Sterling Brown: an ethnographic perspective

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Beverly Lanier Skinner

They heard the laugh and wondered; Uncomfortable; Unadmitting a deeper terror. . . . The strong men keep a-comin' on Gittin' stronger. . . . (Southern Road 53)

Thus, Clifford and Marcus's call for ethnographic analyses that are "situated between power systems of meaning" (2) was already in place in Brown's oeuvre, particularly in such poetic answers to hegemonic bias in depictions of African Americans. In fact, the bulk of Brown's poems, oral histories, and essays show the connection between African-American culture and oppressive hegemonic societal influences.

Sterling Brown wrote ethnography by offering a diverse oeuvre of material from which to glean an understanding and appreciation of the richness and diversity of black folk culture. This is not to diminish his poetry as poetry, but the fact remains that one cannot escape the rich portrait of African-American life and culture that Brown's poetry renders. Brown never tried to offer a univocal or unified description of the culture he chose to examine. Rather, by using diverse forms of expressivity, he pioneered a postmodern ethnographic methodology that turns the tables on a discipline, the depths of whose elitism, arrogance, and chauvinism have barely been tapped.

Notes

1. For a cogent argument concerning Du Bois's ethnography of African-American culture and epistemology, see Schrager.

2. For an excellent retrospective of the development of the field of ethnography, see Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority" (Predicament 21-53).

Works Cited

Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. New York: Harper, 1980.

-----. The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems. Detroit: Broadside, 1975.

----- . "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors." Journal of Negro Education 2.2 (1933): 179-203. Rpt. The New Cavalcade: African American Writing from 1760 to the Present. Ed. Arthur P. Davis, et al. 2 vols. Washington: Howard UP, 1991. 1: 607-39.

----- . Southern Road. New York: Harcourt, 193Z

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

-----. "Traveling Cultures." Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.96-116.

-----, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994.

"Ethnography." Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember. New York: Holt, 1996. 416-22.

Gabbin, Joanne V. Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition. 1985. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994.

Stanfield, John H., II. "Ethnic Modeling in Qualitative Research." Denzin and Lincoln 175-88.

Schrager, Cynthia D. "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bols." American Quarterly 48 (1996): 551-86.

Vidich, Arthur J., and Stanford M Lyman. "Qualitative Methods: Their History in Sociology and Anthropology." Denzin and Lincoln 23-59.