ''imitation'' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial ''truth'' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person ''black'', while it also reveals how ''blackness'', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of ''whiteness'' as a stable, uncontested ideal.