Beyond the Blueprint: African-American Literary Marxism in the Period of the Cold War, 1946-1969.

Abstract

Beyond the Blueprint: African American Literary Marxism in the Period of the Cold War, 1946-1969 investigates the aesthetics of Marxist commitment in African-American literature of the post-Second World War period. Anchored in novels that unsettle the fixed political itinerary of Marxist identity articulated in 1930s proletarian fiction, this dissertation examines avant-garde forms of Marxist expression in the work of Richard Wright (1908-1961), Rosa Guy (1922-2012), and Sarah E. Wright (1928-2009). Through their fiction—Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953), Rosa Guy’s Bird at My Window (1966), and Sarah Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live (1969)—each author offers a formal record of his or her subjective experience in the margins of official forms of radical belonging, namely the Communist Party, the “ultra-Bolshevism” of French philosophical Marxism, Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism, and Third World Internationalism. My emphasis on formal (e.g. stylistic and structural) analysis in the interpretation of non-aligned committed literature revises traditional analytic methods of literary radicalism founded upon an author’s standing in existing political organizations and institutions. In addition to compromising the legacies of individual authors’ complex political and literary imaginations, these methods have suppressed a vital body of literature that expresses the most significant historical transition of the twentieth-century—a moment that philosopher Hannah Arendt theorizes as “between past and future” (Arendt 3). While the innovative writing (and reading) practices performed by these authors may not resemble the radical writing of the 1930s and early 1940s, their departure from this previous mode of expression reaffirms the dialectical quality of Marx’s thought, which requires that any appropriation—political, philosophical, or cultural—respond to its particular historical and material conditions. Such a theoretical position has traditionally been attributed to continental theorists, especially the Frankfurt School in Germany, the post-Althusserian school in France (including Michel Foucault, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière), and the existential Marxism of Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; however, the existence of an African-American Marxist avant-garde at the helm of these theoretical advancements has been virtually ignored.