Art as propaganda: didacticism and lived experience

Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Jan, 2005 by Khaled Aljenfawi

For example, Ray in Claude McKay's novel Home to Harlem can represent an African American individual who does not see any importance to ideas like art as propaganda. While discussing the importance of education with Grant, another character in McKay's novel, Ray explains that "it's all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point of view in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it's quite another thing." (13) What Ray demands is an education that "make[s] [him] a sharp, snouty, rooting hog." (14) To be a sharp, snouty and rooting hog might be Ray's definition of living through the struggle of life undeterred by its inhibitions and challenges. One wonders whether such a high-flown concept such as art for propaganda ever turned ordinary African American individuals into sharp and rooting hogs? In other words, art of propaganda did not seem to provide Ray with social and practical skills to dig his way through the harsh realities of the African American condition.

In addition, the tension arising from the clash between the ideologies of art as propaganda, as represented by Du Bois with artists' personal artistic visions, who, as mentioned earlier, were living and experiencing African American's daily life, might have resulted from the use of the term propaganda. I will trace the origin of the term Propaganda and explain how Du Bois' use of the term Propaganda to describe the new mission of art in the African American Harlem context is erroneous and misleading.

Before voicing his famous call, "art is propaganda and ever must be," Du Bois situates his ideological and aesthetic understanding of art in specific cultural, social, and aesthetic contexts. In his famous speech, Du Bois explains that the "Negro Youth" can restore beauty to the world. (15) Beauty that "human beings are chocked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly." (16) It is the Negro Youth, according to Du Bois, who can bring a "new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be." (17) Indeed, the Negro Youth, according to Du Bois are a "different kind of Youth, because in some new way it bears this mighty prophesy on its breast, with a new realization of itself, with new determination for all mankind." (18) In addition, the Negro Youth, according to Du Bois has to [tell] the truth and exposes evil and seeks with beauty and for beauty to set the world right. That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect beauty sits above Truth and Right, [according to Du Bois] I can conceive, but here and now and in the world in which I work they are for me unseperated and inseparable. (19) Using such a platonic discourse, Du Bois tries to explain how one can find beauty in daily life.

He narrates a story of two sisters, one who is white, and the other who is brown. The white sister marries a white man, and when her brown sister prepares to go to her wedding, the mother refuses to let her. Eventually, the brown sister "went into her room and turned on the gas and died." What is important for Du Bois in narrating this story, which might be a real story, is that it represents for him a "Greek Tragedy." (20) What is significant to notice here, is that Du Bois seems to borrow some of his descriptions of the excellency of art from classical references. In other words, though he encourages the Negro Youths and artists to borrow from their own history and their own daily life, still, in order to illustrate his points, he frequently brings in examples from the classics. This borrowing of terms like "Greek Tragedy" might not be an explicit indicator of Du Bois' favoring classical notions of art. Indeed, like many middle-class African Americans intellectuals, Du Bois received what one might call today a classical education, a remnant of Nineteenth-Century educational curriculums, but it is curious that he uses the term propaganda and Greek Tragedy in the same context.