America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology (review)

This carefully researched, compact study examines how three writers, Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, and Jade Snow Wong, were strongly influenced by modern sociological research and theory but needed, finally, to challenge and transcend them in order to articulate fully their own unique visions of American racial and ethnic life.

Central to Tolentino’s book are the following propositions: 1) Sociology in the twentieth century was the dominant knowledge producer about race and ethnicity, becoming the “official national discourse” (25) on these matters; 2) “Canonical Sociology,” formed by the Chicago School at the turn of the century and further developed by influential sociologists such as Gunnar Myrdal and Emory Bogardus during the Cold War, helped to shape and advance American foreign policy in Europe, Asia, and Africa; and 3) creative artists such as Wright, Bulosan, and Wong had to break away from sociological knowledge and methods, finding them excessively abstract and simplistic.

Her chapter on Wright is the strongest part of the book, because her thesis squares best with his actual literary practice, especially in his masterwork, Native Son. She grants that Wright was deeply influenced by sociologists such as Robert Park, Horace Cayton, and St. Clair Drake, arguing that they provided him with a clear, coherent means of understanding his traumatic experiences in both the rural South and the urban North. She also effectively links Wright’s interest in sociology to his equally strong attraction to Communism, since both enabled him to engage in an organized search for truth and imagine systematic ways to reengineer social and political reality.

Tolentino quite rightly points out, as many others have also done, that Wright felt constrained, both as a person and as an artist, by the limits of sociological theory and Marxist dogma, finding them at odds with his own vision of African American life. As he stressed in both “I Tried to Be a Communist” and “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” he was wary of any abstract approaches to human experience which could prevent him from truthfully examining the full richness, complexity, and density of black life. He became what Paul Gilroy characterized as “a new kind of black author” (5) who, in Tolentino’s words, practiced “an independent and black radicalism” (12). This view of Wright is supported by a detailed and nuanced reading of Native Son.

The remainder of Tolentino’s study places two autobiographical narratives, Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter in the context of the cultural and political milieu of the Cold War. She argues convincingly that American foreign policy shaped by the State Department made elaborate attempts to use the work of professional artists to strengthen our image in Europe, Asia, and the Third World as a means of furthering U. S. interests as a global power intent on achieving hegemony in those regions. (This policy advanced the careers of writers whose works could serve as evidence of American racial reform and progress, while repressing the careers of those like Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, who were viewed by the State Department as dangerous subversives and a threat to our image abroad.)

Tolentino views Bulosan and Wong as strongly influenced by post-World War II sociology that held an emphatically assimilationist vision in championing “model minority” narratives, which claimed that the problems of minorities such as the Chinese and Filipinos would eventually be solved when they integrated fully with mainstream American culture. Just as she argued that Wright achieved artistic maturity by breaking away from sociological models and becoming an independent radical, Tolentino maintains that Bulosan and Wong ultimately rebelled against their sociological training by staking out positions as independent artists. But a stronger argument needs to be made to support this position. Her analysis of America Is in the Heart and Fifth Chinese Daughter, unlike her discussion of Native Son, lacks the detail and nuance needed to support the weight of her claims for these two...