New Negro, old Left: African-American writing and communism between the wars

Abstract

Maxwell, William J.1999. New Negro, Old Left AfricanAmerican Writing and Communism Between Wars New York: Columbia University Press. $49.50 hc. $17.50 sc. 254 pp James Grove Mount Mercy College For past fifty years, a powerful cultural narrative has defined how many readers approach and discuss history of African-American writing during critical junction between First and Second World Wars. It tells cautionary story of how creative energy of Harlem Renaissance was appropriated, undermined, and finally gutted when so many of its writers were idealistically drawn to Communist Party, then smothered by its reductive proletarian dictates about art. This is a dramatic, alluring story of good versus evil-heightened by its rather clean separation of Harlem Renaissance's glory days (now so often hallowed and mythologized) from high time of American Communism (now so discredited and misunderstood). Populated by striking personalities and talents, narrative is filled with tales of commitment, manipulation, and betrayal, of rebellion, resurrection and redemption-in short, an epic tale where Marxist snake slyly enters Eden and does irreparable damage before being repudiated by so much of African-American literary history. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between Wars is a closely argued, thoroughly researched attempt to show how this dominant narrative has often been misleading and reductive. Following lead of revisionist critics such as Barbara Foley and James A. Miller, Maxwell wants us to rethink debilitating premises behind narrative: there was a white communist seduction and betrayal of black mouthpieces, and that black intellectuals were incapable of transforming their party or their white radical counterparts, save through denunciations issued after escape (5). By painstakingly revealing constant reciprocity between African-American literature and Communist Party during this time, Maxwell persuasively shows these interracial exchanges occurred throughout Harlem Renaissance. They, in fact, energized both sides to examine new ways to solve race problem in United States and did not evaporate in more proletarian 1930's, even though black writers (most notably Claude McKay and Richard Wright) were gradually moving away from party. In short, Maxwell argues for a history of race-radical modernism resists schematic attempts to make this radicalism a product fitting into an ideologically convenient anti-Communist lock-step (whether specific to race, gender, and/or politics). Maxwell's entry into this argument is through his close, Bourdieu-like consideration of long forgotten Andy Rozof, black Bolshevik poet and Tin Pan Alley lyricist, whose career demonstrates how fertile Old Left's intellectual practice was in the full history of renaissance cultural field (59). Maxwell closely analyzes Rozof's unstudied poems (most notably sonnet Don't Tread on Me, convincingly seen as a powerful forerunner of Claude McKay's landmark cry for Negro selfdefense, If I must Die) as well as his songs (especially Black and Blue played so famously by Louis Armstrong and by Ralph Ellison in opening of Invisible Man). Maxwell also examines McKay's relationship to Marxist publication The Crusader and his 1930% musical A Kitchen Mechanic's Revue, a rich mixture of proletarian themes and black folklore. …

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