Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995

1. The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the "Vital Link": Histories and Institutions

1 The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the “Vital Link” Histories and Institutions Feminism, Marxism, and Black nationalism have had contentious relationships with each other, to say the least. How is it, then, that the Communist Party’s theory and tactics of African American nationhood gave rise to the Black internationalist feminist tradition that came into its own in the post–World War II era? This chapter investigates the histories of African American involvement with the Communist Left that shaped Black women writers’ strategic commitments to national liberation as they strove to represent emancipatory enactments of gender and sexuality. I begin by discussing the intertwining of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the CP’s Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. Jones’s Marxist analysis of gender must be understood in light of her leadership in reviving the Black Belt Nation Thesis and its internationalist implications. Her Black internationalist feminism carried over into the cultural front, creating spaces within the Left for writing by and about African American women. I conclude by examining the primary institutions through which Black women writers represented nonheteropatriarchal identities and alignments in the process of exploiting the possibilities for African American freedom that national liberation throughout the Third World opened up. The antagonism between Black nationalism and Communism is better known than their intersections, but the origins of the Black Left undeniably complicate this narrative. As Robin Kelley writes, “African Americans who joined the Party in the 1920s and 1930s were as much the creation of American communism as of black nationalism; as much the product of African American [and Afro-Caribbean] vernacular cultures and radical traditions as of Euro-American radical thought.” This is made evident by considering the major source of the first known Black Communists, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). This revolutionary Black nationalist order, which was established in 1919 on the heels of the Red Summer’s wave of racial terror, advocated armed self-defense and African liberation along with interracial labor/left solidarity. Many ABB members hailed from the West Indies, including Cyril Briggs, Richard Moore, Otto Huiswood, Arthur Hendricks, Claude McKay, and W. A. Domingo, and the colonial and immigrant background of these Black radicals honed their awareness of both national oppression and class exploitation. A turning point in ABB founder Cyril Briggs’s politics came with the first congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, which “topp[ed] Wilson’s post-war principle of national self-determination with outright calls for revolution in the colonial world, backed by promises to aid it.” When the short-lived ABB folded in the early 1920s, its members turned to the CPUSA, which had been established in 1919, “largely because of the Communist International ’s commitment to supporting ‘racial and national movements against imperialism.’” While the emergent CPUSA tended to either ignore issues of race or reduce them to economic factors, the Soviet Union—which owed the success of its revolution to minorities within the Russian Empire—perceived African Americans to be strategically important as the largest and most oppressed minority group in the United States. Consequently, the Soviet-dominated Comintern not only pushed the CPUSA to fight for Black rights but also welcomed African Americans to the USSR as visitors, settlers, students to be trained at multinational Soviet schools, and Comintern delegates and speakers . There is good evidence that in the latter positions, Black Americans and Afro-Caribbeans impacted Communist theory on the national question. ABB member and Communist Claude McKay, for example, appears to have influenced the crafting and adoption at the 4th World Congress of the Com32 . CHAPTER 1 intern in 1922 of the “Theses on the Negro Question,” which declared that the “Negro problem has become the urgent and decisive question for world revolution” and that “the Negroes’ fight against imperialism is not the fight of one nation, but of all the nations of the world.” These theses...