A Wilderness of Waves: Harry Dean, Rural Life, and 1920s Black Maritime Travel Writing

Abstract Although many scholars define the 1920s by its shifts toward urbanity and cosmopolitanism, “A Wilderness of Waves: Harry Dean, Rural Life and 1920s Black Maritime Travel Writing” argues that peripheral modernities are crucial in understanding the Harlem Renaissance’s creative legacy. This essay focuses on oceanic modernity in The Pedro Gorino, a now little-known 1929 autobiographical work by and about the African American sailor Harry Dean, co-authored with Sterling North. For Dean, oceanic expanses prompted a rethinking of oppressive national and colonial formations and offered the material resources to challenge global anti-Blackness. I use a well-known Langston Hughes poem about oceans (“Long Trip”) as a counterpoint to explain how Dean’s vision of Black modernity was predicated on drawing distinctions between urbanity on land, and an implicitly rural freedom possible for Black people (particularly Black men) at sea. Also, I argue that Dean’s creative writing has an important corollary in his racial uplift work: the Black maritime college he established in Alameda, California in the 1920s; and the independent Black agricultural settlement near Tacoma, Washington he attempted to establish in the early 1930s.