The red and the black.

THE NOVEL AND THE AMERICAN LEFT: CRITICAL ESSAYS ON DEPRESSION-ERA FICTION.

Edited by Janet Galligani Casey. University of Iowa Press, 2004.

LEFT OF THE COLOR LINE: RACE, RADICALISM, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES.

Edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

When I first read Richard Wright in high school and then re-encountered him in college, little was said about his membership in the Communist Party, let alone his reworking of radical literary aesthetics. What mention was made of Wright's Left affiliations tended to dismiss them as antithetical to his art and African American subject matter; Wright's eventual break with the Communist Party seemed to be more important than his work within it. When in graduate school I learned of the resurgence of scholarship on literature of the U.S. Left, including the work of Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, Bill Mullen, and William Maxwell, I was astounded by the extent to which the Left shaped the political and artistic vision of Wright as well as many other American writers. And given the richness and vibrancy of the cultural Left, I could not believe that its history and influence had been silenced in so many of the books I had read and courses I had taken on U.S. literature.

Within the renaissance of Left literary scholarship of the past two decades or so, two of the most recent offerings--both collections of critical essays--will contribute greatly to changing how we study and teach U.S. and in particular American ethnic literatures. The Novel and the American Left and Left of the Color Line pose and variously answer the question, "What happens when we put the Left at the center of our study of U.S. culture?"--to paraphrase Color Line editors Mullen and Smethurst (for whom this question is homologous to the question Mary Helen Washington posed in her presidential address to the American Studies Association, "what happens to American Studies if you put African American Studies at the center?"). Challenging simplistic narratives that the cultural Left propagated a monotonous social(ist) realism that had no relationship to modernism, contributors to the two collections demonstrate the heterogeneity of aesthetic techniques that writers used and fused in order to create revolutionary art. While the Left is largely defined as the Communist Party in both books, contributors espouse a range of ideological positions that are implicitly in productive tension with each other. In different ways, and with different levels of success, both collections also address the impact of multiculturalism in studying Left literature.

The Novel focuses on literature of the 1930s; editor Janet Galligani Casey "invite[s] a more capacious definition" of this decade, but her invitation is not explicitly accepted by most of the contributors. A central concern of the collection is the treatment of "specific leftist novels as novels" (original emphasis), that is, to take seriously their aesthetics and shared formal and thematic concerns with other literary traditions. In light of the bad rap that radical fiction has gotten within the literary establishment, Casey is concerned with establishing that these novels are not "merely political," and she contrasts this approach with that of previous "revisionist efforts," which have generally situated their studies of Left literature within specialized debates over art. This characterization of earlier scholarship seems to misrepresent significant examples of it, such as Paula Rabinowitz's Labor and Desire." Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America and Barbara Foley's Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction. The term "revisionist" suggests an apology for or retraction of radical politics that is not present in much recent scholarship on Left literature. Also, examining the politics and critical debates surrounding Left writing generally does not preclude a systematic study of its art, as Rabinowitz and Foley demonstrate. Indeed, the essays in Casey's own collection compellingly integrate analyses of the political and the aesthetic. Jon-Christian Suggs illuminates the ways that the experimentalism of Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching! constitutes a response to debates over the form, content and political purpose of proletarian fiction. Radical fiction's confluences with modernism are also explored in essay, s by Joy Castro and Joseph Entin, who show that fragmentary narratives, archetypal symbolism, and other modernist techniques were necessary to represent the violence done to working-class and women's bodies. Meanwhile, Caren Irr argues that Josephine Herbst's Rope of Gold exemplifies an aesthetic of "dialectical objectivity,"--understanding the Depression as an expression of a long-term crisis in capitalism--that draws from modernist and realist traditions.

As Casey notes in her introduction, half of the essays engage in feminist critique or study women's novels. These essays are insightful. Like Castro, Angela Marie Smith shows how white radical women writers struggled not only to condemn capitalism but also to critique patriarchy within the Left. Irr and Casey analyze gendered ideologies concerning nature by mapping Josephine Herbst's critique of property relations through her representations of landscape (Irr), and by considering women's novels that rearticulate idealized visions of rural life secured by keeping women in traditional roles (Casey). Donna Campbell argues that James Cain's Mildred Pierce registers middle-class anxiety over working-class mobility and the erosion of the boundary between the marketplace and the home.

