Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties, and: Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box, and: South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (review)

The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement are celebrated as critical moments of racial nationalism and cultural awakening. Questioning the critical consensus about this narrative, however, Anthony Dawahare and James Hall reframe these two literary periods in light of transnational and antimodernist paradigms. Both are provocative studies, disturbing to our common sense about these seminal eras; taken together, both books prompt reflection about how we read African American fiction. Taking marginalized artists from the 1960s as his point of reference, Hall explores the reduction of complex writers of this era to one-dimensional Civil Rights radicals, raising larger questions about whether African American artists ought to be accountable to a protest tradition (and are somehow less black or worthy of study if they do not). Similarly, Dawahare attempts to redraw the critical map of the period between the World Wars by applying Marxist theory to identify a differently focused, postnational protest tradition, one that links the work of African American writers to the "liberating struggle of all oppressed working class people" (139). Although Trudier Harris-Lopez does not engage in a similar historical recontextualization, as the punning title South of Tradition suggests, her essays deviate from the well-worn path of a feminist scholarship that too often condescendingly misunderstands, or erases, Southern African American men's and women's lives.

Hall's Mercy, Mercy Me is an important historical revision of the "monolithic construction" of the sixties (31), particularly the Black Arts movement, solely in terms of a racial and cultural nationalism. Drawing upon Jackson Lears's paradigm of "anti-modernism" in No Place of Grace, Hall argues that sixties artists were not just activists but also "seekers." Many writers in the sixties were searching for an authentic self in what they found to be a spiritually bankrupt, depersonalized, sterile, consumer-oriented, Cold-War American culture. Although often judged harshly as Uncle Tom-ish integrationists, these "anti-modernist" writers were reacting to the banality and shallow, pragmatic optimism of American culture. As Hall quips, they were opponents of cultural "dis-integration" (84). In carefully argued chapters on Robert Hayden, Paule Marshall, William Demby, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W. E. B. DuBois, Hall proves that these artists wrestled with the despairing weightlessness that accompanied modernity. At times, Hall's use of Lears's concept of antimodernism to describe a WASPish elite can seem forced and derivative (as he acknowledges [194]). It is questionable whether this elite's nostalgic "look back" at history in order to resist change resonates with African American writers' evocation of historical memory in order to find a meaningful self or to influence social transformation. Nevertheless, Hall deftly restores a fuller voice to sixties artists too often straightjacketed within an obligatory hermeneutics of racial protest.

Tapping into the increasing interest in transnational U.S. literary studies, Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars argues that too much African American literary history, especially of the 1920s and 1930s, "remains entrenched in nationalist paradigms" (xviii). While other recent studies of early-twentieth-century African American writers have recovered an "Atlantic" or "cosmopolitan" perspective, Dawahare locates in the Marxist-based socialist and communist movements of the interwar period a color-blind internationalism and working-class consciousness that exceeded exclusionary racial or U.S. national identity formations. In a challenging critical move, Dawahare asks us to "read dialogically" (35), to place...