Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean(Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday "folk." Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly-that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive-from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince-Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture-and Blackness itself-as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Prologue Part I. Writing the Crossroads 1. Georgia Dusk and Panama Gold: Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, and the “Death” of Folk Culture 2. Compelling Insinuation and the Uses of Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Price-Mars, and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti Part II. Performing the Archive 3. “Cuban Evening”: The Poetics of Translation in the Work of Eusebia Cosme, Nicolás Guillén, and Langston Hughes 4. Reinterpreting Folk Culture at the “End of the World”: Sylvia Wynter’s Dance and Radio Drama Coda: Toward an Ontological Sovereignty Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Imani D. Owens is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

Review :
Turn the World Upside Down profoundly recreates the literary and cultural history of Black diasporic modernism. Working across national and linguistic borders, the book brings a richly comparative method to texts too often siloed in disciplinary and area studies scholarship, from works by U.S. literary icons like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to less-studied figures like the Cuban performer Eusebia Cosme. Imani D. Owens’s ‘critical return to folk culture’ will forever change how readers approach the beautiful ‘unruliness’ and asymmetry of Black cultural expression. Original and compelling, Turn the World Upside Down invests in and expands Black diaspora studies, displays stunning archival research, and highlights heretofore unseen connections and underread texts next to highly known figures in the field. Turn the World Upside Down is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Black folk culture in the Americas. This truly innovative and complex study ranges across linguistic and national boundaries and represents a major contribution to the fields of African diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and American studies Thoughtfully written and creatively argued, Turn the World Upside Down is both fascinating and timely. Imani Owens innovatively theorizes the idea of folk culture to bring new insights to the field by helping us to rethink our understanding of “folk culture” and its manifold functions in African diasporic cultures. In fact, Owens performs a disruption of her own by bringing together US empire studies and New Southern Studies to offer a multilingual, comparative, transnational analysis that enriches and deepens our readings of African diasporic literatures and cultures.