Conjuring the folk

"In a series of revisionary readings, Nicholls studies how the folk is shaped by the ideology of form. He examines the presence of a spectral folk in Toomer's modernist pastiche, Cane, and explores how Hurston presents folklore as a contemporary language of resistance in her ethnography, Mules and Men. In Claude McKay's naturalistic romance, Banana Bottom, Nicholls discovers the figuration of an alternative modernity in the heroine's recovery of her lost folk identity.

He unearths the individualist ethos of Booker T. Washington in two novels by George Wylie Henderson and reveals how Richard Wright's photo-documentary history, 12 Million Black Voices, places the folk in a Marxian narrative of modernization that is moving toward class-consciousness."--BOOK JACKET.