Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Tony Martin

John Cullen Gruesser. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 218 pp. $29.95.

Black on Black is an interesting discussion of selected twentieth-century African American literary works focusing on Africa. Gruesser posits a clear progression from "Ethiopianist" writing at the turn of the century to its antithesis, "The Movement Away from Ethiopianism," at the century's end. He defines Ethiopianism as an African American belief that Africa was once great, that ancient Greeks resorted thereto for learning, that African Americans can associate themselves with this glorious heritage, that Africa will rise again (what he calls a cyclical view of history), and that African Americans can play a significant role in the regeneration of Africa.

He considers this "Ethiopianist myth" to be mystical, ahistoric, and paternalistic. Although he denounces Mary "Lefkowitz's vigorous but superficial attack on Afrocentrism," he is nevertheless in substantial agreement with her. For "in its most extreme forms," he says, "Afrocentrism [that is to say, latter-day Ethiopianismi poses a danger to the integrity of American higher education." Lefkowitz, he says, is "inaccurate and even irresponsible" in tracing the "myth" only as far back as Marcus Garvey. She should have situated it "within the much larger context of Ethiopianism." Having so situated it, Gruesser finds that the Ethiopianist/Afrocentrist threat to academia has in fact receded steadily over the last century.

Gruesser begins his study with the early-twentieth-century writings of Sutton Griggs, Pauline Hopkins, and John E. Bruce and proceeds to the New Negro Movement of the post-World War I period. Here he sees a movement away from Ethiopianism. He identifies the most significant literary "texts" of the New Negro period as Shirley Graham's opera Tom Tom, Langston Hughes's autobiography The Big Sea, and George Schuyler's novel Slaves Today.

He next considers the literary response to the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Despite some initial Ethiopianist sentiment, he sees this period as moving toward Marxist and other anti-Ethiopianist positions. He discusses the Ethiopian poems of Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson and the latter's unfinished novel, The Lion and the Jackal. It is George Schuyler, however, author of the Black Empire novels, whom he sees as the most important voice of this period, and indeed the most important African American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. Schuyler is very hostile to Marcus Garvey and most manifestations of Ethiopianism, though this does not prevent him from appropriating many Ethiopianist dreams for Pan-African cooperation.

Gruesser follows with a chapter on Tolson's long poem Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), which he considers a further giant step away from Ethiopianism. Yet he claims that Tolson relies on W. E. B. Du Bois's The World and Africa, one of the eclectic Du Bois's most Ethiopianist works. Gruesser's discussion of Tolson also evokes shades of Marcus Garvey's epic poem "The Tragedy of White Injustice," though Gruesser does not make the connection.

Gruesser's argument for a steady progression away from Ethiopianism culminates in a discussion of late-twentieth-century works, including Richard Wright's travel book Black Power, Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker, whose controversial treatment of Africa and Pan-Africanists Gruesser sees as demonstrating the end of Ethiopianism.

While Gruesser's work is thought-provoking and provides a useful starting point for debate, there are several problems that may be raised. His overall thesis of a steady progression from Ethiopianism to its antithesis cannot be proven by the arbitrary selection of writings he chooses to synopsize. He presents no objective standard for selection. His chosen works include novels, serialized newspaper fiction, poems long and short, an opera, travel literature, and autobiographies. Some had limited print runs and circulated primarily in the African American community. Others, like Alice Walker's work, had the benefit of major publishing houses and were presumably read mostly by white people. The only consistent thread running through Gruesser's commentary is a decided preference for writers hostile to the Pan-African sentiments of the Ethiopianists.

Were the early works of, say, Pauline Hopkins and John E. Bruce Ethiopian because they were published by and intended primarily for African Americans? This question is not addressed. Were there similarly African American publishers of Ethiopianist literature during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the Afrocentric movement of the 1990s? Gruesser does not address this point. If he had, he might have discovered that the Ethiopianist/Black Arts/Afrocentrist tradition was alive, well, and flourishing, even in the age of Alice Walker.

Where whole genres of Black art exist and do not fit into Gruesser's linear scheme, he simply shunts them off to the sidelines of this study. As in the case of the Black Arts Movement, he is aware of the tremendous impact of the Marcus Garvey Movement on the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. Yet while acknowledging the Ethiopianist expression of much Garveyite writing, he seems somehow to place Garvey on the fringes of the New Negro Movement. This allows Gruesser to self-fulfill his prophecy that the "writers most closely associated with the New Negro Movement"--Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay--were non-Ethiopianist.