Wallace Thurman’s Marginality and his Quest for Recognition through Primitivism: A Critical Analysis of his Play Harlem

Abstract

From the beginning of their presence in the United
States, blacks faced an all-encompassing process of marginalization and
inferiorization imposed by the dominant white America, so they had to
adopt different kinds of strategies in order to fight marginalization and
find the respect and recognition they longed for. In the 1920s, young
African American writers, greatly influenced by the modernist
primitivism of the post-war Europe and the hedonistic zeitgeist of the
Jazz Age America, opted to give a primitive, exotic portrait of Negro life.
They naïvely believed that their primitivist representational strategy
could prove their unique features and worth to whites and thus could
bring them a more secure status in society by fascinating the post-war
disillusioned Americans. Wallace Thurman was one of these writers who
was extremely marginalized because he was not only black, but also
homosexual. Trying to dispose of his subalternized status in society,
Thurman went for a decadent, primitivist representational strategy since
he held that an exotic portrait of Negro life, which catered to the taste of
dominant whites, could grant him recognition and respect of which he
had been deprived due to his “non-normative” skin color and sexual
orientation. This paper tries to analyze Thurman’s marginality and its
influence on his choice of primitivism through a critical analysis of his
play Harlem. It also aims to show that Thurman’s goal to achieve
recognition through the exotic representation of Negro life was a naïve,
simplistic agenda which never materialized