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African Americans, Culture and Communism (Part 2): The Black Cultural Front
The Cry Was Unity: Communist and African Americans, 1917-1936 by Mark Solomon (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1998) 403 pages, $17 paperback.
New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars by William J. Maxwell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 254 pages, $17.50 paperback.
Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1936-46 by Bill V. Mullen (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999) 242 pages, $16.95 paperback.
The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946 by James Edward Smethurst (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 288 pages, $45 hardcover.
WILLIAM MAXWELL'S 254-PAGE New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (including a handsome thirteen-page insert of photographs and illustrations), puts cultural flesh on the organizational and political scaffolding constructed by Mark Solomon. It also reconfigures in startlingly new ways the entire terrain of 1920s-'30s left-wing cultural production.
Maxwell's focus is on the movement of a number of African-American writers from a background of "New Negro" and "Harlem Renaissance" experiences toward the Communist movement in the interwar period. His unique orientation emphasizes a mutual indebtendess, a two-way channel "between radical Harlem and Soviet Moscow, between the New Negro renaissance and proletarian literature." This interchange is the reason why the explanation for such a development "cannot be pursued without acknowledging both modern Black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to modern Black literature."
Moreover, the importance of the Harlem/Moscow transit in Black cultural history also explains the reason why the disillusionment of a handful of African-American Leftists was expressed so fervently after the 1930s and has received so much attention.
Maxwell's emphasis on "Black volition" and the "interracial education of the Old Left" corresponds to Solomon's research; but Maxwell aims to enhance our understanding of African-American and "white" modern literature as well as radicalism.
Included among the misrepresentations of the relationship of "New Negro" (the term for militants in the Harlem Renaissance days) and "Old Left" refuted by Maxwell, are the pre-eminent readings of novels by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison that view the relationship of the left to African Americans as one of manipulation; Black nationalist interpretations of the faults of earlier Black...