Sterling A. Brown, storytelling and the Southern tour

Frustrated by the bureaucracy of the Federal Writers' Project, in the early 1940s, the poet Sterling A. Brown set off on a series of tours around the South.

Brown's account from these travels was finally published in 2007 as A Negro Looks at the South, a book which includes hundreds of vignettes of the realities of being a tourist in the Jim Crow South. Unlike most travel guides, in this one Brown is rarely let in to the site he is visiting. Accordingly, this failure of admission is matched by a failure of form: the book's genre straddles autobiography, travel writing, documentary writing, parody, ethnography and more.

This talk is based on a paper that argues that such failures act as a form of resistance. By tracing Brown's engagement with Joel Chandler Harris, the local colour writer who made his fame recounting Black folk stories.

Dr Siân Round is a writer, researcher and teacher based in Cardiff, Wales and a specialist in literatures of the US South, print culture studies, and the Harlem Renaissance. She explores how Brown uses the genre of the travel guide to expose the stories the South tells about itself.