![\"los](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/los-angeles-review.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMarch 25th, 2015<\/p>\n
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Kate Baldwin<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\nThe Other Blacklist:
\n<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\nThe African American<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n Literary and Cultural<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n Left of the 1950s<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n![\"the](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/the-other-blacklist.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Black Left, Black List<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nTOWARD THE END\u00a0of Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s novel\u00a0Maud Martha<\/em>, the title character Maud fights with a chicken. With the battles of World War II not far in the background, Maud contemplates the parallel violence she exerts upon the chicken\u2019s limp corpse. People could do this to other people, she thinks: \u201cfeel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death.\u201d But could they? In Maud\u2019s supple hands, the chicken becomes a \u201csort of person, with its own kind of dignity.\u201d Limning the boundaries between human and animal, Maud states: \u201cThe difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI thought about this passage as I read Mary Helen Washington\u2019s\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>. It may seem like a surprising comparison. After all, Washington\u2019s book deals with largely overlooked African American cultural producers of the 1950s (including Brooks), not cooking the evening meal. And yet the issue of domesticated violence hovers at the surface of her book\u2019s chapters. Taking up the marginalization of major African American artists in the 1950s not only by government agencies and white media but also by most African Americans, Washington\u2019s book explores the injustices that came from within the black community.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Other Blacklist<\/em>, which takes its name from the famous list of names besmirched by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the entertainment industry beginning in 1947, opens with Washington\u2019s compelling memories of her girlhood in Ohio, where political leftists were treated as social outcasts: decent folks snubbed communists and Catholic nuns prayed for the salvation of the godless. Pausing here to frame its narrative,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t so much seek to correct past mistakes than to remember them afresh.<\/span><\/p>\nWashington\u2019s book asks how black liberalism came to shun the cultural production of leftist dissent at precisely the moment when civil rights energies could have benefited most from it. Washington seeks to \u201chighlight the ways that a deep animosity to black civil rights struggles ran like a vein throughout US Cold War culture, preparing even those of us who benefited the most from civil rights militancy to be stand-up little anticommunists.\u201d Seeing herself as the product of an \u201cantiblack, self-abnegating form of racial identity based on white tolerance and black invisibility,\u201d Washington situates her youthful subject position as representative of a larger problem. It was easy to hurt what was unreal to you, she implies, and her \u201cstand up little anticommunism\u201d contributed to that violence of cultural silencing, which was also a form of self-loathing. In repressing the Left, she argues, the dominant Cold War mindset, held by the black community as well as white, also sought to recalibrate racial subjectivity to a white tune.<\/span><\/p>\nThe book queries these recalibrations, and in so doing seeks to reclaim energies that were marginalized not only by the dominant white cultural radar, but also by folks like her. Extending the temporal limits of the Black Cultural Front into the 1950s, Washington argues that from Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, to the George Washington Carver school in Chicago, the spaces and institutions of this front were enabling for black cultural producers. For it was within \u201cthe leftist spaces of the Black Popular Front that African American literary culture was debated, critiqued, encouraged, performed, published, produced and preserved.\u201d These people shared an intimate public; they were known to each other.\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is her \u201cattempt to finally overhear those long-forgotten, repressed conversations.\u201d In this sense,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is not simply trying to assert the humanity of black lives, but rather to imply that attempts to prove the humanity of people repeats the same identitarian problem that has stymied movements of dissent over and over again. So instead, displays and structures of power, and their subtle and not so subtle shifts, motivate this book. The political thread here is not one that resorts to a politics of identity, but one that seeks to unpack the material infrastructure of black radicalism in the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\nDrawing on archival materials, interviews, biographies, cultural histories, FOIA documents, and close readings of literary texts,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>reconstructs conversations that may have whispered the names of Lloyd Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Charles White. Each of these artists serves as the backbone for a chapter. Washington weaves together the missing remnants of the Left in her subjects, thus \u201cmak[ing] connections that reestablish their relationships with the Black Popular Front,\u201d that have been lost \u201cbecause these subjects deliberately distanced themselves from their leftist pasts or because of the practices of contemporary literary and cultural histories.\u201d Her aim is to delegitimize the common demonization of communism and the Left, and her hope is that this project will open up the subject for future students and scholars.<\/span><\/p>\nSo, let\u2019s take up the gambit Washington offers here, and imagine, if you will, a generation of children growing up amidst rich historical narratives in which the aspirations and dreams of social justice as etched in the public works of black artists were framed as positive endeavors. A history in which words like \u201cleftist,\u201d \u201cradical,\u201d and \u201ccommunist\u201d did not summon instant skepticism if not scorn; a world in which these terms could sustain real dialogue about possibility instead of foreclosure, futurity instead of certain doom. Imagine pejorative assumptions banished while positive connections unfurl in their place. Imagine marginal, fractured lives brought forth and celebrated for their stalwart brilliance and unwillingness to cave to social pressure and the pretty persuasion of dollar signs and covert government support. Just imagine.<\/span><\/p>\nAs literary and cultural history, Washington\u2019s book offers a vast resource for fulfilling that promise. Readers who are eager to place the postwar period in the context of 1930s and \u201940s historiography of the left as well as the period of black nationalism that followed in the 1960s will rejoice in these pages. Washington\u2019s prodigious research leaves virtually no stone unturned, and readers will enjoy rich discussions of heretofore woefully under-researched figures. For example, Alice Childress hardly holds the name recognition of Lorraine Hansberry, and yet they worked together and their pieces appeared side by side in Paul Robeson\u2019s\u00a0Freedom<\/em>\u00a0between 1951 and 1953. Alice Childress\u2019s column \u201cConversations from Life\u201d offered the witticisms and bold critiques of the black domestic Mildred, a character whose inflections can be heard throughout Hansberry\u2019s best-known play,\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>. Washington\u2019s appraisals of Childress help to move her from the margins of black literary history of the 1950s to a more certain artistic center.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd yet, persuasive as this move is, methodologically the book\u2019s strategies might be termed daring. Seeking \u201cclues\u201d to \u201cestablish relationships\u201d and examining \u201cintimate lives and networks\u201d in detail, to prompt \u201cfurther investigation,\u201d\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0feels at times as if it is inadvertently borrowing tactics from the entity from which it most wants to distinguish itself: the FBI. Part of the difficulty of piecing together a past that doesn\u2019t necessarily want to be known, let alone exist, is that it presents an epistemological dilemma. For example, although she hung out with popular fronters and was active in the milieu of the Chicago left, Gwendolyn Brooks adamantly disassociated her work with the leftism of her peers. To press Brooks\u2019s history in this direction pushes the reader to confront one of the book\u2019s dilemmas as historical scholarship: to call Brooks a leftist because she associated with leftists evokes McCarthyite tactics. Because the ends are more altruistic in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>, are the means justified?