Reading Dunbar and Picturing Uplift in Poems of Cabin and Field

This paper explores the ideologies of racial uplift in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Poems of Cabin and Field (1899). The first in a series of illustrated collections of Dunbar’s verse produced for the Christmas gift book market,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores the ideologies of racial uplift in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Poems of Cabin and Field (1899). The first in a series of illustrated collections of Dunbar’s verse produced for the Christmas gift book market, the volume includes reprints of eight poems in black dialect with photographs meant to depict “old plantation life” that were staged and shot by the Hampton Institute Camera Club. The work is influenced by the plantation tradition, but, as Andrew Heisel argues, it also serves Hampton’s agenda of racial uplift, portraying the idea of a vanishing black folk who will be consigned to the past by the agricultural and technical training of places like the Hampton Institute and replaced by a rising black middle class. I argue that the Camera Club’s appropriation of Dunbar’s work for its program of uplift and respectability relies upon dominant literary modes for reading the poet’s dialect verse that are indexed in their photographs. I focus on how the volume’s speaker portraits—photographs meant to indicate the character uttering the poems—stage the forms of mediation that produce its fantasies of antebellum slave life, the mechanical dislocations that figure an absent folk and instrumentalize the work’s black subjects. By attending to this understudied product of late nineteenth-century poetry and others like it, we can begin to understand the place of verse reading practices and their attendant racial imaginaries in the cultural work of violence and erasure.