Fiddling About: The Life and Love of Pura Teresa Belpré and Clarence Cameron White
Abstract
My dissertation, Fiddling About: The Life and Love of Pura Teresa Belpré and Clarence Cameron White, examines the lives of Pura Teresa Belpré and Clarence Cameron White as emblematic of a desire for cultural presence felt by individuals from two socially marginalized groups. The marriage of Clarence Cameron White and Pura Teresa Belpré reveals some of the overlapping themes and convictions of the Harlem Renaissance and what Belpré calls a Spanish Renaissance. White's musical career revolved around the ambitious project within the Harlem Renaissance to make high art out of folk materials. Like Belpré, White sought to preserve the artistic gifts of his people by using them to inspire his own creative genius. White's struggle to elevate African America music in the dark days of the turn of the century was mirrored in Belpré's determination to draw from Puerto Rican folk tales the cultural fodder meant to inspire pride in a Puerto Rican cultural heritage. In this dissertation, I want to explore Belpré's involvement in the social and cultural movement she named as a renaissance and White's position in relation to the somewhat younger men and women who named the Harlem Renaissance. But I also believe that we cannot fully appreciate the nature and stakes of either person's work without acknowledging the powerful influence each had on the other. Belpré and White help us see how porous the boundaries might be in our study of American culture, African American culture, Children's Literature, and American music. In the chapters that follow, I hope to explore the ways that the two movements influenced one another. I have found that doing so requires attention to the relationship between biography and culture and to the role of love and intimacy in generating cultural expression. Since this work emerges directly from my engagement with archival collections that preserve the traces of these two lives, it is also important to think critically about how archives are formed and what they can tell us about what is preserved and what is remembered, recognizing that the two are not precisely the same thing. Finally, I want to consider the historical moment in which these two cultural renaissances occurred to show what forces in the wider culture may have enabled Belpré and White to conceive of their work as they did.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Curtis, Purdue University.
Subject Area
African American Studies|Latin American literature|American studies|Music
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