Subversive Journalism
Bryant, Earle V., ed. Byline
Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015.
Such recent dedicated scholarship as Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the
1950s and William J. Maxwell’s F.B.
Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s
Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature serves as a warrant for
thinking of contemporary literary and cultural studies as components of a mega-surveillance
machine. Readers and critics cooperate, often unwittingly, with publishing
conglomerates and official agencies of detection in panoptical activities that
exceed the scrutiny imagined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.
Technological progress encourages us to abandon dreams of a liberated
future and to accept dystopia as self-evidently “normal.” For Richard Wright
scholars, the publication of Indonesian
Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung
Conference (Duke University Press, Spring 2016) by Brian Russell Roberts
and Keith Foulcher will create an opportunity for more speculation about the
function of journalism in Wright’s imagination as well as raising devastating
questions about how the journalism of Ida B. Wells and Ishmael Reed assist us
to understand what was and is African American literature. We do need to explore
Black print cultures more thoroughly in relation to the production of Black
literatures. In this sense, Earle V.
Bryant’s long-awaited Byline Richard
Wright has a significant mediating function.
Perhaps financial exigencies are responsible for the
University of Missouri Press’s delayed printing of Bryant’s editing and
commentary on a number of Wright’s Daily
Worker articles from 1937 and the essays “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite”
(1935) and “High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom” (1938) from New Masses. Bryant, a Professor of English at the
University of New Orleans, had been working on this project, very quietly, for
more than a decade. The delayed publication does not compromise his effort to
map underexplored territory in Wright Studies.
It does, unfortunately, increase the likelihood that his work will get
less attention than it deserves.
Giving notice to time and space, as Thadious M. Davis does
in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), reifies the value of chronology in examining
Wright’s growth. Her methodological
choices ensure that we link Wright’s emergence as a journalist with his
assignments in subdivisions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
especially the Illinois Writers Project, without diminishing notice of his simultaneous
participation in Chicago’s South Side Writers group and brief membership
(1934-35) in the John Reed Club. On the other hand, Bryant chose to arrange the
Daily Worker articles by theme
---urban conditions in New York, war in Spain and China, heroism, Marxist
interest in the Scottsboro case, and art in the service of life. By avoiding
strict chronology, Bryant is able to foreground his insightful analyses of
political implications and aesthetic qualities in Wright’s journalism, to tell
us many things about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s accomplishments. Byline is Bryant’s effort “to bring
Wright’s early newspaper work out of obscurity and into the light where it can
be read and appreciated” (10).
There is a mixed blessing in Bryant’s book being in our
hands after the works by Washington, Maxwell, and Davis, because the rigor of
their scholarship sets the bar for critical attention to Wright very high. Bryant’s work provides an opportunity to
think about how African American and left-leaning journalism has been necessarily
subversive and critical of efforts to sell the American Dream. To be sure, Byline encourages more thinking about how subversion operates under
surveillance. The minor failure in Bryant’s scholarship, however, is his not
supplying a full listing of all the Daily
Worker articles Wright wrote and glosses or explanatory footnotes for the
articles selected from the full range of what is available. Yes, students and scholars who might use
Bryant’s book can surf the Internet to get information about topical references
in the articles, but Bryant would have enhanced the value of his book by
supplying them in the text. It is odd
that Bryant chose to say nothing about what Wright might have learned from
Frank Marshall Davis about the art of journalism. It is even odder that H. L. Mencken is not
mentioned in Byline, because Wright
made a special point of acknowledging his discovery of Mencken in a Memphis
newspaper and his indebtedness to the work of Mencken as one of America’s most
influential journalists, prose stylists, and social critics. It is baffling why
Bryant seems to attribute the claim “All art is propaganda” to Wright on page
215, when it is a widely known that W. E. B. DuBois used that wording in his
essay “Criteria of Negro Art” in the October 1926 issue of Crisis. Shortcomings notwithstanding, Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses
can quicken interest in exploring more profoundly the journalistic aspects of Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain and Richard Wright’s bracing
subversiveness. Wright deserves more credit for his prophetic panopticism.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 11, 2015
