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No period k black American cultural history was more mercurial, and at the present time, no period is less understood than the "nadk," which stretched from the end of Reconstruction to World War I.1 With the exception of touring spiritual choks celebrated for thek natural power, black artists were largely kvisible to white Americans until the mid-1 890s when ragtime exploded, mkstrel stars sold millions of copies of thek sheet music, and Paul Laurence Dunbar rose to national promkence.2 A pioneering novelist who was hailed as the "black poet laureate" and "prince of 'coon' song writers" ("Paul Laurence Dunbar" n. pag.), Dunbar represents perhaps the best starting place for a reassessment of the black nadir. Uskg Dunbar's varied, often misunderstood career as a lens, this essay studies the fraught relationship between turn-of-the-century black art and racism.
Dunbar was enmeshed like no other nadir-period artist k the politics and possibilities of racial representation. Despite burgeonkg scholarly kterest k black minstrelsy, the standard history of Dunbar's songwritkg career is plagued with errors and misconceptions. This is unfortunate because the full complexity of Dunbar's dynamic approach to racial representation is only accessible through a careful excavation of his work with Bert Williams, George Walker, and the other members of what I call the Marshall Ckcle - the talented group of African American and African Caribbean performers who gathered at the black-owned Marshall Hotel.4 By exploring the continuities and discontinuities of Dunbar's racial representations, I hope to provide ksight kto the racist forms that turn-of-the-century black artists inherited, the new modes of cultural expression that they struggled to produce, and the political tensions between the two.
My analysis begks with a simple claim: Racist expectations did not trap Dunbar; rather, they prompted his remarkable movement across genres and forms. By working withk and agakst conventional black representations k poetry and song, Dunbar reached diverse black authences, achieved politically "representative" success, and contributed to emergent cultural forms. I will examke how different orientations to the domkant politics of respectability imbued plantation verse and "coon" songs with distinct, uneven cultural possibilities. My essay culmkates k a discussion of Dunbar's 1902 novel, The Sport of the Gods. Dunbar's contribution to the nascent black naturalist tradition doubles as his state-of-the-nadk address on black...