From No Man's Land to Mother-land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Anthony Dawahare

Before delving into the psychology of nationalism in Wright's Depression Era writings, we must first briefly work through his cultural history of black Americans, since only at the conclusion of a phase of that history do we find the black nationalist "resolution" of the Oedipal crisis alluded to above. It is well known that Wright was influenced by the Communist Party's (CP's) understanding of nationalism, which was largely based on Stalin's popular book Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (1912). As Wright asserts in "A Blueprint for Negro Writing," he too believed that blacks had a common "national" culture that originally arose from a "plantation-feudal economy" and persisted in the Jim Crow political system of the South.(1) The foundation of this modern black culture lies in the African American folk tradition of the blues, spirituals, work songs, and folk tales (99). Black social institutions, such as the black church, black sports, black business, black schools, and a black press, represent "a Negro way of life in America" (100).

However, Wright implicitly differs from other Communists on an important point: Black cultural nationalism in the U.S. was neither so stable nor so progressive as the CP black nation thesis made out. On the contrary, he views black cultural nationalism as the result of forced common experiences of slavery and segregation that produced an unwanted common black culture. Wright argues that the Negro people did not ask for [their cultural nationalism], and deep down, though they express themselves through their institutions and adhere to this special way of life, they do not want it now. This special existence was forced upon them from without by lynch rope, bayonet and mob rule. ("Blueprint" 100)

Such a nationalism is unstable for Wright because, even though he, like the CP, saw the social history of black Americans as an historical process, it was a process with a very different direction: As he writes in 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Wright perceived "a complex movement of debased feudal folk toward a twentieth-century urbanization" that has occurred at an historically rapid pace (xix; my emphasis). The more or less homogenous black consciousness and cultural community resulting from provincial, Southern material conditions was in the process of being eroded by modernization. Wright contends that

it is in industry that we encounter experiences that tend to break down the structure of our folk characters and project us toward the vortex of modern urban life.... we are gripped and influenced by the world-wide forces that shape and mold the life of Western civilization. (12 Million 115)

For Wright, the feudal black peasantry's liberation lay not in preserving or developing a black "national" culture in the South, but in an historical overcoming of "black" identity and cultural nationalism. In other words, Wright only provisionally accepts the unified cultural identity of the postwar "New Negro," since he favors a "multi-cultural" identity in the process of further socialization by modernity. Nowhere in his literary work, or in his more than 200 articles written for the Daily Worker, do we find an endorsement for the CP's desire for a black republic in the Southern Black Belt. On the contrary, Wright lauded the historical movement toward modernity wherever he saw it. For example, one of his Daily Worker articles written in 1937 celebrates a former slave woman who became an active Communist in Harlem. "This woman," he writes, "has seen the face of her country changed more than once during her 71 years, and she has the strength, the courage, and the faith to fight and wait for still another change." He ends this short article by quoting her, saying for a second time, that "I live in the 20th Century" ("Born A Slave" 3), as if to underscore her own recognition that the movement from Southern slave to urban Communist is part and parcel of the progressive movement of history itself.(2)