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American Literature 73.4 (2001) 885-877



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Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. By Bill V. Mullen. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 1999. xi, 242 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $16.95.
Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. By Mark A. Sanders. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 1999. xiv, 211 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

Bill Mullen’s Popular Fronts and Mark Sanders’s Afro-Modernist Aesthetics aim to stretch the critically accepted temporal, geographic, political, aesthetic, and racial circumscriptions of twentieth-century New Negroism, a movement conventionally seen as rooted in the Harlem Renaissance. Taken together, these two texts open a fresh window onto the empowering Leftist character of African American politics and culture during the Depression, World War II, and the postwar era, and also onto African Americans’ leadership in forging this period’s progressive cross-class, interracial, and international alliances. Mullen grounds his commentary in the political and artistic coalitions of urban Chicago’s South Side between 1935 and 1946, while Sanders centers his critique in Sterling Brown’s revision of hegemonic literary and cultural modernism and his hybrid and pluralist poetics. Despite these apparently dissimilar textual preoccupations with, respectively, the streets and public spaces of Bronzeville and the formal linguistic mechanics of Brown’s prosody, Mullen and Sanders both skillfully historicize the genesis, political workings, and paradoxes of a specific era’s struggle for African American identity in the United States.

Mullen begins by resituating the Harlem Renaissance as only the first of three twentieth-century African American renaissances. Moving chronologically, Popular Fronts identifies Chicago, a synecdoche for radical black artistic and political production at midcentury, as the site of the second African American [End Page 875] renaissance, and the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the third. Correspondingly, citing Richard Wright’s 1937 repudiation of Marxist ideology and his flight from Chicago, Mullen challenges Wright’s canonization as the sign and symbol of the Chicago Renaissance, instead pointing to the far more artistically collaborative and archivally diverse creativity mobilized in that era and that locale. Purposefully plural, Mullen’s concept of popular fronts references, first, the United Front Scottsboro Committee, a white Leftist and black alliance founded during the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case and revitalized by the era’s lynchings, disenfranchisement, and labor exploitation in both North and South. Subsequently, the Popular Front gained prominence when in 1938 the Communist Party designated culture as one “front” for effecting revolutionary economic, social, and political equality. Finally, the Negro People’s Front of Chicago’s Depression-seized South Side engaged in cultural work in such diverse journalistic and artistic mediums and public sites as the Chicago Defender, Negro Story, and the South Side Community Art Center. These sites brought together African American artists and public school programs, proletarian writers and graphic designers, and the African American bourgeoisie and socialist activists. According to Mullen, the South Side Community Art Center, “Chicago’s Federal Art Project landmark and the hub of much of its most progressive and improvisatory cultural work” (15), publicly rejected and inverted (white) mainstream capitalism’s demeaning characterizations of African American history, current events, and culture. Moreover, the plural popular fronts were interracial and global in scope and membership, inspired by and artistically involved with avant-garde Mexican revolutionary muralists dedicated to the Leftist “Black and White Unite and Fight” call and committed to an encompassing antiwar and antifascist ethic at home and abroad.

Like Mullen, Sanders contextualizes African American cultural work and public identity as it shapes and is shaped by political, artistic, labor, and civic histories of the 1930s and 1940s. However, Sanders is more interested in materialist literary representation as a form of protest and, potentially, of recuperation; further, following Paul Gilroy, Sanders stakes a claim for Afro-modernity as the central, unacknowledged paradigm of social and cultural modernity and modern consciousness. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics expands the era of the Harlem Renaissance to encompass the years...

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