The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945-1950

CHAPTER ONE: Beyond Protest: Retracing the Margins of the Postwar African American Novel

7 CHAPTER ONE Beyond Protest: Retracing the Margins of the Postwar African American Novel To re-create the conditions of the production of the African American novel between 1945 and 1950, we must not only recover the lost voices of the time, we must pry open a space in the critical models available for theorizing postwar African American culture. Critical reassessments of this era have proliferated in the past twenty years,with the end of the ColdWar providing cultural historians with both a sense of closure for a long-standing global narrative and a rich source of archival materials from the former Soviet Union and its satellites.Early contributions to the field include Lary May’s pioneering collection, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1989), Stephen J.Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1990), and W. T. Lhamon’s cultural history, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (1990). Often, however, the focus has been on the work of white writers, while black musicians and (more rarely) visual artists have stood in for the cultural production of African Americans more generally. Ralph Ellison provides the single exception, yet even Ellison criticism is problematic: the durable comparison between the aesthetic of Invisible Man and that of a symphonic jazz composition, for example, blurs the boundaries between music and writing, managing the oxymoronic feat of marginalizing the canonical.Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (2002) offers a refreshing shift from Ellison to John A.Williams and Alice Walker as representative Cold War African American novelists, but the fact that the works he discusses date from the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, Retracing the Margins of the Postwar African American Novel 8 respectively,again underscores the absence of attention to black writing of the late 1940s and 1950s. Instead of nuance, we have received a tidy narrative. The critical truism is that with the publication of Native Son in 1940,“America was aroused out of her contumelious indifference” to black writers (Chandler 28).Wright’s work galvanized readers with a new genre, the gritty social realist novel, which redefined African American literature and accordingly provided a template for “authentic” work by black writers for the next twenty years. Jeff Karem’s The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures (2004) offers a useful analysis of the shift that Native Son is presumed to have inaugurated and encapsulated.As scholars such as J. Martin Favor have established,“authenticity” in African American writing before 1940, even when it was produced in the urban north, was overwhelmingly identified with a “folk” culture rooted in the rural South. That assumption, Karem notes, limited Wright even as it paradoxically established his credibility as a black urban observer; although Native Son defied readers’ expectations for another regional portrait of black life in the mold of Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, most were willing to trust Wright’s knowledge of black life because of his southern provenance. Wright’s investment in both the conventions of realism and leftist politics also clearly allowed a line of influence to be drawn between Native Son and subsequent literature and art produced by African Americans. Literary historian Stacy I. Morgan offers a detailed and subtle treatment of the period that is representative of a growing body of critical work focusing on the African American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. In Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (2004), Morgan identifies the 1940s and early 1950s as the high-water mark of social realism for African American “cultural workers.” Although contemporary literary scholars usually identify social realism with the Great Depression, according to Morgan, “the careers of African American cultural workers tell a different story, one that extends for at least a full decade beyond the bounds of conventional periodizations. . . . [M]any of the more striking works of social realism produced by African Americans date from the 1940s and early 1950s” (21). Morgan’s thesis reflects the substantial body of influential work produced in recent years by scholars operating at the intersection of critical Retracing the Margins of the Postwar African American Novel 9 race theory and cultural histories of the U.S. Left, such as Bill V. Mullen , James Smethurst, and Alan...