<\/span><\/p>\nPart of the obstacle here may be inherent in Washington\u2019s creation of what she calls \u201cportraits.\u201d Seen in this light, each of the chapters has a predisposition toward the left, a named perspective that is offered as a \u201cway of illustrating the unique relationship between each of the artists [\u2026] and the Left.\u201d The goal is to remove the scare quotes of communism and the Left (which, by the way, are often used in this book interchangeably). Could this be the only way forward into a future of dissent, a future so pressing that we can feel its breath on our cheeks?<\/span><\/p>\nI troubled over this question for some time. In the end, I decided that we might need to bracket Audre Lorde\u2019s declaration that the master\u2019s tools can never be used to dismantle the master\u2019s house. Doing so \u2014 using the master\u2019s tools, as in effect Washington does \u2014 might invite criticism. And, to be sure,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0does name names. It calls people out. It creates a\u00a0blacklist<\/em>. But it does so in the name of black futurity, not black death. If that future generation is going to grow up amidst positive associations with the left, it may as well start right here, with Washington\u2019s book.<\/span><\/p>\nTo that end, Washington\u2019s finest moments come in a late chapter, \u201c1959: Spycraft and the Black Literary Left,\u201d the one chapter that uses a year in place of a grounding, central figure. In 1959, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) hosted the First Conference on Negro Writers in New York City. Modeled on the\u00a0Pr\u00e9sence Africaine<\/em>\u00a0conferences in Paris in 1958, the conference sought to negotiate slippery terms of black cultural production in the late 1950s \u2014 race, agency, the publishing industry, and aesthetics. With the prominent exceptions of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, and Paule Marshall, the conference gathered some of the best-known black American writers of the era \u2014 including Langston Hughes, Saunders Redding, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Sarah E. Wright, Harold Cruse, and Alice Childress \u2014 all figures addressed in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\nIn her revisionary history of the conference, Washington argues that the volume of proceedings edited by AMSAC President John A. Davis, and titled \u201cThe American Negro Writer and His Roots,\u201d obscures the work of the more radical speakers of the conference, setting limits on black subjectivity through conservative ideas of integration. In his introduction, Davis touts dominant Cold War ideology, implying that racial troubles are on the wane. The work of the participants, however, tells a different story. Julian Mayfield remains suspicious of integration, seeing in it the demise of black life. And Langston Hughes exhorted his audience: \u201cuntil you get white \u2014 write,\u201d warning them against the crass racism of the publishing industry. For Washington, 1959 is a crossroads wherein the black left vied with conservative integrationists, many of whom wrote for publications that were government subsidized. In Washington\u2019s hands, Davis\u2019s volume thus becomes a microcosm of public memory of black cultural production of the 1950s, full of edits, omissions, rewritings, and government-sponsored corruption. And Lorraine Hansberry, who gave the conference\u2019s keynote, which is absent from the text, sits in the middle of these contested spaces.<\/span><\/p>\nI have been immersed in these spaces as I work on my own project about 1959. Hansberry\u2019s play\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u00a0debuted that year, a few months after the AMSAC conference. As\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0makes clear, the crossroads of 1959 were also indelibly global. In this close-post era of\u00a0Sputnik<\/em>, Fidel Castro became president of Cuba, and Hawaii joined the US as its 50th state. It was also the year that the USSR opened its doors to the US for the first time since World War II, welcoming the American National Exhibition in\u00a0Sokol\u2019niki<\/em>Park. ANEM became the site of the famous \u201ckitchen\u201d debate between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, a debate that turned heads toward the smooth surfaces of consumerism, the arts of blenders and blending in. With State Department authorized and funded ways of representing black subjectivity, ANEM became a mouthpiece for the multiple wonders of market capitalism.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThis was a period when US officials deployed race as part of a national narrative of inclusiveness in order to counteract Soviet propaganda that alleged US hypocrisy along racial lines. From\u00a0Brown v. Board<\/em>\u00a0to the four African American guides on the ground at ANEM, narratives of progress in race relations and interracial cohesion began to feature African Americans. Rather than showcasing capitalism as an evil in concert with white supremacy, this kind of racial progressivism proclaimed the future as bright with cross-racial solidarity.<\/span><\/p>\nThe proximity of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s debut and Hansberry\u2019s contributions to AMSAC necessitate rethinking this moment as a shaping one for the confrontation of black radicalism not only with integrationists at home, but also with the global staging of a cultural front as a site for Western triumphalism. Nixon\u2019s rhetoric in Moscow presented a one-sided view of the mechanics of the American kitchen. The push-button features of this kitchen were far removed from the manual labors of Maud Martha\u2019s kitchenette. Forgotten in Moscow were the day laborers who toiled in the kitchens of middle-class whites, and the structural links between these lives.<\/span><\/p>\nSimilarly, as Washington points out, the account of AMSAC recorded in the proceedings was distorted. As with the suppressed meanings of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s more potent critiques of racial inequality, the sexual division of labor, and coloniality, in the published AMSAC proceedings, conversations are lost; addresses, photos, and papers are hidden, manipulated, and entirely missing. Held at this critical juncture in global history, the AMSAC gathering put forth what was to be erased later that year in Moscow and elsewhere as African Americans circled the globe, some in search of better options, some representing the US. It\u2019s important to remember that dissenting voices of the left were erased not only in the State Department\u2013authorized publication of the conference\u2019s proceedings, but also in government-sponsored cultural tours that promoted inter-racialism as a defining conceit of US democracy.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat interests me beyond the historical proximity of AMSAC and ANEM, however, is the warping of the relationships between Moscow and New York, and between the intellectual vibrancies at work in both places in the received accounts of these events. We need to reactivate the conscious and unconscious longings \u2014 the deferred dreams, as Langston Hughes wrote in the poem that became the inspiration for\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u2019s title \u2014 displaced by progressivist accounts of history for which\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>has served as a pivotal marker.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nHow can you grasp a legacy of dissent from erasure? Washington\u2019s best lesson is that we can\u2019t move forward unless we work through our complicity in the violences of the past. If things are going to change we need to live amongst those we have not been willing to consider fully human: to live amongst chickens, as it were. Until then we are all just wrestling with ignorance, and indulging in our own selfish appetites \u2014 licking our lips at the thought of our next succulent meal.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n[1]<\/a>\u00a0I explore these ideas more fully in\u00a0The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol\u2019niki Park to Chicago\u2019s South Side<\/em>\u00a0(Dartmouth UP).<\/span><\/p>\n[2]<\/a>\u00a0The late critic Richard Iton describes the popular reception of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0as marking a shift in the movement from Popular Front politics to those of liberalism\u2019s integration: this reception\u2019s \u201cdownplaying, and in some instances suppression, of themes related to anticolonialism, diasporic consciousness, and intraracial class distinctions, along with the implicit engagement of gender relations, mark her creation as a significant turning point in both black politics and popular culture.\u201d See\u00a0In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n+++++++++++++++<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
