New Negro, Old Left

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New Negro, Old Left

Howard "Stretch" Johnson, a charismatic Harlemite who graduated from Cotton Club dancer to Communist Party youth leader, once claimed that in late 1930s New York "75% of black cultural figures had Party membership or maintained regular meaningful contact with the Party." He stretched the truth, but barely. In a broad-ranging, revisionary account of the extensive relationship between African-American literary culture and Communism in the 1920s and 1930s, William J. Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literatureâ€•reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

Juxtaposing well-known and newly rediscovered works by Claude McKay, Andy Razaf, Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nelson Algren, Maxwell maintains that the "Old," Soviet-allied Left promoted a spectrum of exchanges between black and white authors, genres, theories, and cultural institutions. Channels opened between radical Harlem and Bolshevik Moscow, between the New Negro renaissance and proletarian literature. Claude McKay's 1922-23 pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, for example, usually recalled as a lighthearted adventure in radical tourism, actually jumpstarted the Comintern's controversial nation-centered program for Afro America. Breaking from studies governed by Cold War investments and pivoting on the Great Depression, Maxwell argues that Communism's rare sustenance for African-American initiativeâ€•not a seduction of Depression-scarred innocentsâ€•brought scores of literary "New Negroes" to the Old Left.

Country	USA
Author	William Maxwell
Binding	Paperback
EAN	9780231114257
ISBN	0231114257
Label	Columbia University Press
Manufacturer	Columbia University Press
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	272
PublicationDate	1999-07-15
Publisher	Columbia University Press
Studio	Columbia University Press
ReleaseDate	0000-00-00

New Negro, Old Left

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