However, feminist critique here is problematically defined insofar as it is limited to novels by and largely about white women. Furthermore, this speaks to the surprising paucity of discussion of race in this collection, and the absence of writers of color. The one essay that examines race in detail concerns Mike Gold's Jews Without Money, about which Lee Bernstein presents a nuanced analysis of racial formation and working-class identity that goes beyond the black/white binary to consider the mutually constitutive relationship between American Indian and European Jewish histories. A couple of other essays--Campbell's and Lawrence Hanley's--speak to issues of racism and racialization but only briefly. Given the wealth of Left novels by people of color, especially African Americans, and the substantial scholarship on these texts, the omission of writers of color is inexplicable.

This omission is precisely what the innovative collection Left of the Color Line sets out to redress: "It is our contention," write the editors, "that these minorities [African Americans, Chicanas/os, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans] are central to the story of the Left in the United States and to that of U.S. culture generally." Putting the Left at the center of American Studies necessarily centers race and ethnicity, and Color Line is one of the very few books on Left literature that addresses writers of color besides African Americans. Ben Olguin argues that we can begin to study the Latina/o Left by examining Mexican American war literature, specifically Tejana and Tejano poetry. Fred Ho surveys the culture of the Asian Pacific American Left and working class. Marcial Gonzalez presents a provocative theoretical framework for critiquing the pervasive invocation of the borderlands trope within cultural studies and for rethinking identity within Chicana/o and ethnic studies. The politicization of whiteness and "regional" identity is probed through Rachel Rubin's essay on the remarkable but neglected Appalachian poet and organizer Don West. Unfortunately, there is not as much recovery and analysis of Latina/o or Asian American writers of the Left and/or the Popular Front as I would like to see. Nonetheless, these essays provide strong foundations for conducting and theorizing such recovery projects.

One important consequence of this centering of race and ethnicity within the Left is that it interrogates the privileging of the 1930s within Left literary studies, since an African American Popular Front survived beyond the Popular Front's official demise. Hence, several of the essays of Color Line engage with the 1950s and 1960s: Alan Wald's encyclopedic knowledge of Left history enables his critique of Harold Cruse's reliance of "group caricatures" of Jews in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; James Smethurst asserts the Left's role in enabling the development of the Black Arts Movement; and Mary Helen Washington opens up exciting new avenues into the African American Popular Front by discussing Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones--and it is significant that Washington studies the post-World War II Popular Front through African American women writer-activists, because women of color are still marginalized within radical literary studies. Other essays, such as Bill Mullen's on W.E.B. DuBois' novel Dark Princess, and Michelle Stephens' on Harry Belafonte, remind us that the Left is, after all, an internationalist movement and cannot be confined politically or intellectually within domestic borders. Eric Schocket's "Modernism and the Aesthetics of Management" is another paradigm-shifting work, one that argues that studies of class and radical writing must not submit to the "easy essentialism" that turns its critical gaze away from conservative and/or bourgeois cultural forms; to this end, Schocket persuasively opens up T.S. Eliot's early poems to class analysis.

The more "traditional" essays in Color Line--that is, the ones that deal with Left culture in the 1930s and 1940s--are of no less interest. William Maxwell shows us new ways of reading writers on the Left such as Claude McKay, for whom state surveillance was a literary influence and whose "counterdisciplinary sight" in turn produced F.B.I. "literary criticism." Barbara Foley's fascinating research into Ralph Ellison's drafts of what would become Invisible Man tracks the novel's gradually increasing anti-Communism between inception and completion. Anthony Dawahare reads the trace of African American radicalism expunged by Alain Locke from The New Negro.

Appropriately enough, at least one essay from each of the collections--Lawrence Hanley's from The Novel and Cary Nelson's from Color Line--addresses the need to conjoin scholarship and activism. Hanley warns against a multi-culturalism that "confuses symbolic with political representation and canon revision with social change." Diversifying the curriculum, in other words, should not replace changing institutional structures and policies that restrict access to higher education, and that delegitimize forms of knowledge that might disrupt entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Academic multiculturalists, Hanley argues, must "rethink their project through two necessarily linked questions: (minority) representation for whom? greater access to what (curriculum)?" Certainly one example of institutional change that Nelson raises in Color Line's final essay is the Yale graduate student grade strike from of 1995-1996. As Nelson notes, this event crystallized the gap between symbolic and political representation when scholars who do progressive work on race, gender, colonization and unionizing rejected the graduate student union and had striking students disciplined. Yet Nelson also sees numerous examples of students and faculty whose scholarship and activism are mutually constitutive. While Nelson ends on a somewhat romantic note, it does not hurt to be reminded in desperate times that we have a strong tradition of political dissidence, if we only choose to claim it.