The African American<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n Literary and Cultural<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n Left of the 1950s<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Black Left, Black List<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nTOWARD THE END\u00a0of Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s novel\u00a0Maud Martha<\/em>, the title character Maud fights with a chicken. With the battles of World War II not far in the background, Maud contemplates the parallel violence she exerts upon the chicken\u2019s limp corpse. People could do this to other people, she thinks: \u201cfeel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death.\u201d But could they? In Maud\u2019s supple hands, the chicken becomes a \u201csort of person, with its own kind of dignity.\u201d Limning the boundaries between human and animal, Maud states: \u201cThe difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI thought about this passage as I read Mary Helen Washington\u2019s\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>. It may seem like a surprising comparison. After all, Washington\u2019s book deals with largely overlooked African American cultural producers of the 1950s (including Brooks), not cooking the evening meal. And yet the issue of domesticated violence hovers at the surface of her book\u2019s chapters. Taking up the marginalization of major African American artists in the 1950s not only by government agencies and white media but also by most African Americans, Washington\u2019s book explores the injustices that came from within the black community.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Other Blacklist<\/em>, which takes its name from the famous list of names besmirched by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the entertainment industry beginning in 1947, opens with Washington\u2019s compelling memories of her girlhood in Ohio, where political leftists were treated as social outcasts: decent folks snubbed communists and Catholic nuns prayed for the salvation of the godless. Pausing here to frame its narrative,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t so much seek to correct past mistakes than to remember them afresh.<\/span><\/p>\nWashington\u2019s book asks how black liberalism came to shun the cultural production of leftist dissent at precisely the moment when civil rights energies could have benefited most from it. Washington seeks to \u201chighlight the ways that a deep animosity to black civil rights struggles ran like a vein throughout US Cold War culture, preparing even those of us who benefited the most from civil rights militancy to be stand-up little anticommunists.\u201d Seeing herself as the product of an \u201cantiblack, self-abnegating form of racial identity based on white tolerance and black invisibility,\u201d Washington situates her youthful subject position as representative of a larger problem. It was easy to hurt what was unreal to you, she implies, and her \u201cstand up little anticommunism\u201d contributed to that violence of cultural silencing, which was also a form of self-loathing. In repressing the Left, she argues, the dominant Cold War mindset, held by the black community as well as white, also sought to recalibrate racial subjectivity to a white tune.<\/span><\/p>\nThe book queries these recalibrations, and in so doing seeks to reclaim energies that were marginalized not only by the dominant white cultural radar, but also by folks like her. Extending the temporal limits of the Black Cultural Front into the 1950s, Washington argues that from Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, to the George Washington Carver school in Chicago, the spaces and institutions of this front were enabling for black cultural producers. For it was within \u201cthe leftist spaces of the Black Popular Front that African American literary culture was debated, critiqued, encouraged, performed, published, produced and preserved.\u201d These people shared an intimate public; they were known to each other.\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is her \u201cattempt to finally overhear those long-forgotten, repressed conversations.\u201d In this sense,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is not simply trying to assert the humanity of black lives, but rather to imply that attempts to prove the humanity of people repeats the same identitarian problem that has stymied movements of dissent over and over again. So instead, displays and structures of power, and their subtle and not so subtle shifts, motivate this book. The political thread here is not one that resorts to a politics of identity, but one that seeks to unpack the material infrastructure of black radicalism in the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\nDrawing on archival materials, interviews, biographies, cultural histories, FOIA documents, and close readings of literary texts,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>reconstructs conversations that may have whispered the names of Lloyd Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Charles White. Each of these artists serves as the backbone for a chapter. Washington weaves together the missing remnants of the Left in her subjects, thus \u201cmak[ing] connections that reestablish their relationships with the Black Popular Front,\u201d that have been lost \u201cbecause these subjects deliberately distanced themselves from their leftist pasts or because of the practices of contemporary literary and cultural histories.\u201d Her aim is to delegitimize the common demonization of communism and the Left, and her hope is that this project will open up the subject for future students and scholars.<\/span><\/p>\nSo, let\u2019s take up the gambit Washington offers here, and imagine, if you will, a generation of children growing up amidst rich historical narratives in which the aspirations and dreams of social justice as etched in the public works of black artists were framed as positive endeavors. A history in which words like \u201cleftist,\u201d \u201cradical,\u201d and \u201ccommunist\u201d did not summon instant skepticism if not scorn; a world in which these terms could sustain real dialogue about possibility instead of foreclosure, futurity instead of certain doom. Imagine pejorative assumptions banished while positive connections unfurl in their place. Imagine marginal, fractured lives brought forth and celebrated for their stalwart brilliance and unwillingness to cave to social pressure and the pretty persuasion of dollar signs and covert government support. Just imagine.<\/span><\/p>\nAs literary and cultural history, Washington\u2019s book offers a vast resource for fulfilling that promise. Readers who are eager to place the postwar period in the context of 1930s and \u201940s historiography of the left as well as the period of black nationalism that followed in the 1960s will rejoice in these pages. Washington\u2019s prodigious research leaves virtually no stone unturned, and readers will enjoy rich discussions of heretofore woefully under-researched figures. For example, Alice Childress hardly holds the name recognition of Lorraine Hansberry, and yet they worked together and their pieces appeared side by side in Paul Robeson\u2019s\u00a0Freedom<\/em>\u00a0between 1951 and 1953. Alice Childress\u2019s column \u201cConversations from Life\u201d offered the witticisms and bold critiques of the black domestic Mildred, a character whose inflections can be heard throughout Hansberry\u2019s best-known play,\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>. Washington\u2019s appraisals of Childress help to move her from the margins of black literary history of the 1950s to a more certain artistic center.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd yet, persuasive as this move is, methodologically the book\u2019s strategies might be termed daring. Seeking \u201cclues\u201d to \u201cestablish relationships\u201d and examining \u201cintimate lives and networks\u201d in detail, to prompt \u201cfurther investigation,\u201d\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0feels at times as if it is inadvertently borrowing tactics from the entity from which it most wants to distinguish itself: the FBI. Part of the difficulty of piecing together a past that doesn\u2019t necessarily want to be known, let alone exist, is that it presents an epistemological dilemma. For example, although she hung out with popular fronters and was active in the milieu of the Chicago left, Gwendolyn Brooks adamantly disassociated her work with the leftism of her peers. To press Brooks\u2019s history in this direction pushes the reader to confront one of the book\u2019s dilemmas as historical scholarship: to call Brooks a leftist because she associated with leftists evokes McCarthyite tactics. Because the ends are more altruistic in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>, are the means justified?