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Reviewed by:
  • Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy
  • John Ernest
Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy. By Finnie D. Coleman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2007.

Sutton E. Griggs has been strangely neglected in African American literary and cultural scholarship, and this book should go far towards changing that. As Finnie D. Coleman demonstrates throughout this informed and thoughtful study, a comprehensive understanding of Griggs's life and work will challenge scholars to reframe their understanding of the literary, political, and cultural past by forcing them to confront the broad ideological range of the black intellectual tradition. The book's basic approach is encapsulated nicely at the end of its preface. "While this book is not a biography, a literary biography, or a strictly literary or cultural analysis," Coleman writes, "it does contain elements of each" (xiii). Those familiar with African American literary and cultural history will appreciate this mixed-genre approach, for the representation of individual African American lives is a complex affair, one that requires not simply historical and cultural context but an intricate (re)weaving of many strands of the ideological fabric of U.S. cultural history. Accordingly, I appreciated greatly Coleman's discussion of literary archeology in the introduction—and, indeed, I would say that the great promise of this book is grounded in [End Page 169] the project of "recovering fragments and scraps of fabric that constitute patterns in texts that have been lost to us" (xvi).

Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy begins with very useful cultural and biographical background on Griggs, and then proceeds to readings of individual texts and significant eras of Griggs's life and thought. Although a great deal of attention is devoted to Griggs's most famous novel, Imperium in Imperio, the manuscript is devoted ultimately to looking beyond Griggs's fiction to his important but generally ignored nonfictional writings. At times, Coleman paints with rather broad strokes when addressing cultural and literary contexts, but he portrays Griggs's life and work in illuminating detail. Coleman takes his readers from a cultural history of the Griggs's family into an increasingly complex ideological landscape, including chapters entitled "King Cotton, the Griggs Family, and the Making of the 'New Negro,'" "Death of the New Negro," "Crafting an Imperium in Imperio: Conservative Black Literature and the Battle against White Supremacy," "Taming Jim Crow," and "The New Science: Epistemological Contours of White Supremacy." In short, the book begins by examining the cultural order that shaped Griggs's life, and it ends with the philosophical order that Griggs drew from his experiences in his life-long effort to respond to those shaping forces and to promote both interracial and intraracial social reform. In its detailed biographical and cultural history of the Griggs family, its careful readings of important texts, and its presentation of Griggs's political philosophy (as well as his troubled efforts to promote that philosophy in his publications), this is an important book (and an eminently readable one) that should join with other recent scholarship to point to the need for new directions in African American literary and cultural scholarship.

John Ernest
West Virginia University
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