Text and Contexts in Afro-American Criticism

Text and Contexts in Afro-American Criticism E.QuitaCraig. Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era: Bei•ond the Formal Horizons. Amherst: The University of MassachusettsPress, 1980. 239 + x pp. AddisonGayle. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. GardenCity, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. 342 + xvi pp. RobertO'Meally. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 212 + ix pp. CarolynWedin Sylvander. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980. 181 + ix pp. Leslie Sanders In a 1950 essay, Blyden Jackson suggested to Phylon readers that AfroAmericanliterature had come of age and that what remained was the critical taskof examining its contents, elucidating its meaning and placing it within aliterarytradition. Since that time, a battle has raged over how to accomplish thattask, principally over whether established critical canons properly illuminateblack literature. Most stridently as a revolt against all established critical canonsin the sixties and early seventies, more recently as a controversy over current methods, the debate continues. The debate is not confined to AfroAmerican literature; in that field, however, it acquires a certain urgency, forthe soil is fresh and comparatively untilled, the task immediate and vital. The books under review vary widely in subject, but all are rooted in a particular concern, some more explicitly than others. That concern isto give anaccount of the social and political history which is context for the artist's workand life. Moreover, all deal with writers for whom the meaning of one's socialidentity is a subject of art. To disclose the social and political context istoimply the necessity of asking a further question: how the artistic process andthe art itself is shaped and influenced by its context. The degree to which eachofthe books under review has seen and responded to that further question isthe focus of my evaluation. Addison Gayle's political biography of Richard Wright discloses and makes amatter of record what has long been suspected: that once Wright achieved Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 3, Fall 1983,343-52 344 Leslie Sanders prominence, he was subjected to continual and at times intense harassment by various branches of the U.S. Government at home and abroad. Gayle's expose of this aspect of Wright's life prepares the way for, but does not engage in, an examination of how Wright's politics shaped his art, a seemingly obvious approach to his work, but one that is rarely taken. Robert O'Meally's The Craft of Ralph Ellison, the first full-length study of this important and influential writer, concretizes the meaning of one of the axioms particularly crucial to black criticism since the sixties, the presence and effect of the AfroAmerican folk tradition in the work of black writers. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander's James Baldwin raises no questions. It is intended as an introduction to Baldwin's life and work and, while useful for its bibliographic essay and its information, adds little to Baldwin criticism. In contrast, E. Quita Craig's Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era, a study of plays by several little known Afro-American dramatists whose works were unearthed among the Federal Theatre Papers (themselves discovered only in 1974 in an airplane hangar in Baltimore, Maryland), fills one of the disturbing gaps in the histol} of Afro-American theater and is an exciting, if idiosyncratic, addition to books in the field. In Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son Gayle sets out to illuminate the role of ideology and politics in Wright's life. While in other respects he offers little information beyond that provided by Wright himself in Black Boy and American Hunger and by earlier biographers, his access to 227pages of government files, made possible by the Freedom of Information Act, gives Gayle grounds for a thorough consideration of Wright's political experience and its effect on his life and art. The book's title is well chosen: Wright's relations with the Communist Party and the intense government pressure on him both in the U.S. and in Paris truly constituted an ordeal for the sensitive Wright, the dimensions of which have not previously been revealed. Of course that Wright was frequently under surveillance should come as...