THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING HARLEM: THE RENAISSANCE AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM.(Review)

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. By William J. Maxwell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi + 254 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. By Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xv + 248 pp. Notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).

Historians and cultural critics of the last generation have devoted considerable attention to the political and aesthetic hothouse that was Harlem in the 1920s. Much as the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s stimulated interest in the Old Left of the 1930s, the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the sixties opened new scholarly vistas on the Harlem Renaissance and its nurturing of African American artistic expression and protest politics. Harlem in the 1920s was not simply "in vogue," as David Levering Lewis has reminded us, it was the staging ground for the launching of black power--not the specific, tactical black power of Stokely Carmichael but the universe of African American cultural and political forms and the enunciating power of those forms, for which the twentieth century may yet best be remembered. But Harlem's "New Negro" intellectuals, artists, and activists faced innumerable challenges as they forged an African American space within modernism. Two new books, by William J. Maxwell and Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., highlight one of the most important of these many challenges: how Harlem figures navigated between communist radicalism on the one hand (left) and state-sponsored reactionary conservatism, even repression, on the other (right). Read together, Maxwell and Kornweibel offer key revisions of the literary and political dimensions of the renaissance in monographs that should fit comfortably within Harlem Renaissance scholarship.

Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars is an extended debate with Harold Cruse, Nathan Huggins, and David Levering Lewis. These three, according to Maxwell, are responsible for the dominant narrative of communism's relationship to the Harlem Renaissance. [1] According to that narrative, communism was at best a false-consciousness diversion for black American artists and intellectuals that had to be transcended and at worst an anti-black-aesthetic cul-de-sac of modernism responsible for the demise of the renaissance itself. Maxwell insists, in contrast, that "black bolshevism is best seen as a fluctuating but consistently fertile position within the full history of the renaissance cultural field" (p. 59). Black bolshevism was not the unwelcome interloper described by previous scholars but "an invited guest" at Harlem's cultural rebirth, an assertion that he defends by resurrecting Andy Razaf and the Crusader and connecting them to Alain Locke's New Negro (1925). Maxwell contends that black communists' desire to elevate the emerging African American urban proletariat as both a cultural and political world-historical force was not incompatible with Alain Locke's casting of the rural southern "folk" as the bearers of the renaissance's cultural authenticity. Why, Maxwell queries, should we celebrate Communist party-member Claude McKay's militant poem of African American strength and resistance, "If We Must Die," as the "inaugural address" of the Harlem Renaissance and not take seriously the potentially fertile ground that joined communism with the emergent "New Negro"?

Maxwell's answer takes us on a revisionist journey through familiar terrain. He gives us a recounting of the Scottsboro trial, for instance, and he revisits the debate between Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston over the cultural position of the black "folk." There are chapters on Claude McKay--the principal Communist party member whose career and intellectual contributions to New Negro art and thought Maxwell wants to rehabilitate--interracialism within the Old Left, and Native Son. Throughout, inspired by Robin D.G. Kelley and Mark Naison, Maxwell looks less to the Comintern "party line" than to "the practices of the party's rank and file" on American soil (p. 70). [2] Within those practices, Maxwell finds a mutually constructive relationship between black literary artists and Soviet-allied white and black leftists across a range of genres and cultural institutions. Indeed, even when he does turn his attention to the Comintern, Maxwell uncovers crucial African American influence. He demonstrates, for instance, that Claude McKay's 1922-1923 trip to Moscow strongly influenced the Comintern's "party line" position on a nation-centered program for black America (the so-called Black Belt Nation thesis). And even though many Harlem intellectuals and writers, including McKay and Wright, ultimately renounced the Old Left in the forties, Maxwell's contention that interwar black literature owes a largely unacknowledged debt to CP ...