TIMELY INTELLIGENCE WALKS INTO VIEW
Washington, Mary Helen. The
Other Blacklist: The African American
Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Cloth. 347 pp.
ISBN 978-0-231-15270-9.
When you reach a certain age, you can tell a truth without
fear. It is a truth that I think highly of Mary
Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist
in much the same way I think highly of Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative
History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011). They complement one another. Both books
address literary and cultural issues with scholarly and critical grace. They are readable and enhanced by
conversational style. They minimize
pretense. Were I teaching a graduate seminar on research, these books would be
two of the printed texts. They are that
good. While both books are touchstones of effective writing and rhetorical
eloquence, Washington’s book is especially good in its specificity about the
aims, procedures, and probable outcomes of seeking a balance of qualitative and
quantitative research methodologies. It is a truth that I am prejudiced in
favor of empiricism and common sense in literary and cultural studies; I have
severe reservations about the excesses of the speculative and think intellectual
fireworks are ultimately reductive.
Washington’s book has been many years in the making, but our
waiting for its publication has not been in vain. By virtue of exacting
documentation, she explores key issues in historiography and a researcher’s
historicity. This is a trait we find in
the most useful examples of work in cultural studies. She does not disguise her ideology with the
Latinate illocutions best used in canonizing saints literary and otherwise.
Clean prose satisfies her needs and ours. In the intellectual climate begot, in
part, by fear of increased Federal domestic surveillance, revelations about the
sacred secrets of Cold War politics, and confusion about the purposes of
discourses in the Age of Information ---in that climate, what Washington has
done is justifiable. She is forthright in announcing her research question in
the Introduction: “ What happens if you
put the black literary and cultural Left at the center of African American
studies of the Cold War?” (13).
The most immediate answer is that you write The Other Blacklist. You conduct interviews. You spend many hours
doing archival work and reading empowering secondary works by Sterling Stuckey,
Harold Cruse, Michael Denning, Trudier Harris, James Smethurst, Robin D. G.
Kelley, Frances Stonor Saunders, and others. You abstain from the seductive
pleasures of theory and endeavor to make persuasive connections and
interpretations among life histories, hardcore pre- and post-Cold War politics,
and the functions of criticism, aesthetics, and writing that desires to have
the status of what counts as “literature” in the United States and other parts
of the world. You agonize over the multitude of other questions your research
question spawns. You avoid being tendentious.
As you explore the Cold War tropics of discourse, you succeed in writing
a book that will appeal to your peers as well as to general readers who wish to
know what is still being withheld from us about labor, literary inclusion and
exclusion, practices of literacy and the endless quest for justice and freedom.
Or, better yet, why many of us can feel that maximized national security
policies have made us hostages without sanctuary.
One of the peculiar features of The Other Blacklist is how frequently Washington uses such phrases
as “what I want to do,” “what I have tried to do,” “I trace,” “I chart,” “my
intention is to show.” These simple
declarations of intention and desire have the cumulative effect of exposing
Washington’s awareness that research findings are provisional not definitive. From my vantage, her rhetorical strategies do
not betray trepidation about her authority or depth of knowledge. Rather they inspire greater confidence that
she knows what she is discussing and why she is seeking to discover what many
scholars, anthologists, and critics have chosen to ignore or denigrate. Respecting
the limits of critical thought as one triumphs over those limits is the mark of
the seasoned scholar. Washington seems to be determined that we understand
concerns about labor and race, about work, led some African American writers
and artists to embrace leftist ideologies or the Communist Party and that their
choices of remaining in the leftist orbit or departing from it were complex not
simple. One must turn to Cedric Robinson’s Black
Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) and Harold Cruse’s
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) for fuller
explanations of those choices. In this matter of political choices they were
not unlike their non-black comrades; they were very much unlike those comrades,
however, in what they brought to the Left from their vernacular heritage of
folklore, oral traditions and literature, and other forms of cultural
expressiveness. In what she discusses about aesthetics and the Left, Washington
is very clear in noting this fact.
Reading Bernard Bell’s comments in Chapter 6: “Myth, Legend,
and Ritual in the Novel of the Fifties” of The
Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1987) against those which Washington makes about Alice Childress, Lloyd Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frank
London Brown directs attention to the making of knowledge. Bell speaks of parallel movements in the
novel: “a movement away from naturalism and nonracial themes, and a movement
toward the rediscovery and revitalization of myth, legend, and ritual as appropriate
sign systems for expressing the double-consciousness, socialized ambivalence,
and double vision of the modern black experience” (189). The deductive motion of Bell’s assertion
takes us into the region of metahistory. Washington is inductive. She works case by case, trusting particulars
more than organic generalities, as she takes us into the heart of less traveled
territories. Bell and Washington provide divergent insights about how
traditional naturalism and realism got transformed into modernism.
In the chapters on Lloyd L. Brown and Frank London Brown,
Washington makes the fullest display of her analytic and interpretive
powers. Her discussion of Lloyd Brown’s Iron City (1950) as a challenge to
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is
capital. Her use of autobiographical
details derived from F.O.I.A. materials on Frank London Brown to explicate his
first novel Trumbull Park (1959) and to
reconsider why its leftist aesthetics render it something greater that merely a
civil rights novel is a model for understanding how “reality” is transformed
into “fiction.” The chapters on
Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Childress encourage our having more sustained
engagement with their contributions to womanist literary discourse, just as the
chapter on “spycraft” urges us to attend to role of surveillance in American
literary politics. In short, The Other
Blacklist makes a powerful case for our need to understand the Left and the
1950s as a prelude to the now emerging revisionist research on the Black Arts
Movement and its aftermath.
Only after we have read the book in its totality –introduction,
six chapters, epilogue, notes (which frequently prove as exciting as the main
text), and works cited [where a few of us will note the absence of Freedomways 20.3 (Fourth Quarter 1980),
a special issue on Charles White]—do we appreciate fully its didactic logic and
how timely intelligence walks into view.
Washington has written a nuanced guide for future research and
responsible scholarship. The epilogue
firmly expresses one contribution revisionist American literary history can
make to clarify muddled thought about what it means to be an American who reads
by choice or default. Washington uses
Julian Mayfield’s seldom read novel The
Grand Parade (1961) and its final
scene of the young girl Mildred in a newly “integrated” school to make a
stringent critique of the left and suspect, racialized liberalism: “the black
girl , studying and singing for legitimacy, has been assigned her role as the
newly racialized and restigmatized integrated subject, now retooled for the
modern integrationist narrative”(272). The integrationist narrative and its
bastard post-racial narrative grandchild are defunct. Lloyd L. Brown, Charles White, Alice
Childress, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frank London Brown, as Washington aptly
concludes “critiqued the Left even as they believed in many of its goals. In the end they were artists
on the Left on their own terms, experimenters and protestors in both their
activism and their art” (273). Future
American literary histories of all colors ought to inform the public that
little is to be gained from critiques of the always shifting Right, Center, and
Left unless the dominant power of surveillance is recognized. Washington has identified the possibility that
all American writers are protest writers.
Indeed, those writers who might stridently protest that the case is
otherwise, that only the marginalized protest, are the best protestors we shall
ever know.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
May 11, 2014
