Authentic Imitation: Modernist Anthologies and the Pedagogy of Folk Culture

TLDR: The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925-26) as mentioned in this paper is a collection of African American folk music written by James Weldon Johnson and published in the early 1920s.

Abstract: I n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n s t o h i s c o m p a n i o n anthologies The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925–26), James Weldon Johnson succinctly outlines the two central justifications for his project. One is the active role of the spirituals in the development of a self-conscious black American art: “This reawakening of the Negro to the value and beauty of the Spirituals was the beginning of an entirely new phase of race consciousness. It marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze upon his own cultural resources” (1:49). The other is directed at white Americans, who, he says, have been “awakened” by the spirituals “to the truth that the Negro is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature” (2:19). The two audiences share a common ignorance, until recently, of the black American cultural heritage—in Johnson’s figure of speech, they have been asleep to it, and the valuation of this heritage can begin as soon as their eyes and ears are opened. In other words, aesthetic education merely involves showing his readers what has been there all along; white Americans will then recognize the full humanity of black Americans by acknowledging them as fully capable of creating culture, while black Americans can start putting these “cultural resources” to use. Johnson’s hopes were common among anthologists of black folk music in the 1920s and ’30s, who, as mediators between folk singers and an urban readership, also confronted a number of pressing questions as to how, exactly, this “awakening” would occur. Was cultural recognition