Dis-Placing Race and Re-Placing Region in Paul Laurence Dunbar

Ever since William Dean Howells’ racialist review of Majors and Minors (1895), critics have predominantly understood Paul Laurence Dunbar exclusively as a “race poet.” This assessment, however, is based largely on the... [ view full abstract ]

Ever since William Dean Howells’ racialist review of Majors and Minors (1895), critics have predominantly understood Paul Laurence Dunbar exclusively as a “race poet.” This assessment, however, is based largely on the popularity of his plantation dialect poems published in leading monthly magazines and the assumption that these publications’ national circulation amounted to a national uniformity of interpretation. As a result, critics have overlooked alternate conditions of literary engagement by which an alternate Dunbar canon emerged. Countering this tendency, I focus on Dunbar’s Midwestern writings in order to argue that crossing recognizable regional tropes and dialects with racial ones enabled him to leverage his own Midwestern regional identity as a productive, alternative site for black expression. Dunbar was able to do so because these strategies were not simply representational: they fundamentally structured an uneven reception of his poems across the regionally-distinctive cultural climates of postbellum America. This fact becomes visible only when we look beyond models of circulation that assume geographic uniformity and instead look at local newspapers and readerly communities. Uniquely embraced by Midwestern Populists, Midwestern African American literary clubs, and Midwestern critics alike as one of their own, Dunbar was read differently in the Midwest; furthermore, as quantitative analysis of newspapers shows, he was referenced more frequently there as well. I argue that Dunbar successfully cultivated a strong counter-tendency in the Midwest to read his work regionally, blurring racial lines, suggesting cross-racial affinities, and challenging the racialist conflation of blacks with the antebellum South on which plantation poetry was based.