Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandoraâ??s Box

Introduction

Introduction Every minority and suppressed group seeks self-expression. Woodrow Wilson let off the lid of a new Pandora’s box when he so eloquently preached this doctrine as the shibboleth of the war. The Negro seeks self-determination also. Kelly Miller, ‘‘The Harvest of Race Prejudice’’ (1925) Hopelessness is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs. Which is why even deception, if it is to be effective, must work with flatteringly and corruptly aroused hope. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Marxism and nationalism constitute two of the most influential ideologies of the last century. They have generated many cultural and political movements worldwide and have radically transformed conceptions of self, culture , and society in the modern period. The goal of this study is to evaluate the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on a relatively small segment of writers from the twentieth century, particularly black writers from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression-era proletarian literary movement. Living during those tempestuous years of economic crisis and war, many black writers found common cause with nationalist and internationalist ideologies and movements that spoke to their own desires for social equality. The ‘‘new Pandora’s box’’ contained the hope that selfdetermination was still possible, in spite of the many disappointments bred by a history of slavery, segregation, and racism. Indeed, the twenty years between the wars were two of the most politically productive and culturally rich decades of the twentieth century for African American writers. Yet, like the old Pandora’s box, the new one also contained a mess of social evils that were set free during this period, and not only by Wood- xii Introduction row Wilson. My principle argument in this book is that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements during the interwar period, culminating in the Nazi genocide, functioned for a time to divert the legitimate political desires of many black writers for a world without racism along channels that did not throw into question the capitalist foundation of modern racism. Seduced by the promises of the ethnic nationalism of the period, most Harlem Renaissance writers replicated in their literary work many of the pseudo-scientific notions of racial and national identity that capitalism had used since its inception in the United States to deflect attention away from the class basis of exploitation and inequality. I also argue that the strongest black writers of the period are precisely those who did not heed the call of nationalism and were, on the contrary, receptive to the internationalist ideas of the American and European Left. Understanding that receptivity implies availability, I demonstrate that it is during the ‘‘Red Decade’’ that black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of nationalism. Black Communist writers, as well as their white comrades (most of whom are out of the purview of this study), historically anticipate a growing body of contemporary scholarship that reveals the intellectual vapidity and political hazards of nationalism, especially its ability to generate feelings of grandeur in return for the working class’s cooperation in an exploitative peace or an imperialist war. This study, therefore, challenges a reigning paradigm in black literary studies that privileges the cultural nationalist writings of the Harlem Renaissance as the most relevant literature of the interwar period. While I work to demonstrate the dominance of nationalism in the 1920s and Marxism in the 1930s, I also address the ways in which these ideologies coexist in the movements of both decades. That is, on the one hand, throughout the interwar period, Marxism and nationalism confront each other as antagonistic phenomena. Nationalistic texts of the 1920s polemically engage those of Marxism, while Marxist texts of the 1930s engage those of nationalism. On the other hand, we also find combinations of the two ideologies at play in each of the two cultural movements under consideration. We will discover the influence of socialism in the Harlem Renaissance and nationalism in the proletarian literary movement. Marxism and nationalism, in short, belong to an overriding and complex political dialogic of the modern period. This book is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘‘Nationalism in the Harlem Introduction xiii Renaissance,’’ centers on the principle of ethnic nationalism that underwrote World War I, the peace settlement, and the Harlem Renaissance. In individual chapters, I address 1) the postwar movements of and highlycharged debates about black nationalism, socialism...