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Even the smallest conversational turns can index macro-contexts of social inequality, racialization, and capital; fictional narrative, coordinating the particular and the global, seems well positioned to represent these scalar dynamics. But how exactly does the textual medium of the novel link the particularities of voice with the politics of race? Scholarship on this question has often turned either to the representation of vernacular speech (e.g., dialect) or to free indirect discourse, the latter as a “double-voiced” mode that linguistically concretizes Du Bois’s influential theory of black double consciousness. This essay draws an alternative approach from Du Bois’s fictional practice, highlighting the affinities between his use of dialogue in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and recent work in linguistic anthropology. In the turn-of-the-century US South represented in Quest, the functions of conversation are intricately connected with the production and exchange of cotton—otherwise known as gossypium hirsutum, giving the essay a key term, gossypoglossia, for describing these connections between a racialized global economy and particularized forms of talk. To attend to those forms is to locate theoretical resources in the very thing that critics, often dismissing Du Bois’s dialogue as unrealistic or discordant, have found least compelling about his fiction. For Du Bois, the essay argues, fictional dialogue is not only (nor primarily) a site for the realist representation of conversation, but also a speculative mode in which the unspoken metapragmatic contexts of the “color-line” can be rendered explicit, unfamiliar, and subject to contestation.

Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica. Its speaker, whose voice appears in a densely patterned representation of Jamaican Creole, meditates on biological variation and colonial history. Setting the poem against discourses of race and poetics in contemporaneous Kingston print culture (and other intertexts, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's “When Malindy Sings” to Erving Goffman's “The Lecture”), this essay links the thematic concerns of “Fresh from de Lecture” with its medium: McKay, it argues, uses the principle of accident to explore the intersection of evolution, history, and poetic performance. In many accounts of McKay's early work, scholars have read “Fresh from de Lecture” as evidence of McKay's youthful internalization of imperialist apologism and formal conservatism. Conversely, this essay highlights the poem's political intractability—its ironization of social evolutionism, its allusions to insurrection, its emphasis on the counterfactual—and suggests that it offers a surprising view of dialect poetry, one that foregrounds the potentially radical mutations involved in the act of reading aloud.

Journalist Frank Thone opened an article in the 5 September 1936 issue of the popular weekly Science News Letter with a question: "Do you talk with your hands?"1 The piece summarizes an ongoing study of New York City immigrants' gestural habits that was conducted by Argentinean anthropologist David Efron under the supervision of Franz Boas, the hypothesis of which is the primacy of environmental (that is, historical and social) over genetic factors in shaping gestural behavior.2 The answer to Thone's question is yes, you do talk with your hands, and more than you think. But the "you" here is not, as you might guess, the generic second person, and the upshot of this opening move is not the generalized claim that one talks with one's hands. It is rather that the specific reader Thone more than once invokes, the "typical average American," is guilty of the same kinds of gesticulation that he or she tends to associate with "foreigners." Yet "we have become so used to our gestures that they 'don't count,"' which leads Thone to a more fundamental point, if one that remains largely implicit, about the relationship between gesture and discourse. The former does not only serve as an instrument of the latter (as Efron's study shows by comparing the style and function of Jewish and Italian body language); these communicative practices are also structurally analogous. Gestures, Thone writes, "fit into the pattern of our lives as thoroughly as English speech fits in, or the habit of saying 'yeah' or 'uh-huh' instead of 'yes.'"' Like vernacular speech, gestural habits take shape independently of reflection. Nearly echoing Dick Diver's claim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934) that "no American men," other than Diver himself, have "any repose," Thone writes that Americans "talk with their hands a good deal more than they realize."4And with their feet, if one puts stock in Fitzgerald's representation of gestural comportment. Consider a moment in his story "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar," with which I'd like to begin in order to set up the questions this essay will pursue-questions about the functions of physical behavior in Fitzgerald's fiction and about how these functions might allow us to reflect on the methodological problem, long central to the interface of literary studies and ethnography, of description. Published in 1923, as the author began to conceive of The Great Gatsby (1925), "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar'' shares that novel's interests in social disparity and in the limits of self-fashioning. The protagonist, Jim Powell, is a self-styled "Jazz Master" who drives up from Georgia to try his luck in the North for the summer by opening a school that trains well-to-do New Jersey adolescents in the arts of modern socializing: shooting dice, playing guitar, fending off handsy dates, speaking in dialect. In the comic story of Jim's school and its quick demise, Fitzgerald reflects on the class functions both of racial masquerade and of segregation-of, that is, the construction of ethnic categories as, on one hand, performative and, on the other, as stable objects of disciplinary control. But I'd like to draw particular attention to a small-scale gestural interaction between Jim and the young woman of his affections, Amanthis Powell:Jim began to tap his foot rhythmically on the porch and in a moment Amanthis discovered that she was unconsciously doing the same thing."Stop!" she commanded, "Don't make me do that."He looked down at his foot."Excuse me," he said humbly. "I don't know-it's just something I do."''Like Thone's "typical average American," Jim's body is more active than he realizes; like saying "'uh-huh' instead of'yes,'" tapping his foot is just something he does, part of the pattern of his life. Still, this behavior resists the kinds of functional categorization in which Efron's ethnographic study of gesture is invested. Perhaps Jim, the Jazz Master, is tapping out a beat. …