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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1516-1519



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Review

Rethinking Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture


Bill V. Mullen. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946. Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

In the past five years, the influence of cultural studies and the deepening of social historical investigations have generated a fruitful intellectual environment for the reconsideration of such African-American cultural projects as the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts movement. Journals like Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Souls, and the African American Review have contributed to this new climate, and young scholars, non-African-American as well as African-American, have offered fresh looks at the cultural past. 1 Far from the close literary readings proposed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 2 these women and men carefully situate literary texts and artistic performances within their social and historical contexts, explore the biographies of writers and artists, and find meaning in the intersections of the creators' intentionality, their audiences' desires and reactions, and the richness of the cultural objects themselves. The stimulating results offer contemporary readers, scholars, writers, and artists an opportunity to reconsider the place of cultural work, including literature, within the struggle for a changed society, past, present, and future.

Bill V. Mullen's Popular Fronts is among the best of this new genre. Through the excavation of previously ignored texts and journals (such as Negro Story magazine) and the reinterpretation of well-known, even canonical texts (such as Native Son), Mullen explores the relationship between African-American writing and the left (white and black) in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. He pays particular attention to the relationship between commercialism and radicalism, arguing that the capitalist marketplace might provide a means to disseminate anti-racist and anti-capitalist ideas to a broad public even as it might also function to soften and mitigate the political thrust of cultural work. Mullen's interpretation gives considerable weight to factors of class and gender, as well as race, in the generation and distribution of African-American literary work. He also proffers a dialectical as opposed to dichotomous reading of African-American literature. While he first applies this methodology to Native Son, he practices its tools throughout the book. Native Son and its commercial success, he argues, "adumbrated black aspiration and anxiety over tensions between gradualism and radicalism, cultural immersion and cultural revision, racial marginalization and racial legitimation, capitalist jouissance and capitalist despair" (33). Mullen calls attention to "the numerous readings available in the text of Native Son . . . and the dialectical debate within the black public sphere about the political utility of negative images of black life" (35). Mullen argues for a reading of this canonical text that maintains a dialectical tension between Wright himself and his central character, Bigger Thomas, and between Wright's additional self-representation in Black Boy and his own persona. Mullen's application of his "dialectical" method informs his impressive reconsideration of the political character of African-American writing in this period, one that will interest writers and activists in the present as well as students of the past.

Mullen uses Richard Wright as a key to open multiple doors in Popular Fronts. On the one hand, he wants to demonstrate that Wright's relationship with the left, particularly the Communist Party, was more complex and of longer duration than most scholars have recognized. Mullen reminds his readers that the CP itself and the left more generally was anything but monolithic in the tumultuous 1930s. Wright's views tended to find common cause with those of the proponents of the more radical "third period" (1928-1935) than with those of the "popular front" (1935-1939). It was in this period that the CP embraced the "Scottsboro boys," put white members on trial for racism, and advocated a strategy of "self-determination for the Black Belt." While the party line changed in 1935 in the direction of integration, coalition [End Page 1516] building, and participation in mainstream cultural activities, contention and conflict did not cease. Seen through the lens of...

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