Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 (review)

Like the elastic prose of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (New York, 1952), which strays from naturalist description into the syntax of nightmares and fantasies, black cultural history has lately tested its traditional bond with social realism by courting the surreal. Kelley's recent work on the black radical imagination, for example, suggests that surrealism succeeded where social(ist) realism failed in opening the royal road between black radicalism and the Western left.¹ Kelley proposes that the dreamscapes of André Breton and company invitingly embraced those touchstones of black culture that official Marxism and its sometimes compulsory realist style ignored or debunked—namely, spirit, soulfulness, desire, even love itself, the best and brightest materials of antimaterialism. Without discounting the influence of surrealism on black painters in particular, Morgan's new book tacitly counters Kelley's freedom dreaming with a redoubled case for social realism as a risk- taking, aesthetically inventive, and politically progressive episode in African-American art.

African-American social realists of the 1930s championed novel thrusts against "the threat of both race prejudice and class inequalities," Morgan contends (2). Behind their struggles to remove, as well as to record, these wrongs was an imaginative ambition nearly as flamboyant as that of the surrealists. Social realists conceived a lofty "faith in the ability of . . . cultural work to serve alternately as an instrument of social criticism, a means of instilling race pride, and an agent of interracial working-class coalition building" (2). According to Morgan, their creed outlived the Great Depression and failed to respect the authority of the many scholars who date the end of their movement to the first light of the Cold War. A great number "of the more striking works of social realism produced by African Americans," in fact, emerged during the 1940s and early 1950s (21). "Novelist Ann Petry, artist John Wilson, and poet Robert Hayden were only a few of the African American cultural workers to debut an engagement with social realism during these years," Morgan reminds us (21). In place of such temporally compressed tags as the "Black-Red Decade" and the "Age of Richard Wright," Morgan casts mid-twentieth-century African-American art as a multigenerational campaign to expose a mass audience to all-too-real social contradictions.

Morgan also casts this art as a consciously multigeneric campaign, encompassing poems, novels, public murals, lithographs, linocuts, and other mass-reproducible forms of graphic art. He notes that social-realist work in all of these media shared a usually frustrated will to popularity distinct from high modernism, but his book becomes most animated when distinguishing among the differing agendas of realist poets, painters, engravers, and novelists. Charles White, Hale Woodruff, and other African-American muralists tended to cloak their radical politics in historical allegories, Morgan maintains, in contrast to the contemporary working-class portraits favored by graphic artists less subject to the scrutiny and censorship of patrons. For their part, poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, and Frank Marshall Davis issued the most forthright calls for political transformation of all the social realists; their novel-writing peers, educated in naturalist pessimism, painted "a national landscape littered with irreparably fractured American dreams" (41).

Because Morgan is less successful in distinguishing among the different techniques and formal vocabularies native to each of these media, he fails to develop an interdisciplinary methodology convincingly able to correlate diverse artworks beyond matters of content and institutional influence. A greater weakness of the book is its relative lack of analytical and argumentative surprise. Most of Rethinking Social Realism channels the documentary impulse of the movement that it studies, content to exhibit proof after proof that black social realism survived the disbanding of the WPA. Actual rethinking of the ironies and genealogies of this realism blooms in the final chapter on the novel, however, and the primary and secondary scholarship throughout is admirably fair, cogent, and tireless. For readers seeking thorough documentation...