Research Seminar - Passing as White (Collar): Jim Crow’s Typewriter and the Harlem Renaissance

Passing as White (Collar): Jim Crow’s Typewriter and the Harlem Renaissance

Presented by: Dr Tamyln Avery

Date: Friday 23 April 2021
Time: 12–1pm
Location: Online via Zoom 

Abstract

The typewriter – a polysemic term suggesting both the writing instrument and its human operator – has been key to historicizing the interpenetration of social practices, technology, and the materiality of writing for influential theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler. Yet, even in accounts of the typewriter that have challenged the ease with which female liberation has been coupled with secretarial labour, race remains largely unexamined. This paper redresses that oversight, in relation to the works and letters of Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond. Despite their political and aesthetic differences, these writers were united in this respect: they each represented black typists engaging with the white-collar sector through discourses of racial passing, where both clerical and literary typewriting alike convey difficulty, frustration, impermanency, and alienation, rather than efficiency, productivity, permanency, and emancipation. These writers thus denaturalised the widespread ideology that stenography would become a convenient “step-ladder” to both racial uplift and artistic productivity. This coalition of literary typewriters not only narrate to us a fascinating and critically overlooked account of black modernism and literary innovation under Jim Crow; they confront us with a powerful master-allegory of the sexual and racial segregation that underwrites the wider history of art, intellectual culture, and white-collar labour in the United States and beyond. 

Presenter

Dr Tamlyn Avery is a Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Communication and Arts, and an editor of Affirmations of the Modern, the official journal of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN). Her research interests include modernism, music, and race in American Literature, and her research has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Australian Feminist Studies, and Mississippi Quarterly. She is currently preparing a monograph on the history of the American Bildungsroman for Edinburgh University Press.