Playing in the Dark, on the Left, and Out of Bounds: Nelson Algren, World War II, and the Cross-Racial Imagination of Blackness

How do we evaluate the representation and figurative appropriation of racial blackness by nonblack writers? This essay addresses the work blackness accomplishes in texts authored by nonblack writers pursuing radical projects defined at least in part as anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Do such texts necessarily silence African American voices and thus inadvertently reinforce the racist distortion and caricature of African American subjectivity? Or can they sometimes, under certain circumstances, articulate valuable sociopolitical analyses and utopian hopes that depend on their imaginative constructions of blackness and the black subject? This essay considers the potentials of what Toni Morrison calls “playing in the dark,” the cross-racial literary construction of blackness, by examining a little-known yet richly instructive text that approaches playing in the dark with surprising self-reflexivity and historical awareness: Jewish American Communist writer Nelson Algren’s World War II short story “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn.”¹

The story appears in Algren’s 1947 collection The Neon Wilderness, published following his return from military service in Europe. “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn” is based on Algren’s own wartime experiences, but the story’s protagonist is an African American GI who, after deserting the US Army at the end of World War II, hides out in Marseilles and survives by trading on the city’s black market. The story is important to recover for multiple reasons. In the first place, Algren’s marginal status in current US literary studies can be traced to his postwar reputation as a sentimental writer of dated protest fiction. Citing what he saw as the “technical conservatism” and melodramatic, Depression-style political “platitudes” of Algren’s work, Leslie A. Fiedler dubbed him “the Last of the Proletarian Writers” (43).² But “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn” testifies to Algren’s continued relevance, informing concerns about the fates of subjectivity, collective identity, and radical politics in a world dominated by the market and the commodity. Furthermore, as a story of historically situated African American experience and identity authored by a white radical, “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn” suggests that the judicious and self-aware cross-racial imagination of blackness can actually orient and enhance the theoretical and aesthetic inventiveness of engaged writing. Through Algren’s imagining of black subjectivity, “He Couldn’t Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn” crafts original insights into the dynamics of capital and empire while imagining new modes of revolutionary resistance and international communal identification.

In Playing in the Dark (1992), Morrison calls for an investigation of the “imaginative uses” of “a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona” in the work of nonblack American writers. Morrison asks us to examine the various ways in which white writers have played in and with the “denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify” (6). While Morrison focuses on exploitative and fetishizing figurations of blackness that prop up normative constructions of white identity and subjectivity, she nonetheless suggests that some form of engagement with the Africanist presence is a necessary condition of the production of all literature in a nation whose cultural and political identities are structured in relation to race and racial ideology (6-7). She outlines a critical project that seeks to “examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions” (11). Kim Q. Hall writes that Playing in the Dark, by examining the textual articulation of race as an identity category, “has profoundly influenced many scholars in feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies” (274). This essay expands the application of Morrison’s paradigm by bringing it to the study of US leftist writing, Marxist theory, and the formal procedures of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist aesthetic practice.

Playing in the dark is always a risky undertaking. It brings with it an overwhelming tendency to occlude, silence, or eradicate black difference and to make blackness merely a...