<\/span><\/p>\nPart of the obstacle here may be inherent in Washington\u2019s creation of what she calls \u201cportraits.\u201d Seen in this light, each of the chapters has a predisposition toward the left, a named perspective that is offered as a \u201cway of illustrating the unique relationship between each of the artists [\u2026] and the Left.\u201d The goal is to remove the scare quotes of communism and the Left (which, by the way, are often used in this book interchangeably). Could this be the only way forward into a future of dissent, a future so pressing that we can feel its breath on our cheeks?<\/span><\/p>\nI troubled over this question for some time. In the end, I decided that we might need to bracket Audre Lorde\u2019s declaration that the master\u2019s tools can never be used to dismantle the master\u2019s house. Doing so \u2014 using the master\u2019s tools, as in effect Washington does \u2014 might invite criticism. And, to be sure,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0does name names. It calls people out. It creates a\u00a0blacklist<\/em>. But it does so in the name of black futurity, not black death. If that future generation is going to grow up amidst positive associations with the left, it may as well start right here, with Washington\u2019s book.<\/span><\/p>\nTo that end, Washington\u2019s finest moments come in a late chapter, \u201c1959: Spycraft and the Black Literary Left,\u201d the one chapter that uses a year in place of a grounding, central figure. In 1959, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) hosted the First Conference on Negro Writers in New York City. Modeled on the\u00a0Pr\u00e9sence Africaine<\/em>\u00a0conferences in Paris in 1958, the conference sought to negotiate slippery terms of black cultural production in the late 1950s \u2014 race, agency, the publishing industry, and aesthetics. With the prominent exceptions of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, and Paule Marshall, the conference gathered some of the best-known black American writers of the era \u2014 including Langston Hughes, Saunders Redding, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Sarah E. Wright, Harold Cruse, and Alice Childress \u2014 all figures addressed in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\nIn her revisionary history of the conference, Washington argues that the volume of proceedings edited by AMSAC President John A. Davis, and titled \u201cThe American Negro Writer and His Roots,\u201d obscures the work of the more radical speakers of the conference, setting limits on black subjectivity through conservative ideas of integration. In his introduction, Davis touts dominant Cold War ideology, implying that racial troubles are on the wane. The work of the participants, however, tells a different story. Julian Mayfield remains suspicious of integration, seeing in it the demise of black life. And Langston Hughes exhorted his audience: \u201cuntil you get white \u2014 write,\u201d warning them against the crass racism of the publishing industry. For Washington, 1959 is a crossroads wherein the black left vied with conservative integrationists, many of whom wrote for publications that were government subsidized. In Washington\u2019s hands, Davis\u2019s volume thus becomes a microcosm of public memory of black cultural production of the 1950s, full of edits, omissions, rewritings, and government-sponsored corruption. And Lorraine Hansberry, who gave the conference\u2019s keynote, which is absent from the text, sits in the middle of these contested spaces.<\/span><\/p>\nI have been immersed in these spaces as I work on my own project about 1959. Hansberry\u2019s play\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u00a0debuted that year, a few months after the AMSAC conference. As\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0makes clear, the crossroads of 1959 were also indelibly global. In this close-post era of\u00a0Sputnik<\/em>, Fidel Castro became president of Cuba, and Hawaii joined the US as its 50th state. It was also the year that the USSR opened its doors to the US for the first time since World War II, welcoming the American National Exhibition in\u00a0Sokol\u2019niki<\/em>Park. ANEM became the site of the famous \u201ckitchen\u201d debate between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, a debate that turned heads toward the smooth surfaces of consumerism, the arts of blenders and blending in. With State Department authorized and funded ways of representing black subjectivity, ANEM became a mouthpiece for the multiple wonders of market capitalism.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThis was a period when US officials deployed race as part of a national narrative of inclusiveness in order to counteract Soviet propaganda that alleged US hypocrisy along racial lines. From\u00a0Brown v. Board<\/em>\u00a0to the four African American guides on the ground at ANEM, narratives of progress in race relations and interracial cohesion began to feature African Americans. Rather than showcasing capitalism as an evil in concert with white supremacy, this kind of racial progressivism proclaimed the future as bright with cross-racial solidarity.<\/span><\/p>\nThe proximity of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s debut and Hansberry\u2019s contributions to AMSAC necessitate rethinking this moment as a shaping one for the confrontation of black radicalism not only with integrationists at home, but also with the global staging of a cultural front as a site for Western triumphalism. Nixon\u2019s rhetoric in Moscow presented a one-sided view of the mechanics of the American kitchen. The push-button features of this kitchen were far removed from the manual labors of Maud Martha\u2019s kitchenette. Forgotten in Moscow were the day laborers who toiled in the kitchens of middle-class whites, and the structural links between these lives.<\/span><\/p>\nSimilarly, as Washington points out, the account of AMSAC recorded in the proceedings was distorted. As with the suppressed meanings of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s more potent critiques of racial inequality, the sexual division of labor, and coloniality, in the published AMSAC proceedings, conversations are lost; addresses, photos, and papers are hidden, manipulated, and entirely missing. Held at this critical juncture in global history, the AMSAC gathering put forth what was to be erased later that year in Moscow and elsewhere as African Americans circled the globe, some in search of better options, some representing the US. It\u2019s important to remember that dissenting voices of the left were erased not only in the State Department\u2013authorized publication of the conference\u2019s proceedings, but also in government-sponsored cultural tours that promoted inter-racialism as a defining conceit of US democracy.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat interests me beyond the historical proximity of AMSAC and ANEM, however, is the warping of the relationships between Moscow and New York, and between the intellectual vibrancies at work in both places in the received accounts of these events. We need to reactivate the conscious and unconscious longings \u2014 the deferred dreams, as Langston Hughes wrote in the poem that became the inspiration for\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u2019s title \u2014 displaced by progressivist accounts of history for which\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>has served as a pivotal marker.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nHow can you grasp a legacy of dissent from erasure? Washington\u2019s best lesson is that we can\u2019t move forward unless we work through our complicity in the violences of the past. If things are going to change we need to live amongst those we have not been willing to consider fully human: to live amongst chickens, as it were. Until then we are all just wrestling with ignorance, and indulging in our own selfish appetites \u2014 licking our lips at the thought of our next succulent meal.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n[1]<\/a>\u00a0I explore these ideas more fully in\u00a0The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol\u2019niki Park to Chicago\u2019s South Side<\/em>\u00a0(Dartmouth UP).<\/span><\/p>\n[2]<\/a>\u00a0The late critic Richard Iton describes the popular reception of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0as marking a shift in the movement from Popular Front politics to those of liberalism\u2019s integration: this reception\u2019s \u201cdownplaying, and in some instances suppression, of themes related to anticolonialism, diasporic consciousness, and intraracial class distinctions, along with the implicit engagement of gender relations, mark her creation as a significant turning point in both black politics and popular culture.\u201d See\u00a0In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n+++++++++++++++<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
