Nationalist Blackness

There is a delightful piece of apocrypha in which Richard Nixon, then vice president, runs into Louis Armstrong at an airport (in most versions it is Paris; in others Moscow or Tokyo or Rio) and invites the trumpeter to join him aboard Air Force Two for the flight home. Nixon is thoroughly charmed by Armstrong, with whom he chats most of the flight. "Pops, is there anything I can do for you?" Nixon asks. "Well, Mr. Vice President," replies Armstrong, who is known to keep a sizeable stash of marijuana in his trumpet case, "it would be an honor to have you hold my trumpet when we get off the plane." Nixon agrees, no doubt liking the semiotics of this act, its potential conferral of political capital and something that will soon be called "soul." So off the plane, into the terminal, and through customs stride Armstrong and Nixon, both all smiles. Outside the airport, Nixon hands back Armstrong's instrument and contraband and the two part company, each the richer for the experience. For Armstrong in this case, embracing the nation-state (literally holding on to its penultimate embodiment, Nixon) despite its ongoing legal and political subjugation of African Americans, proved an effective strategy for accomplishing his goal. It was something on which he might have reflected on the ride back to his home in Queens.

We might read this legend as yet another variation on the "trickster" tale pervasive in African diasporic texts, or we may consider it as an instance of what Adam Green, in his provocative book Selling the Race, calls the "cultural initiative" of African Americans at midcentury. In Green's view, this quality consists of the capacity to improvise, to adapt, and to inflect—rather than resist—the dominant structures of American modernity. Selling the Race thus participates in what we might call the "agnostic turn" in U.S. cultural historiography since the mid-1980s. Drawing on the tradition of immanent critique found in American pragmatism, this turn looks to the dominant economic social forms of modernity for their (often accidental) progressive effects, and, perhaps more importantly, attempts to draw out the transformational potential that these structures and institutions harbor, unrealized though that potential remains. Unlike the majority of left historians of the past quarter-century, who have tended to view corporate capitalism, the consumer marketplace, the crisis of autonomous subjectivity, the nation-state and civic nationalism, and liberalism itself as prohibitive of more socialist and democratic visions of human association and production, scholars aligned with this recent turn frame these entities as precursors—with all the deficiencies of the prototype—of more robustly democratic social forms yet to be built. The essence of this turn, according to James Livingston, one of its key navigators, is the deployment of a "comic" rather than a tragic perspective on corporate capitalism and the worlds it made.¹ Its equal measures of ambivalence and hope toward the corporate remaking of American life distinguish this scholarship from the declension narratives of most left cultural history and from the market triumphalism advanced by a chorus of neoliberal voices both inside and outside the academy.

Selling the Race is among the first studies of twentieth-century African America to follow this turn. As such it challenges, but also complements, recent work critical of liberal and market-oriented strategies for racial assertion and recognition. Nikhil Pal Singh's Black is a Country, for example, focused on midcentury black intellectuals' repudiation of American universalist ideology and search for a resistant political consciousness that would "not fold blacks back into a liberal nationalist narrative of American freedom."² By contrast, Green emphasizes that "even as black modernism established its own terms of inquiry, much remains to be learned from the more conventional tenets of the modern, even when these fail, in part or outright, to account for human life and action beyond the European continent" (p. 3). Moreover, whereas Singh treated the construction of a supranational blackness, Green...