Shelly Eversley 
Real Negro [PDF ebook] 
The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity – what Zora Neale Hurston called ‚the real Negro‘ – in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in ‚the real Negro‘ transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because – written by a black man – they were not ‚imitation‘ black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a ‚real‘ black, they were not ‚imitation‘ white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial ‚truth‘ as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person ‚black‘, while it also reveals how ‚blackness‘, spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of ‚whiteness‘ as a stable, uncontested ideal.