Left of the 1950s<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Black Left, Black List<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nTOWARD THE END\u00a0of Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s novel\u00a0Maud Martha<\/em>, the title character Maud fights with a chicken. With the battles of World War II not far in the background, Maud contemplates the parallel violence she exerts upon the chicken\u2019s limp corpse. People could do this to other people, she thinks: \u201cfeel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death.\u201d But could they? In Maud\u2019s supple hands, the chicken becomes a \u201csort of person, with its own kind of dignity.\u201d Limning the boundaries between human and animal, Maud states: \u201cThe difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI thought about this passage as I read Mary Helen Washington\u2019s\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>. It may seem like a surprising comparison. After all, Washington\u2019s book deals with largely overlooked African American cultural producers of the 1950s (including Brooks), not cooking the evening meal. And yet the issue of domesticated violence hovers at the surface of her book\u2019s chapters. Taking up the marginalization of major African American artists in the 1950s not only by government agencies and white media but also by most African Americans, Washington\u2019s book explores the injustices that came from within the black community.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Other Blacklist<\/em>, which takes its name from the famous list of names besmirched by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the entertainment industry beginning in 1947, opens with Washington\u2019s compelling memories of her girlhood in Ohio, where political leftists were treated as social outcasts: decent folks snubbed communists and Catholic nuns prayed for the salvation of the godless. Pausing here to frame its narrative,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t so much seek to correct past mistakes than to remember them afresh.<\/span><\/p>\nWashington\u2019s book asks how black liberalism came to shun the cultural production of leftist dissent at precisely the moment when civil rights energies could have benefited most from it. Washington seeks to \u201chighlight the ways that a deep animosity to black civil rights struggles ran like a vein throughout US Cold War culture, preparing even those of us who benefited the most from civil rights militancy to be stand-up little anticommunists.\u201d Seeing herself as the product of an \u201cantiblack, self-abnegating form of racial identity based on white tolerance and black invisibility,\u201d Washington situates her youthful subject position as representative of a larger problem. It was easy to hurt what was unreal to you, she implies, and her \u201cstand up little anticommunism\u201d contributed to that violence of cultural silencing, which was also a form of self-loathing. In repressing the Left, she argues, the dominant Cold War mindset, held by the black community as well as white, also sought to recalibrate racial subjectivity to a white tune.<\/span><\/p>\nThe book queries these recalibrations, and in so doing seeks to reclaim energies that were marginalized not only by the dominant white cultural radar, but also by folks like her. Extending the temporal limits of the Black Cultural Front into the 1950s, Washington argues that from Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, to the George Washington Carver school in Chicago, the spaces and institutions of this front were enabling for black cultural producers. For it was within \u201cthe leftist spaces of the Black Popular Front that African American literary culture was debated, critiqued, encouraged, performed, published, produced and preserved.\u201d These people shared an intimate public; they were known to each other.\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is her \u201cattempt to finally overhear those long-forgotten, repressed conversations.\u201d In this sense,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is not simply trying to assert the humanity of black lives, but rather to imply that attempts to prove the humanity of people repeats the same identitarian problem that has stymied movements of dissent over and over again. So instead, displays and structures of power, and their subtle and not so subtle shifts, motivate this book. The political thread here is not one that resorts to a politics of identity, but one that seeks to unpack the material infrastructure of black radicalism in the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\nDrawing on archival materials, interviews, biographies, cultural histories, FOIA documents, and close readings of literary texts,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>reconstructs conversations that may have whispered the names of Lloyd Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Charles White. Each of these artists serves as the backbone for a chapter. Washington weaves together the missing remnants of the Left in her subjects, thus \u201cmak[ing] connections that reestablish their relationships with the Black Popular Front,\u201d that have been lost \u201cbecause these subjects deliberately distanced themselves from their leftist pasts or because of the practices of contemporary literary and cultural histories.\u201d Her aim is to delegitimize the common demonization of communism and the Left, and her hope is that this project will open up the subject for future students and scholars.<\/span><\/p>\nSo, let\u2019s take up the gambit Washington offers here, and imagine, if you will, a generation of children growing up amidst rich historical narratives in which the aspirations and dreams of social justice as etched in the public works of black artists were framed as positive endeavors. A history in which words like \u201cleftist,\u201d \u201cradical,\u201d and \u201ccommunist\u201d did not summon instant skepticism if not scorn; a world in which these terms could sustain real dialogue about possibility instead of foreclosure, futurity instead of certain doom. Imagine pejorative assumptions banished while positive connections unfurl in their place. Imagine marginal, fractured lives brought forth and celebrated for their stalwart brilliance and unwillingness to cave to social pressure and the pretty persuasion of dollar signs and covert government support. Just imagine.<\/span><\/p>\nAs literary and cultural history, Washington\u2019s book offers a vast resource for fulfilling that promise. Readers who are eager to place the postwar period in the context of 1930s and \u201940s historiography of the left as well as the period of black nationalism that followed in the 1960s will rejoice in these pages. Washington\u2019s prodigious research leaves virtually no stone unturned, and readers will enjoy rich discussions of heretofore woefully under-researched figures. For example, Alice Childress hardly holds the name recognition of Lorraine Hansberry, and yet they worked together and their pieces appeared side by side in Paul Robeson\u2019s\u00a0Freedom<\/em>\u00a0between 1951 and 1953. Alice Childress\u2019s column \u201cConversations from Life\u201d offered the witticisms and bold critiques of the black domestic Mildred, a character whose inflections can be heard throughout Hansberry\u2019s best-known play,\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>. Washington\u2019s appraisals of Childress help to move her from the margins of black literary history of the 1950s to a more certain artistic center.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd yet, persuasive as this move is, methodologically the book\u2019s strategies might be termed daring. Seeking \u201cclues\u201d to \u201cestablish relationships\u201d and examining \u201cintimate lives and networks\u201d in detail, to prompt \u201cfurther investigation,\u201d\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0feels at times as if it is inadvertently borrowing tactics from the entity from which it most wants to distinguish itself: the FBI. Part of the difficulty of piecing together a past that doesn\u2019t necessarily want to be known, let alone exist, is that it presents an epistemological dilemma. For example, although she hung out with popular fronters and was active in the milieu of the Chicago left, Gwendolyn Brooks adamantly disassociated her work with the leftism of her peers. To press Brooks\u2019s history in this direction pushes the reader to confront one of the book\u2019s dilemmas as historical scholarship: to call Brooks a leftist because she associated with leftists evokes McCarthyite tactics. Because the ends are more altruistic in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>, are the means justified?