Marxism and/or nationalism.

NATIONALISM, MARXISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE BETWEEN THE WARS: A NEW PANDORA'S BOX

By Anthony Dawahare. University of Mississippi Press, 2003.

For a long time, the dominant trend in literary criticism and history was to limit the impact of the Left on the literatures and cultures of the United States to a few discrete and disjunct periods generally divided into decades: the "Lyrical Left" of the 1910s, the "Red Decade" of the 1930s, and the "New Left" of the 1960s. However, in recent years much more effort has been made to trace the continuities between different high points of Left influence, and rethink the work of Left artists and intellectuals in decades less commonly deemed radical, such as the 1920s, 1940s, and the 1950s. African American studies in particular has been a locus of this sort of rethinking. George Hutchinson's Harlem Renaissance in Black and White made new and important connections between the "Lyrical Left" and the Harlem Renaissance. William Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left showed how the links between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and African American literature of the "Red Decade" than many scholars had previously assumed. Following in these footsteps, Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars joins other new work on the relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to the post-Bolshevik Revolution Left.

Actually, it is not entirely accurate to say that Dawahare follows completely in anyone's footsteps since his take on African American writing in the 1920s and 1930s is quite novel in some important respects. Part of Dawahare's project is a thoughtful polemic against nationalism, both "mainstream" and ethnic minority, both as a potential basis for the creation of an engaged, liberatory literature and as the primary lens through which one analyzes and evaluates African American literature. He argues that the dominant version of the Harlem Renaissance that emerged from Alain Locke's 1926 anthology, The New Negro, consciously repressed more class conscious, socialist, and internationalist currents of African American thought and literature that were circulating through such journals as The Messenger, the Daily Worker, and, in a somewhat more nationalist modality, the African Blood Brotherhood's Crusader in favor of a dual (American and black) cultural nationalism that was at bottom reformist and capitalist. He goes on to examine how the onset of the Great Depression and the increasing profile of the Communist Party of the United States of America among African Americans, especially artists and intellectuals, challenged that dual nationalism while extending and strengthening the socialist and internationalist currents of the Harlem Renaissance.

Of course, as Dawahare points out, the relationship of the CPUSA to African American nationalism was complicated and even contradictory during the first half of the 1930s, advocating in many respects an internationalist "class against class" stance while at the same time holding that African Americans in the South were an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. Dawahare holds up the revolutionary poetry of Langston Hughes from this period as embodying a black internationalist class-based vision that avoided the contradictions caused by the CPUSA's notion of a Black Belt nation. In this way, according to Dawahare, Hughes was actually to the left of the CPUSA (in a good way) on the "national question" even though Hughes's poetry derived both thematically and formally from CPUSA ideology in other respects. Dawahare also holds up the work of Richard Wright, including his journalism in the Daily Worker, the essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the collection of stories Uncle Tom's Children, the unpublished (in Wright's lifetime) novel Lawd Today, and the novel Native Son, as comprising a powerful interrogation and indictment of both mainstream and African American nationalism. He sees the rise of the Popular Front in the mid-1930s and a new CPUSA engagement with normative U.S. patriotism and ethnic nationalism as a retreat from the sort of necessary critique of the various modes of nationalism conducted by Hughes and Wright.

One might want to argue with Dawahare that some more discrimination in the types and uses of nationalism can be made. While I feel sympathy for the general thrust of the book, I am uncomfortable with what seems to me to be a too-easy linking of what might in other accounts be called "revolutionary nationalism" to what the CPUSA used to call "bourgeois nationalism." After all, if nationalism and national identity are not, as Dawahare points out, encoded in our DNA, neither is class identity, which he seems to take as a natural given. This is not to say that class does not exist, only that a certain amount of imagination, or construction if you will, is necessary for a carpenter in New Jersey, a teacher in the United Kingdom, and a garment worker in Indonesia to make a common identity. As Terry Eagleton reminds us in After Theory, while nationalism may be a "totalizing" narrative that in some cases has been used to oppress billions and perpetrate great crimes against humanity, it has also been a force that motivated and organized billions to fight economic exploitation and political domination. Also, while I, too, admire Hughes's "revolutionary poetry," I wish Dawahare had offered more accounting for the fact that most productive period of Left African American writing, including the most important work of Wright, takes place in what might be thought of as the extended Popular Front era of 19361949 (or so). Also, the separation of a "radical" period in Langston Hughes's career from the rest of his work, especially after the mid-1930s, is problematic and perhaps a little too close to the traditional anti-Communist reading of Hughes in which his "revolutionary poetry" is seen as disjunct from the rest of his work, even if in this case it is to praise the "Red" poetry rather than to damn it.

However, despite these possible objections, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars is a valuable and timely book. With possible exception of Barbara Foley's Spectres of 1919, it is the most thoughtful consideration to date of the ideological interface of nationalism and the Left within African American literature, whether that literature is for or against or for and against a reconciliation of nationalism and Marxism. Its argument for a critical yardstick beyond ethnic nationalism and what might be thought of as a false bourgeois universalism (which might be the flip side of ethnic nationalism) as a necessary addition to now widely-circulating critical stances is compelling. Its readings of Locke's The New Negro and Wright's Lawd Today and Native Son are incisive and persuasive. And, whether one is entirely persuaded by Dawahare's argument about nationalism, the issues that it raises as progressives attempt to think about what is necessary to move the politics of the United States forward in what seems to be a backward moment, and to grapple with the Right's use of "faith" and nationalism to drive its agenda, speaks to our moment in an immediate way.