Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment by Juliana Spahr (review)

Juliana Spahr’s literary historical study Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment begins with the story of W. E. B. Du Bois’s nonparticipation in the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Du Bois’s passport had been revoked by the US government in 1955 because of his leftist political beliefs, and instead of attending, he sent a telegram claiming that “the government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I belief [sic] in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security” (qtd. in Spahr 2). For Spahr, this telegram amplifies the problem of how literary communities and artists have been entangled with institutions of government and the form of the nation. The content of the telegram is a jumping-off point for Spahr more than an object of primary study: it works as an exemplar of how the State Department is embedded in literary production at the time. When Du Bois underscores earlier in the telegram that the black American writer must not “say the sort of thing which our state Department wishes the world to believe” (qtd. in Spahr 2), he is commenting on the actions of those who have chosen to participate in the Congress, including Richard Wright and James Baldwin, whose political positions have frequently been seen as at odds.

However, in Spahr’s meticulous analysis, Wright’s and Baldwin’s participation in state-sponsored forms of cultural production puts them in complicated positions, raising questions about whether politically motivated writers can make effective anti-hegemonic claims while being part of institutional structures. She writes: “Writers do not have autonomy if their work is obstructed by their own government. . . . When literature is instrumentalized by the government as the good form of protest and then used to suppress more militant dissent, it is not autonomous” (16). Spahr is invested in autonomy and the mutual participation of literature and social movements, but she also remains firmly grounded in her contention that there is no “outside” to institutional capital and that literary production is dependent on the market, which marks a fresh take on post-1945 literature and politics. Spahr takes neither the position of many critics in poetics, who have sometimes claimed that twentieth-century poetry “was in no way connected to the various antistate . . . uprisings” (7), nor the position of scholars who study “movement” literature and are often more optimistic about the potential of literary works to spur sociopolitical change (12). Spahr’s cases, particularly her analyses of national and transnational languages in Native Hawaiian, American Indian, and Chicana/o literatures, contribute to ongoing scholarly discussions about the political possibility of ethnic literatures amid and within global movements of capital. Spahr holds her position of ambivalence while working through her major cases. Furthermore, she considers what is at stake for literary critics who have tackled the matter of literature and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In using case studies and thinking carefully about a historical genealogy that is not necessarily dependent on a given school of thought, Spahr locates political significance, and the potential for political significance, in unexpected places. The book is organized into four primary chapters that address questions of “national” literatures and nationalism, literary resistance and social movements, and the avant-garde. For Spahr, these major questions are fundamentally inseparable; while she attends to historical moments, the study does not rest primarily on a linear historical organization. In her first chapter, Spahr tackles contemporary literature that privileges the use of nonstandard English, hybrid and pidgin languages, and languages other than English. She shows how the writers she studies “focused on English and its role as both the language of imperial and economic globalization and of US nationalism” (33). While the chapter considers other moments and literary projects, much of the attention here is to uses of pidgin and indigenous Hawaiian by Hawaiian writers. Considering Alani Apio’s...