In Search of a Gullah Cadence: Lowcountry Black Culture and the Rise of Cultural Democracy in the United States, 1920–45

"In Search of a Gullah Cadence: Lowcountry Black Culture and the Rise of Cultural Democracy in the United States, 1920-1945,” analyzes the wave of scholarship, fiction, and theatrical productions created during the interwar period that emphasized black culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry. While both northern and southern writers had collected folklore from the Lowcountry since the late nineteenth century, national interest in black Lowcountry folklore reached a zenith in the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter argues that while the literary works of white writers like George Gershwin, Dubose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, and Ambrose Gonzales commodified romantic portrayals of Lowcountry black life for a national audience desperate for anti-modern narratives, black writers and intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Sterling Brown, Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, and Lorenzo Dow Turner feared that such one-dimensional representations of black life erased the counternarratives of conflict and black agency that challenged mythic accounts of antebellum southern history. These counternarratives, often produced in the black press or supported by black institutions of higher learning, played a critical role in redefining the place of black folklore in American culture and valorized the contributions of rural black people in making the United States more democratic.