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(188). In other words, Fitzgerald believed that African Americans were unable to truly internalize white culture—they remained primitive, or “unspoiled”—and therefore Harlem was merely their attempt to copy white culture. For Fitzgerald, “Harlem [was] aping . . . white ways, as if white culture had been dug out of its context and set down against an accidental and unrelated background” (Carl Van Vechten Collection, N.Y. Public Library, cited in Lewis 188). This last statement is as revealing, it seems to me, as it is startling. African Americans invented jazz, which can hardly be said to be a copy of white music. The Harlem Renaissance produced writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, who expanded on an African American literary tradition that was by no means a copy of white literary culture. On the con‑ trary, white societies outside the United States often recognized the originality of African American culture. As we saw earlier, for example, Jazz Age Paris greatly admired the unique quality of African American culture. Yet Fitzgerald was unable or unwilling to see Harlem in its own right. Clearly, he wanted to continue believing the white stereotype of African Americans as uncivilized and uncultured. If he saw anything in Harlem other than this stereotype, he chalked it up, as we noted above, to African Americans’ “aping” whites, a word choice that, in this context, also reveals Fitzgerald’s racist perspective. It is ironic, then, to say the least, that “The Great Gatsby has become an interna‑ tional source for American social history and is read as a record of American life at an actual time and place” (Bruccoli, “The Text of The Great Gatsby” 193). For if this is the case, then the world has a record of American life during the Jazz Age that omits the place and the people largely responsible for creating the era that the novel examines. M. Gidley says, “Fitzgerald, who was known . . . as the ‘laureate of The Jazz Age,’ so much of the quality of which era emanated origi‑ nally from the night life of Harlem, strikes us now, I would suggest, as a prisoner of prejudice who yet sees beyond his own chains” (181). I agree that Fitzgerald was a prisoner of prejudice, but at least in terms of The Great Gatsby, it is evident that he was unable to see beyond his own chains. Questions for further practice: African American approaches to other literary works
The following questions are intended as models. They can help you use African American criticism to interpret the literary works to which they refer or other texts of your choice. 1. In what ways does Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) participate in the African American literary tradition? For example, you might analyze the novel’s antiracist politics. (Morrison is known for her insights into the
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