<\/span><\/p>\nPart of the obstacle here may be inherent in Washington\u2019s creation of what she calls \u201cportraits.\u201d Seen in this light, each of the chapters has a predisposition toward the left, a named perspective that is offered as a \u201cway of illustrating the unique relationship between each of the artists [\u2026] and the Left.\u201d The goal is to remove the scare quotes of communism and the Left (which, by the way, are often used in this book interchangeably). Could this be the only way forward into a future of dissent, a future so pressing that we can feel its breath on our cheeks?<\/span><\/p>\nI troubled over this question for some time. In the end, I decided that we might need to bracket Audre Lorde\u2019s declaration that the master\u2019s tools can never be used to dismantle the master\u2019s house. Doing so \u2014 using the master\u2019s tools, as in effect Washington does \u2014 might invite criticism. And, to be sure,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0does name names. It calls people out. It creates a\u00a0blacklist<\/em>. But it does so in the name of black futurity, not black death. If that future generation is going to grow up amidst positive associations with the left, it may as well start right here, with Washington\u2019s book.<\/span><\/p>\nTo that end, Washington\u2019s finest moments come in a late chapter, \u201c1959: Spycraft and the Black Literary Left,\u201d the one chapter that uses a year in place of a grounding, central figure. In 1959, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) hosted the First Conference on Negro Writers in New York City. Modeled on the\u00a0Pr\u00e9sence Africaine<\/em>\u00a0conferences in Paris in 1958, the conference sought to negotiate slippery terms of black cultural production in the late 1950s \u2014 race, agency, the publishing industry, and aesthetics. With the prominent exceptions of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, and Paule Marshall, the conference gathered some of the best-known black American writers of the era \u2014 including Langston Hughes, Saunders Redding, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Sarah E. Wright, Harold Cruse, and Alice Childress \u2014 all figures addressed in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\nIn her revisionary history of the conference, Washington argues that the volume of proceedings edited by AMSAC President John A. Davis, and titled \u201cThe American Negro Writer and His Roots,\u201d obscures the work of the more radical speakers of the conference, setting limits on black subjectivity through conservative ideas of integration. In his introduction, Davis touts dominant Cold War ideology, implying that racial troubles are on the wane. The work of the participants, however, tells a different story. Julian Mayfield remains suspicious of integration, seeing in it the demise of black life. And Langston Hughes exhorted his audience: \u201cuntil you get white \u2014 write,\u201d warning them against the crass racism of the publishing industry. For Washington, 1959 is a crossroads wherein the black left vied with conservative integrationists, many of whom wrote for publications that were government subsidized. In Washington\u2019s hands, Davis\u2019s volume thus becomes a microcosm of public memory of black cultural production of the 1950s, full of edits, omissions, rewritings, and government-sponsored corruption. And Lorraine Hansberry, who gave the conference\u2019s keynote, which is absent from the text, sits in the middle of these contested spaces.<\/span><\/p>\nI have been immersed in these spaces as I work on my own project about 1959. Hansberry\u2019s play\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u00a0debuted that year, a few months after the AMSAC conference. As\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0makes clear, the crossroads of 1959 were also indelibly global. In this close-post era of\u00a0Sputnik<\/em>, Fidel Castro became president of Cuba, and Hawaii joined the US as its 50th state. It was also the year that the USSR opened its doors to the US for the first time since World War II, welcoming the American National Exhibition in\u00a0Sokol\u2019niki<\/em>Park. ANEM became the site of the famous \u201ckitchen\u201d debate between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, a debate that turned heads toward the smooth surfaces of consumerism, the arts of blenders and blending in. With State Department authorized and funded ways of representing black subjectivity, ANEM became a mouthpiece for the multiple wonders of market capitalism.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThis was a period when US officials deployed race as part of a national narrative of inclusiveness in order to counteract Soviet propaganda that alleged US hypocrisy along racial lines. From\u00a0Brown v. Board<\/em>\u00a0to the four African American guides on the ground at ANEM, narratives of progress in race relations and interracial cohesion began to feature African Americans. Rather than showcasing capitalism as an evil in concert with white supremacy, this kind of racial progressivism proclaimed the future as bright with cross-racial solidarity.<\/span><\/p>\nThe proximity of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s debut and Hansberry\u2019s contributions to AMSAC necessitate rethinking this moment as a shaping one for the confrontation of black radicalism not only with integrationists at home, but also with the global staging of a cultural front as a site for Western triumphalism. Nixon\u2019s rhetoric in Moscow presented a one-sided view of the mechanics of the American kitchen. The push-button features of this kitchen were far removed from the manual labors of Maud Martha\u2019s kitchenette. Forgotten in Moscow were the day laborers who toiled in the kitchens of middle-class whites, and the structural links between these lives.<\/span><\/p>\nSimilarly, as Washington points out, the account of AMSAC recorded in the proceedings was distorted. As with the suppressed meanings of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s more potent critiques of racial inequality, the sexual division of labor, and coloniality, in the published AMSAC proceedings, conversations are lost; addresses, photos, and papers are hidden, manipulated, and entirely missing. Held at this critical juncture in global history, the AMSAC gathering put forth what was to be erased later that year in Moscow and elsewhere as African Americans circled the globe, some in search of better options, some representing the US. It\u2019s important to remember that dissenting voices of the left were erased not only in the State Department\u2013authorized publication of the conference\u2019s proceedings, but also in government-sponsored cultural tours that promoted inter-racialism as a defining conceit of US democracy.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat interests me beyond the historical proximity of AMSAC and ANEM, however, is the warping of the relationships between Moscow and New York, and between the intellectual vibrancies at work in both places in the received accounts of these events. We need to reactivate the conscious and unconscious longings \u2014 the deferred dreams, as Langston Hughes wrote in the poem that became the inspiration for\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u2019s title \u2014 displaced by progressivist accounts of history for which\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>has served as a pivotal marker.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nHow can you grasp a legacy of dissent from erasure? Washington\u2019s best lesson is that we can\u2019t move forward unless we work through our complicity in the violences of the past. If things are going to change we need to live amongst those we have not been willing to consider fully human: to live amongst chickens, as it were. Until then we are all just wrestling with ignorance, and indulging in our own selfish appetites \u2014 licking our lips at the thought of our next succulent meal.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n[1]<\/a>\u00a0I explore these ideas more fully in\u00a0The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol\u2019niki Park to Chicago\u2019s South Side<\/em>\u00a0(Dartmouth UP).<\/span><\/p>\n[2]<\/a>\u00a0The late critic Richard Iton describes the popular reception of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0as marking a shift in the movement from Popular Front politics to those of liberalism\u2019s integration: this reception\u2019s \u201cdownplaying, and in some instances suppression, of themes related to anticolonialism, diasporic consciousness, and intraracial class distinctions, along with the implicit engagement of gender relations, mark her creation as a significant turning point in both black politics and popular culture.