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. 


 

About Research Seminar and Workshop Series

 


School of Communication and Arts Research Seminar Series

The research seminar and workshop series occur each semester, each with a different topic and guest speaker from UQ or otherwise.

Friday, 4 August
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

After the Future: Heat, Collapse, and Exhausting the “Future of Work”

Dr Luke Munn

Friday, 25 August
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Promoting children’s environmental responsibility in the EFL classroomDr Valentina Adami

Friday, 1 September
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Write FOR your reader vs. writing WITH your reader: human-centred design in professional communication

and

Portraying Asian-diasporic identity beyond the limits of the literary label Asian-Australian

Catriona Arthy

and

Olivia De Zilva

Friday, 8 September
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Exploring Digital Humanities through the Lens of Journalism: A Case Study of Reader Comment Analysis

Dr Lujain Shafeeq

Friday, 15 September
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

The Medicalised Body - On Illness, Humour, and Sexuality

and

Talkin about the thing that stops me writing about the thing Im talkin about: Hacking and Hofstadter on the looping effect of diagnostic labels and writing the strange double

Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Bianca Millroy

Friday, 22 September
12-1pm

Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the
SCA Writer's Studio
(Level 6, Michie)

Coping with eco-anxiety: A guided journal trialDr Ans Vercammen and Dr Skye Doherty

 

Venue

Online via Zoom