Migration, Labor, and History in Literature of the Extended South: Hurston, Brodber, and Banks
In a recent article, I explored the representation of migration within and around the U.S. South in Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). I focused on Their Eyes representation of Bahamian migrant workers on the muck" of the Florida. Everglades; I also attempted a historicist reading of Hurston's novel by relating it to a 1928 hurricane in the Everglades that killed thousands of black migrant workers, including many Bahamians. In this paper, I will look at two more recent novels which, I will argue, extend Hurston's representation of an extended South"/extended Caribbean" by exploring further the material histories of black migration and labor.Like Hurston's fiction, Louisiana (1994) by the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber provides a narrative cartography of black migration across the U.S. South and Caribbean in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, Louisiana's focus on the hegemony of the spirit" (especially voodoo culture in New Orleans) has been the focus of most critical readings of the novel. By contrast, critics have said very little about Louisiana's emphasis on the historical and material conditions of blacks in Louisiana. I want to suggest that if workings of the spirit have become hegemonic in critical readings of Louisiana, other more worldly forms of work are equally important. Ella Townsend's narrative provides a vividly historicized depiction of black southern workers' struggle in rural St. Mary's parish, and on the waterfront in New Orleans. It also suggests how circum-Caribbean links between black southerners and West Indian migrant workers could be and were informed by a flourishing belief in Garveyism.
If Louisiana has received some attention within southern studies, the same cannot be said of Russell Banks' 1985 novel Continental Drift. Banks' experiences in the South during the 1960s informed his firm conviction that race" underpins American history not just U.S. history, but the history of the New World. Like Hurston and Brodber, Banks attends to transregional and transnational patterns of migration into the U.S. South: in this case, northward from Haiti (illegal immigrant Vanise Dorcheville), and southward from New Hampshire (white working-class Bob Dubois). I will argue that through Continental Drift's powerful depiction of Haitian migration to Florida, Banks too extends Hurston's pioneering focus on the migratory routes between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. And like Hurston and Brodber, Banks situates his migration narrative in a particular historical moment: the early 1980s, a time when the United States was receiving a steady flow of refugees from the Duvalier regime in Haiti. Such northward, circum-Caribbean migration is counterpointed by a southward migration that is no less historical: as Gilbert Muller notes, Bob Dubois removal to Florida is cast by Banks as part of a larger demographic movement of the citizens of the Northeast seeking a new life in the nation's Sun Belt."
Martyn Bone, University of Copenhagen