\u201d See\u00a0In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n+++++++++++++++<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Black Left, Black List<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n TOWARD THE END\u00a0of Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s novel\u00a0Maud Martha<\/em>, the title character Maud fights with a chicken. With the battles of World War II not far in the background, Maud contemplates the parallel violence she exerts upon the chicken\u2019s limp corpse. People could do this to other people, she thinks: \u201cfeel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death.\u201d But could they? In Maud\u2019s supple hands, the chicken becomes a \u201csort of person, with its own kind of dignity.\u201d Limning the boundaries between human and animal, Maud states: \u201cThe difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I thought about this passage as I read Mary Helen Washington\u2019s\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>. It may seem like a surprising comparison. After all, Washington\u2019s book deals with largely overlooked African American cultural producers of the 1950s (including Brooks), not cooking the evening meal. And yet the issue of domesticated violence hovers at the surface of her book\u2019s chapters. Taking up the marginalization of major African American artists in the 1950s not only by government agencies and white media but also by most African Americans, Washington\u2019s book explores the injustices that came from within the black community.<\/span><\/p>\n The Other Blacklist<\/em>, which takes its name from the famous list of names besmirched by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the entertainment industry beginning in 1947, opens with Washington\u2019s compelling memories of her girlhood in Ohio, where political leftists were treated as social outcasts: decent folks snubbed communists and Catholic nuns prayed for the salvation of the godless. Pausing here to frame its narrative,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t so much seek to correct past mistakes than to remember them afresh.<\/span><\/p>\n Washington\u2019s book asks how black liberalism came to shun the cultural production of leftist dissent at precisely the moment when civil rights energies could have benefited most from it. Washington seeks to \u201chighlight the ways that a deep animosity to black civil rights struggles ran like a vein throughout US Cold War culture, preparing even those of us who benefited the most from civil rights militancy to be stand-up little anticommunists.\u201d Seeing herself as the product of an \u201cantiblack, self-abnegating form of racial identity based on white tolerance and black invisibility,\u201d Washington situates her youthful subject position as representative of a larger problem. It was easy to hurt what was unreal to you, she implies, and her \u201cstand up little anticommunism\u201d contributed to that violence of cultural silencing, which was also a form of self-loathing. In repressing the Left, she argues, the dominant Cold War mindset, held by the black community as well as white, also sought to recalibrate racial subjectivity to a white tune.<\/span><\/p>\n The book queries these recalibrations, and in so doing seeks to reclaim energies that were marginalized not only by the dominant white cultural radar, but also by folks like her. Extending the temporal limits of the Black Cultural Front into the 1950s, Washington argues that from Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, to the George Washington Carver school in Chicago, the spaces and institutions of this front were enabling for black cultural producers. For it was within \u201cthe leftist spaces of the Black Popular Front that African American literary culture was debated, critiqued, encouraged, performed, published, produced and preserved.\u201d These people shared an intimate public; they were known to each other.\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is her \u201cattempt to finally overhear those long-forgotten, repressed conversations.\u201d In this sense,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0is not simply trying to assert the humanity of black lives, but rather to imply that attempts to prove the humanity of people repeats the same identitarian problem that has stymied movements of dissent over and over again. So instead, displays and structures of power, and their subtle and not so subtle shifts, motivate this book. The political thread here is not one that resorts to a politics of identity, but one that seeks to unpack the material infrastructure of black radicalism in the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\n Drawing on archival materials, interviews, biographies, cultural histories, FOIA documents, and close readings of literary texts,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>reconstructs conversations that may have whispered the names of Lloyd Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Charles White. Each of these artists serves as the backbone for a chapter. Washington weaves together the missing remnants of the Left in her subjects, thus \u201cmak[ing] connections that reestablish their relationships with the Black Popular Front,\u201d that have been lost \u201cbecause these subjects deliberately distanced themselves from their leftist pasts or because of the practices of contemporary literary and cultural histories.\u201d Her aim is to delegitimize the common demonization of communism and the Left, and her hope is that this project will open up the subject for future students and scholars.<\/span><\/p>\n So, let\u2019s take up the gambit Washington offers here, and imagine, if you will, a generation of children growing up amidst rich historical narratives in which the aspirations and dreams of social justice as etched in the public works of black artists were framed as positive endeavors. A history in which words like \u201cleftist,\u201d \u201cradical,\u201d and \u201ccommunist\u201d did not summon instant skepticism if not scorn; a world in which these terms could sustain real dialogue about possibility instead of foreclosure, futurity instead of certain doom. Imagine pejorative assumptions banished while positive connections unfurl in their place. Imagine marginal, fractured lives brought forth and celebrated for their stalwart brilliance and unwillingness to cave to social pressure and the pretty persuasion of dollar signs and covert government support. Just imagine.<\/span><\/p>\n As literary and cultural history, Washington\u2019s book offers a vast resource for fulfilling that promise. Readers who are eager to place the postwar period in the context of 1930s and \u201940s historiography of the left as well as the period of black nationalism that followed in the 1960s will rejoice in these pages. Washington\u2019s prodigious research leaves virtually no stone unturned, and readers will enjoy rich discussions of heretofore woefully under-researched figures. For example, Alice Childress hardly holds the name recognition of Lorraine Hansberry, and yet they worked together and their pieces appeared side by side in Paul Robeson\u2019s\u00a0Freedom<\/em>\u00a0between 1951 and 1953. Alice Childress\u2019s column \u201cConversations from Life\u201d offered the witticisms and bold critiques of the black domestic Mildred, a character whose inflections can be heard throughout Hansberry\u2019s best-known play,\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>. Washington\u2019s appraisals of Childress help to move her from the margins of black literary history of the 1950s to a more certain artistic center.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet, persuasive as this move is, methodologically the book\u2019s strategies might be termed daring. Seeking \u201cclues\u201d to \u201cestablish relationships\u201d and examining \u201cintimate lives and networks\u201d in detail, to prompt \u201cfurther investigation,\u201d\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0feels at times as if it is inadvertently borrowing tactics from the entity from which it most wants to distinguish itself: the FBI. Part of the difficulty of piecing together a past that doesn\u2019t necessarily want to be known, let alone exist, is that it presents an epistemological dilemma. For example, although she hung out with popular fronters and was active in the milieu of the Chicago left, Gwendolyn Brooks adamantly disassociated her work with the leftism of her peers. To press Brooks\u2019s history in this direction pushes the reader to confront one of the book\u2019s dilemmas as historical scholarship: to call Brooks a leftist because she associated with leftists evokes McCarthyite tactics. Because the ends are more altruistic in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>, are the means justified?<\/span><\/p>\n Part of the obstacle here may be inherent in Washington\u2019s creation of what she calls \u201cportraits.