New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by James A. Miller

William J. Maxwell. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 255 pp. $17.50.

William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left is one of the most recent contributions to a growing body of body of scholarship committed to reassessing the relationships between twentieth-century African American writers and the Communist Party. "The history of African-American letters cannot be unraveled from the history of American Communism without damage to both," Maxwell argues, and his compelling study of African American writing between the 1920s and World War II offers a fresh perspective on the origins of African American literary modernism. This kind of revisionist scholarship requires a direct confrontation with the legacy of Harold Cruse's influential 1967 polemic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, as Maxwell fully understands, but he also casts a critical eye on recent work regarding the Harlem Renaissance, such as George Hutchinson's The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, and, indeed, a well-established tradition in literary history and criticism that has ignored or excised the reciprocal exc hanges between black writers and the Soviet-inspired "Old" Left.

One of the many strengths of this original and meticulously researched study is the way Maxwell' solidly grounds it in the social, political, and intellectual ferment of the 1920s. More than half of the book is devoted to recuperating some of the key debates of the period through its literary and cultural production--beginning with the career of poet-lyricist Andy Razaf, who first came to public attention on the pages of Cyril Briggs's radical journal The Crusader. In the process Maxwell makes a strong case for a much earlier--and dynamic--engagement between black artists and intellectuals and the Old Left than is often assumed. His subsequent discussion of Claude McKay's 1922-23 pilgrimage to the Soviet Union makes a persuasive case for the role McKay played in helping to shape the position of the Comintern on the "Negro Question"; and his discussion of Mike Gold's critical pronouncements, and literary works, revisits the question--central to Harold Cruse's argument--of Jewish/Communist "control" of African American cultural production via the "discipline" of proletarian literature during the 1930s.

Midway through the book, Maxwell shifts his gaze to consider the implications of the interracial radicalism fostered by the Communist Party. He is particularly concerned with the Party's active campaign to deconstruct the "triangular lynch myth" of the black male rapist, the white female victim, and the white male protector--symbolized most dramatically by the infamous Scottsboro case of the 1930s. These struggles, he maintains, produced a counter-myth, an anti-lynch triangle posited on a mutual distaste for white female accusers shared by white and black male proletarians. Against this backdrop, Maxwell's juxtaposition of the Scottsboro writings of Langston Hughes and Louise Thompson provides a sharp critique of the gender politics of the Communist Party, particularly its tendency to masculinize its vision of interracial solidarity, and raises provocative questions about the ambiguities and contradictions of its rhetoric.

The last two chapters of New Negro, Old Left are devoted to Richard Wright. First, Maxwell revisits the now legendary critical conflict between Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, locating their exchange within a larger, ongoing debate about the African American "folk." Along the way, he suggests affinities between Hurston's Anthropology and Wright's Communism that many critics have refused to acknowledge. In the final chapter he juxtaposes Wright's Native Son and his close friend and fellow radical Nelson Algren's Somebody in Boots, two "antibuddy narratives" that offer a sympathetic but sharply critical portrayal of Communist interracial alliances.

In his attempt to unsettle fixed notions about both the Harlem Renaissance and African American literary radicalism, Maxwell covers a wide terrain, juxtaposing familiar writers with less familiar ones and carefully scrutinizing a variety of texts: rediscovered poems, plays, essays, and stories; song lyrics, personal correspondence, and political pamphlets. Deeply immersed in prior scholarship in the field, Maxwell takes great care to interrogate established opinion, pointing out contradictions, ambiguities, and outright errors in earlier arguments-- always with an eye to demonstrating how the dynamics of African American literary production during this period resist easy classification and codification. This is a book that, in Maxwell's words, "mixes the archival and the interpretive," and his readings of individual works and his engagement with contemporary critical debates are fresh, provocative, and deeply engaging.

New Negro, Old Left offers a direct challenge to the paradigms that continue to shape African American literary history. Revisionist scholarship in the best and deepest sense of the term, this is a groundbreaking work that will shape discussion and debate in the field for some time.