Bill V. Mullen — Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46; William J. Maxwell — New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (original) (raw)

2000, Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate

These are two excellent books about a rich, vital subject-African American literary work in the first half of the twentieth century. Though their respective focal points differ (Mullen's is Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s; Maxwell's is New York City in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s), both reach similar conclusions, that African American writing was a critical part of the American left, and that the American left was a powerful constructive influence on the development of African American writing. Both books seek to counter what has been the dominant interpretation of these relationships for the past half century, that the white left sought to dominate African American intellectuals, that its influence was nefarious, and that, in due time, African American intellectuals threw off this yoke and found their own voice.' There was a "spectrum of exchanges," Maxwell writes, not a pattern of "white connivance and black self-cancellation." (1) In their quest, Mullen and Maxwell employ similar methodsthe excavation of previously ignored texts and the reinterpretation of well-known, even canonical texts, such as Richard Wright's Native Son. They also reconsider the relationship between radicalism and commercialism, finding that this interaction could disseminate anti-racist and anti-capitalist ideas to a broad public even as it might also act to soften and mitigate the political thrust of cultural work.2 These are substantial similarities, but they do not make the books redundant. The careful student of African American literary work and history will want to read both of them, as each opens a window onto new and fascinating material. Richard Wright plays a central role in Popular Fronts, but in complex ways. On the one hand, Mullen wants to demonstrate that Native Son did not represent Wright's "break" with the Communist Party, but that the book was intended to be an "internal" critique within the left whlle Wright's definitive break with the CP came later, in 1945. On the other hand, Mullen also seeks to shed light on African American writers, cultural workers, and institutions which have long been hidden by Wright's "long black shadow." While Wright had a powerfil influence on them, they also built their own relationships with the white left and they found their own way in the world. Throughout the book, Mullen insists on "dialectical" rather than "dichotomous" readings of African American culture. He first applies this methodology to Wright himself, arguing that "[Native Son] and its commercial success adumbrated black aspiration and anxiety over tensions between gradualism and radicalism, cultural immersion and cultural revision, racial marginalization and racial legitimation, capitalist jouissance and capitalist