Notes
165 Notes INTRODUCTION 1. I have omitted Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) for geographical and generic reasons. CHAPTER ONE 1.Wald notes that“Iron City was intended in some respects as a corrective” (viii) to the tendency Brown saw in Wright and Himes to portray African American characters as victims. Despite this shift of focus, however, it is hard to see Brown’s novel as anything but a protest novel. 2.Werner devotes one chapter to Wright and another to Gwendolyn Brooks; while Werner’s readings of their work are original, it would be difficult to argue that either author qualifies as“undervalued.” 3. This idea of the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of modernity more generally is, according to Paul Gilroy, an important part of Wright’s embrace of existentialism. Gilroy cites C. L. R. James’s remark that Wright saw the experience of the black man in 1930s American society as providing“insight into what today is the universal attitude of the modern personality” (“Black Atlantic” 159). 4. In addition to James Baldwin’s scathing 1961 response to On the Road (“Black Boy”), see Mark Richardson’s“Peasant Dreams” for a detailed critique that baldly links Kerouac’s real-life racist diatribes to his fiction“across a spectrum running from embarrassing, to bad, to abominable” (231). 5. Though it is true that a few publishers, notably Dial Press and Charles Scribner’s Sons, issued novels by African American writers without expressly identifying the authors as black, doing so was hardly standard procedure. CHAPTER TWO 1. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 stipulated that government contractors could not discriminate among workers based on race or national origin; however, the order contained no provision for enforcement. 2. In a move that perfectly illustrates the dominance of the Wright-Ellison pairing at the center of the traditional critical model of the postwar black novel, DicksonCarr relies only on Invisible Man to bolster his thesis that the“inevitable result of Notes 166 the hegemony maintained by the Wright school of social document fiction was a backlash against its form and content” (88). 3. See Mullen’s thought-provoking“Breaking the Signifying Chain” for a fuller discussion of the place of class analysis in African American critical thought; see Breu’s“Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot?” for a thorough discussion of Himes’s embrace of violence as a“positive” signifier for black masculinity. 4. Much of the pioneering theory in this area has focused on Jewish humor. Martin Grotjahn’s summary of the logic behind Jews telling anti-Semitic jokes suggests how the practice strips the racist (or sexist or homophobic) insult of its power:“It is as if the Jew tells his enemies: You do not need to attack us.We can do that ourselves—and even better. But we can take it and we will come out all right” (25). 5. The End of a Primitive was published under that title at this time only in France; the edition copyrighted by the New American Library was edited substantially for“obscenity” and retitled The Primitive. References here are to the 1990 restored version, which makes Himes’s revision of the protest novel form clearer than did previous editions. 6. Bergson’s disguise is related to W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the veil. Du Bois’s suggestion that African Americans live“behind the veil” and as such experience a double consciousness that enables them to see themselves both through their own eyes and as they are perceived by others provides one of the main paradigms for understanding black identity. 7.According to Himes’s biographers, Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre,Walter and his wife are modeled on Ralph and Rose Ellison (186). CHAPTER THREE 1. The same anonymous reviewer or reviewers also recommended Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Marching Blacks and folklorist B.A. Botkin’s Lay My Burden Down, an anthology of slave narratives, warning readers that the former was“violent and very disturbing” but“important” and reassuring them that not only had the latter been compiled by an eminent scholar but“most of the selections are very short” (427–28). 2. The market for fiction about educated and affluent African Americans remained problematic throughout the decade; nevertheless, as Saunders Redding found, it did exist. For a detailed description of Yerby’s experience with the attempted publication of This Is...
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