\u201d Seen in this light, each of the chapters has a predisposition toward the left, a named perspective that is offered as a \u201cway of illustrating the unique relationship between each of the artists [\u2026] and the Left.\u201d The goal is to remove the scare quotes of communism and the Left (which, by the way, are often used in this book interchangeably). Could this be the only way forward into a future of dissent, a future so pressing that we can feel its breath on our cheeks?<\/span><\/p>\n I troubled over this question for some time. In the end, I decided that we might need to bracket Audre Lorde\u2019s declaration that the master\u2019s tools can never be used to dismantle the master\u2019s house. Doing so \u2014 using the master\u2019s tools, as in effect Washington does \u2014 might invite criticism. And, to be sure,\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>\u00a0does name names. It calls people out. It creates a\u00a0blacklist<\/em>. But it does so in the name of black futurity, not black death. If that future generation is going to grow up amidst positive associations with the left, it may as well start right here, with Washington\u2019s book.<\/span><\/p>\n To that end, Washington\u2019s finest moments come in a late chapter, \u201c1959: Spycraft and the Black Literary Left,\u201d the one chapter that uses a year in place of a grounding, central figure. In 1959, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) hosted the First Conference on Negro Writers in New York City. Modeled on the\u00a0Pr\u00e9sence Africaine<\/em>\u00a0conferences in Paris in 1958, the conference sought to negotiate slippery terms of black cultural production in the late 1950s \u2014 race, agency, the publishing industry, and aesthetics. With the prominent exceptions of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, and Paule Marshall, the conference gathered some of the best-known black American writers of the era \u2014 including Langston Hughes, Saunders Redding, Julian Mayfield, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Sarah E. Wright, Harold Cruse, and Alice Childress \u2014 all figures addressed in\u00a0The Other Blacklist<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n In her revisionary history of the conference, Washington argues that the volume of proceedings edited by AMSAC President John A. Davis, and titled \u201cThe American Negro Writer and His Roots,\u201d obscures the work of the more radical speakers of the conference, setting limits on black subjectivity through conservative ideas of integration. In his introduction, Davis touts dominant Cold War ideology, implying that racial troubles are on the wane. The work of the participants, however, tells a different story. Julian Mayfield remains suspicious of integration, seeing in it the demise of black life. And Langston Hughes exhorted his audience: \u201cuntil you get white \u2014 write,\u201d warning them against the crass racism of the publishing industry. For Washington, 1959 is a crossroads wherein the black left vied with conservative integrationists, many of whom wrote for publications that were government subsidized. In Washington\u2019s hands, Davis\u2019s volume thus becomes a microcosm of public memory of black cultural production of the 1950s, full of edits, omissions, rewritings, and government-sponsored corruption. And Lorraine Hansberry, who gave the conference\u2019s keynote, which is absent from the text, sits in the middle of these contested spaces.<\/span><\/p>\n I have been immersed in these spaces as I work on my own project about 1959. Hansberry\u2019s play\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u00a0debuted that year, a few months after the AMSAC conference. As\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0makes clear, the crossroads of 1959 were also indelibly global. In this close-post era of\u00a0Sputnik<\/em>, Fidel Castro became president of Cuba, and Hawaii joined the US as its 50th state. It was also the year that the USSR opened its doors to the US for the first time since World War II, welcoming the American National Exhibition in\u00a0Sokol\u2019niki<\/em>Park. ANEM became the site of the famous \u201ckitchen\u201d debate between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, a debate that turned heads toward the smooth surfaces of consumerism, the arts of blenders and blending in. With State Department authorized and funded ways of representing black subjectivity, ANEM became a mouthpiece for the multiple wonders of market capitalism.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n This was a period when US officials deployed race as part of a national narrative of inclusiveness in order to counteract Soviet propaganda that alleged US hypocrisy along racial lines. From\u00a0Brown v. Board<\/em>\u00a0to the four African American guides on the ground at ANEM, narratives of progress in race relations and interracial cohesion began to feature African Americans. Rather than showcasing capitalism as an evil in concert with white supremacy, this kind of racial progressivism proclaimed the future as bright with cross-racial solidarity.<\/span><\/p>\n The proximity of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s debut and Hansberry\u2019s contributions to AMSAC necessitate rethinking this moment as a shaping one for the confrontation of black radicalism not only with integrationists at home, but also with the global staging of a cultural front as a site for Western triumphalism. Nixon\u2019s rhetoric in Moscow presented a one-sided view of the mechanics of the American kitchen. The push-button features of this kitchen were far removed from the manual labors of Maud Martha\u2019s kitchenette. Forgotten in Moscow were the day laborers who toiled in the kitchens of middle-class whites, and the structural links between these lives.<\/span><\/p>\n Similarly, as Washington points out, the account of AMSAC recorded in the proceedings was distorted. As with the suppressed meanings of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u2019s more potent critiques of racial inequality, the sexual division of labor, and coloniality, in the published AMSAC proceedings, conversations are lost; addresses, photos, and papers are hidden, manipulated, and entirely missing. Held at this critical juncture in global history, the AMSAC gathering put forth what was to be erased later that year in Moscow and elsewhere as African Americans circled the globe, some in search of better options, some representing the US. It\u2019s important to remember that dissenting voices of the left were erased not only in the State Department\u2013authorized publication of the conference\u2019s proceedings, but also in government-sponsored cultural tours that promoted inter-racialism as a defining conceit of US democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n What interests me beyond the historical proximity of AMSAC and ANEM, however, is the warping of the relationships between Moscow and New York, and between the intellectual vibrancies at work in both places in the received accounts of these events. We need to reactivate the conscious and unconscious longings \u2014 the deferred dreams, as Langston Hughes wrote in the poem that became the inspiration for\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0Raisin in the Sun<\/em>\u2019s title \u2014 displaced by progressivist accounts of history for which\u00a0A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>has served as a pivotal marker.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n How can you grasp a legacy of dissent from erasure? Washington\u2019s best lesson is that we can\u2019t move forward unless we work through our complicity in the violences of the past. If things are going to change we need to live amongst those we have not been willing to consider fully human: to live amongst chickens, as it were. Until then we are all just wrestling with ignorance, and indulging in our own selfish appetites \u2014 licking our lips at the thought of our next succulent meal.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n [1]<\/a>\u00a0I explore these ideas more fully in\u00a0The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol\u2019niki Park to Chicago\u2019s South Side<\/em>\u00a0(Dartmouth UP).<\/span><\/p>\n [2]<\/a>\u00a0The late critic Richard Iton describes the popular reception of\u00a0Raisin<\/em>\u00a0as marking a shift in the movement from Popular Front politics to those of liberalism\u2019s integration: this reception\u2019s \u201cdownplaying, and in some instances suppression, of themes related to anticolonialism, diasporic consciousness, and intraracial class distinctions, along with the implicit engagement of gender relations, mark her creation as a significant turning point in both black politics and popular culture.\u201d See\u00a0In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a4<\/span><\/p>\n +++++++++++++++<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n