“Work and Wait Unwearying”
Dunbar's Georgics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23130265 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margaret Ronda (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 127 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 863-878 |
| Publication date | 2012-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-8129 • E-ISSN: 1938-1530 |
| Publisher | Modern Language Association (MLA) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1632/pmla.2012.127.4.863 |
| OpenAlex | W2008883300 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 22 |
This essay argues that the georgic poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar offer his most incisive representations of the hardships faced by African Americans after Reconstruction. Written in the context of Jim Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, and other coercive means of restricting the mobility of southern blacks and extracting compulsory labor from them, these poems present the hard agrarian work characteristic of the rural Black Belt. They confront the pervasive rhetoric of racial uplift through labor, popularized by Booker T. Washington, that dominates American social discourse on race in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries, by revealing the negative freedom of black agrarian labor. At the same time, these poems assert the humanity and blamelessness of African Americans in the face of institutional racism. The essay aims to recast Dunbar's legacy by turning attention from his dialect poetry toward his georgic analyses of the uneven modernization of racialized labor.
Agrarian society · Art · Context (archaeology) · Face (sociological concept) · Linguistics · Literature · Modernization theory · Poetry · Political science · Racism · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
Scenes of subjection
The Environmental Imagination
Slavery and human progress
Cry from the Cotton
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Turning South Again
The Signifying Monkey
The Human Condition
Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Slavery and Human Progress
The Georgic Revolution
Virgil's Poem of the Earth
Intimate Intercessions in the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Risk, Envy and Fear in Sterling Brown's Georgics
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2019 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |