Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

Preface

vii Preface The year 1919 has for some time had a particular resonance for me. John Dos Passos, about whom I long ago wrote a Ph.D. dissertation , named the second volume of his extraordinary U.S.A. trilogy after this critical juncture. As both a leftist who came of age in the late 1960s and a scholar who increasingly focused on African American literature, I became aware that the so-called Red Summer of 1919—signifying at once the political repression of leftists and the bloody suppression of black rebellion—marked a moment in the struggle for human liberation in the United States when the issues of class and race were so closely linked that they could—and can—be separated only by a perverse act of will. It was when I began probing into the archive of wartime and postwar New Negro journalism, however, that I came to appreciate the full extent to which 1919 functioned as a revolutionary crucible, definitively shaping not just self-proclaimed radicals but many mainstream participants in and observers of history in the making. Although the radical movement subsided —and, as Dos Passos was to put it, the bankers “took a deep breath” while the “bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safe-deposit vaults”1—the spectre of revolution continued to haunt the United States for some time. Even Alain Locke’s New Negro (1925), which is commonly held to have wrested leadership of the New Negro movement away from the radicals and placed it firmly in the hands of the culturalists, showed in its various drafts multiple efforts to efface the burrowings of the old mole of revolution. Hence my appropriation of Marx’s rhetoric of 1849 for the conjuncture of some seventy years later: the warning issued in The Com- viii Preface munist Manifesto echoed loudly—as a challenge to some, a warning to others—in the wake of the World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Red Summer of 1919. Spectres of 1919 aims to contribute to the growing body of revisionary scholarship testifying to the significant involvement of African Americans in leftist politics, which remains to this day one of the bestkept secrets of U.S. history. This study also takes a position in debates over race, class, and nation that, largely originating in the crucible of 1919, have continued to shape political activism and cultural production to this day. In particular, it queries the efficacy of nationalism—whether cultural pluralist nationalism, self-determinationist nationalism, or ethnic or racebased nationalism—as a means to emancipate those bearing the yoke of oppression and exploitation. I lend support to the argument that nationalism may well turn out to have been the Achilles heel of twentieth-century mass movements for liberation. Even as I highlight the importance of postwar African American radicalism in understanding the politics, activist and cultural, of the 1920s and beyond, I thus focus on the ways in which that radicalism at once opened up and delimited the potential for a fundamentally transformative politics. While Spectres of 1919 has been guided partly by political and historical concerns beyond the realm of the literary, it is centrally concerned with questions of discourse and trope. It bears mentioning here that this study was first conceived as a context-setting discussion of a study of Jean Toomer, whose masterwork Cane (1923) is often viewed as the first significant text of the Harlem Renaissance. As so often happens with projects of this kind, the “background” discussion mushroomed into an investigation and an argument in its own right; while I expect to follow up this volume with two additional volumes treating the life and work of Toomer, Spectres of 1919 now has a being entirely apart from the author of Cane. The examination of the trope of roots and soil that will focus my discussion of Toomer is prepared for here, however, in my formulation of a strategy of representation, both political and discursive, that I am calling “metonymic nationalism,” which I find useful in approaching the connection between ideology and image in much writing of the Harlem Renaissance. Briefly, metonymic nationalism refers to a practice of establishing a claim to legitimacy and belonging through a series of linkages that posits the nation at one end, black folks at the other, and soil and region in between the two. In a society that was dominated by the nativist rhetoric of...