Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess by Kendra Y. Hamilton (review)

Lyrically written and magisterial in scope, Kendra Y. Hamilton's Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess illuminates how, since the early 1900s, U.S. artists have reimagined the Gullah Geechee communities that formed from West African, European, and Indigenous American elements in the coastal lowlands stretching from North Carolina to Florida.Importantly, Hamilton never claims to have exclusive purchase on the "real" Gullah Geechee, despite her personal connections to this community.Instead, Hamilton traces the origins and effects of cultural images that, she frankly concedes, are not necessarily real-or not even sometimes realistic-but, as she notes in her foreword, continue to have real effects on America's racial imagination today.To contextualize this process, Hamilton begins with a chapter recounting how scholars of Gullah Geechee language traditions have long run the risk of falling into discourses of "vanishing" and revival that "are at their marrow essentialist" (pp.8, 16).Chapter 2 then meditates on the fluidity of the Gullah Geechee swamplands and describes how, after white southerners displaced these creole communities to make way for various commercial enterprises, artists and scholars began their search for an original "Gullah purity" (p.30).This multilayered context thus established, Hamilton's next five chapters alternate between discussions of southern white and Black representations of the Gullah Geechee, thus showing how these contrapuntal representations always reflected the representers' individual subject-positions as much as they did the Gullah Geechee's complex historical reality.Chapter 3, for instance, explains how writers in the white, interwar Charleston Renaissance movement fabricated an antebellum pastoral featuring childlike Gullahs in need of white paternalism, while chapter 4 explores how W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Coming of Black Johns" (1903) and Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) both feature Georgia's Gullah Geechee coast as part of an artistically affirming (if still essentialist) "Black Authentic" (p.63).Hamilton then contrasts Charleston Renaissance paintings of Black Gullahs against the mixed-race painter Edwin Augustus Harleston's portraits of Charleston's Black elite, and in chapter 6 Hamilton explores how Zora Neale Hurston's upbringing in a Gullah Geechee "all-Black town" in Florida, away from "the withering white gaze," may have given her special insight into creolized communities throughout the Caribbean (p.111).In chapter 7, Hamilton finally gets to Dubose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, featuring a disabled African American beggar based on the historical figure Samuel Smalls .At this point, Hamilton again acknowledges her personal connections to her study-her grandmother actually knew Smalls, who was more "unsavory" than the sentimental figure popularized in Heyward's novel and his 1927 non-musical stage adaptation (p.148).