Bill V. Mullen - Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States

Left of the Color Line

The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan, editors

2003 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Designed by April Leidig-Higgins
Set in Monotype Garamond by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Anthony Dawahare's essay, The Specter of Radicalism in Alain Locke's The New Negro, was previously published, in somewhat different form, in Anthony Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), and is reprinted here with permission.

Bill V. Mullen's essay, W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International, was previously published in slightly different form in positions: east asia culture critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 21740, and is reprinted here with permission from Duke University Press.

Alan Wald's essay, Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse, was previously published in Science and Society 64, no. 4 (Winter 20002001): 400423, and is reprinted here with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Left of the color line: race, radicalism, and twentieth-century literature of
the United States / edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst.
p. cm.(The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and
culture) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2799-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8078-5477-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Race in literature.
3. Politics and literatureUnited StatesHistory20th century.
4. Race relationsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. Radicalism
United StatesHistory20th century. 6. Right and left (Political science)
in literature. 7. African Americans in literature. 8. Race relations in literature.
9. Radicalism in literature. 10. Minorities in literature. I. Mullen,
Bill, 1959 II. Smethurst, James Edward. III. Series.
PS228.R32 L44 2003 810.9358dc21 2003005015

cloth 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
paper 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

Bill V. Mullen
James Smethurst
Introduction

Eric Schocket
Modernism and the Aesthetics of Management, or T. S. Eliot's Labor Literature

William J. Maxwell
F. B. Eyes: The Bureau Reads Claude McKay

Anthony Dawahare
The Specter of Radicalism in Alain Locke's The New Negro

Bill V. Mullen
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International

B. V. Olgun
Barrios of the World Unite!:Regionalism, Transnationalism, and Internationalism in Tejano War Poetry from the Mexican Revolution to World War II

Alan Wald
Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse

Barbara Foley
From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man

Mary Helen Washington
Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front

Rachel Rubin
Voice of the Cracker: Don West Reinvents the Appalachian

Michelle Stephens
The First Negro Matinee Idol: Harry Belafonte and American Culture in the 1950s

Fred Ho
Bamboo That Snaps Back!: Resistance and Revolution in Asian Pacific American Working-Class and Left-Wing Expressive Culture

James Smethurst
Poetry and Sympathy: New York, the Left, and the Rise of Black Arts

Marcial Gonzlez
A Marxist Critique of Borderlands Postmodernism: Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Chicano Cultural Criticism

Cary Nelson
The Letters the Presidents Did Not Release: Radical Scholarship and the Legacy of the American Volunteers in Spain

Left of the Color Line

Bill V. Mullen James Smethurst

The relation of the organized Left to the political and cultural life of the United States remains a vexed and contentious issue both inside and outside academia. The taxonomy of the Left, the nature of its parts, and the character and extent of its influence are debated with a ferocity that seems strangely discordant with the alleged end of the Cold War and the demise of existing socialism in Europe, especially in the precincts of the former Soviet Union. A new anti-Communist scholarship that sees the Communist Left in the United States as essentially a tool of Soviet foreign policy contends with revisionist historians and critics (and postrevisionist critics) who view the legacy of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)or at least its rank-and-file memberswith various degrees of sympathy. This volume extends that cultural conversation. It could be considered to be in the revisionist camp but tries to go beyond a number of cultural and political assumptions about the Left and its influence frequently made by revisionist as well as new (and old) anti-Communist scholars, focusing particularly on how race and ethnicity have inflected the impact of the organized Left on literature and culture in the United States as well as on how the consideration (or lack of consideration) of these issues has structured scholarly responses to the subject of the Left and its influence.