Willie J. Harrell, Jr., ed.: We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality.

Morgan, Thomas L.

Willie J. Harrell, Jr., ed. We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2010. 266 pp. $65.00.

This collection of sixteen essays is a welcome addition to critical work on Paul Laurence Dunbar. Building on recent scholarship, such as the Dunbar anthology In His Own Voice and Gene Andrew Jarrett's Deans and Truants, and harkening back to Jay Martin's A Singer in the Dawn, We Wear the Mask contributes to a growing body of work that reassesses Dunbar by leaving behind the dichotomy of accommodation or protest that traditionally locates the writer's legacy. In abandoning this dichotomy, this collection provides the context required to understand Dunbar's negotiation of literary success in late nineteenth-century America. By engaging the difficult choices Dunbar was compelled to make, both literarily and socially, We Wear the Mask models the type of scholarship that will continue to provide fresh and valuable insights into Dunbar's life and work.

Editor Willie J. Harrell, Jr.'s introduction argues for the necessity of renewing our investigation of Dunbar's representation of black identity. Noting the value of locating Dunbar's "artistry in relation to various contextualizations of the politics of black reality that proliferated at the turn of the century" (x), Harrell observes that "there has not been enough attention given to the ways in which Dunbar's representation of black identity was positioned and conditioned in his works" (xii). The collection's three main sections then follow a roughly chronological order, moving from Dunbar's initial experiments in dialect and poetry to the strategies taken up in his later fiction. This trajectory allows We Wear the Mask to challenge "the superficial interpretations of the role Dunbar's prose played during the complex period of turn-of-the-century America, reassessing his works and introducing new paradigms for understanding the unfolding evolution of his artistry" (xiii).

The initial section of the collection focuses on Dunbar's poetry, troubling the traditional separation between dialect and protest. For example, Nassim W. Balestrini and Sharon D. Raynor both examine Dunbar's war poetry as a challenge to the traditional historiography of black soldiers' participation in the Revolutionary, Civil, and Spanish-American wars. Balestrini challenges Jean Wagner's claims about Dunbar's "timidity" and "art of compromise," arguing that Dunbar's "poems are a clarion call to artists, legislators, and citizens to grapple with national history in a candid and constructive fashion in order to close the gap between American ideals and American reality for all" (29). Elston L. Cart, Jr.'s essay examines the relationship between masking in Dunbar's dialect poetry and the reciprocal cultural paradigms of minstrelsy, observing that Dunbar's ambivalence "may be less a capitulation to racist expectations than an indication of the literary market's expectations" (57). In all, the poetry section underlines Dunbar's narrative experimentation in a way that effectively frames the subsequent discussion of race and representation in Dunbar's later works.

"Race, Rhetoric, and Social Structure," the second section of the collection, offers comparative perspectives designed to expand our understanding of Dunbar's literary pursuits. Matt Sandler analyzes Dunbar's relationship with George Horace Lorimer, the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and the connections between Lorimer's rhetoric of self-help and that of racial uplift, as well as Dunbar's own interests in modernist aesthetics and bohemianism. Harrell's own contribution focuses on the relationship between community building and dialect in Dunbar's Old Plantation Days. Arguing that Dunbar's use of dialect was intended to transform contemporary stereotypes by depicting the "continuing development of the black community" (157), Harrell notes that Dunbar's collection "did not mimic or degrade blacks but attempted to prevail over the effect of the centuries-old hegemonic structure of racism that was used to disadvantage the race" (156). Harrell's focus on Dunbar's manipulation of narrative strategies portrays the subtlety Dunbar had to employ in order to present his message to a white readership. Finally, Mark Noonan investigates the influence of the Century Illustrated on Dunbar's career, connecting the impact of contributors Edmund Stedman and James Whitcomb Riley on Dunbar's use of dialect in his poetry. Noting the Century's preference for "Dunbar's poems in Negro dialect, which seemed to conform to and reinforce the plantation myth tradition" (95), Noonan highlights the Century's contributions to creating Dunbar's longstanding (and misguided) reputation for pandering to white racist sentiments. In this sense, the Century helped to reinforce the same sentiments expressed by William Dean Howells, whose initial comments on Dunbar's dialect poetry have taken more than a century to unravel.

In the final section, "Novels, Identity, and Representation," the focus is on Dunbar's last and best-known novel, The Sport of the Gods. Dolores V. Sisco begins her essay by observing the effects of the protest tradition on Dunbar's place in African American literature before moving on to engage Dunbar's critique of "one of the most demoralizing and debilitating effects of white racism: intraracial color and class bias and its confluence with a black code of masculinity for a new age" (207). She positions Joe Hamilton's downfall as a product of internalizing "a skewed set of values ... shared by both blacks and whites" (205), connecting Hamilton to Francis Oakley by making them twinned images of flawed masculinity across the color line. It is Joe's desire to emulate an already compromised notion of masculinity that leaves him unable to work out his own redemption, while simultaneously isolating him from the black community. Jayne E. Waterman applies the concept of masking to Dunbar's last novel, revealing how Dunbar's text "explores and implodes the conventions and expectations of racial identity" (230). In the process, she highlights the subtlety of Dunbar's literary strategies, connects this work to his earlier poetic themes, and points to the value and nuance in the text that remains underappreciated.

As a whole, We Wear the Mask argues for an increasingly complex vision of Dunbar's role in American letters. The collection's flaws are minimal. In taking up notions of "racial consciousness" (x) and "representative black identity" (xi), the collection does at times stray into the rhetoric of racial protest without also taking on the structural dynamics that serve as a backdrop to Dunbar's life, but these are small exceptions. As a whole, We Wear the Mask effectively documents the literary, social, and cultural issues Dunbar was forced to negotiate to make his living as a writer, as well as the ways in which these issues continued to shift over the length of his career. In drawing on the political as well as the aesthetic, We Wear the Mask presents Dunbar's life in all its complexity, revealing his struggles to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of America's overwhelmingly racist and stereotypical assumptions regarding African Americans.

Reviewed by Thomas L. Morgan, University of Dayton