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The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (Race and American Culture) PDF

301 Pages·1999·16.83 MB·English
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The New Red Negro RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE Arnold Rampersad and Shelley Fisher Fishkin General Editors Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class Eric Lott The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature Michael North Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture Laura Doyle Who Set You Flowin': The African-American Migration Narrative Farah Griffin Doers of the Word: African-American Women Writers in the Antebellum North Carla Peterson Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912 Sandra Gunning Scenes of Subjection Saidiya V Hartman Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Susan Gubar Race: The History of an Idea in America, New Edition Thomas F. Gossett Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race Claudia Tate Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity Doris Witt The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 James Edward Smethurst The New Red Negro The LITERARY LEFT and AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY, 1930-1946 James Edward Smethurst NEW YORK OXFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1999 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1999 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smethurst, James Edward. The new red Negro : the literary left and African American poetry, 1930-1946 / James Edward Smethurst. p. cm. — (Race and American culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-I9-5I2054-X 1. American poetry—Afro-American authors—History and criticism, 2. Communism and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Political poetry, American—History and criticism. 5. Left and right (Political science) in literature. 6. Afro-Americans— Intellectual life—20th century. 7. Afro-Americans—Politics and government. 8. Afro-Americans in literature. 9. Race relations in literature. 10. United States—Race relations. I. Tide. 11. Series. PS3IO.N4S64 1998 811'. 5209896073—dc21 98-17128 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 1 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Permissions From Collected Poems by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Extracts from the poetry of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Excerpts from "Southern Road," "Strong Men Gittin' Stronger," Maumee Ruth," "Mecca," "Effie," "Slim in Arkansas," "Sporting Beasley," "Tin Roof Blues," "Cabaret," "Children's Children," "Salutamus," "Side By Side," "Roberta Lee," "Legend," "Honey Mah Love" from The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Michael S. Harper. Copyright © 1980 by Sterling A. Brown. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. From This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems by Margaret Walker Alexander. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker Alexander. Reprinted by permission of the University of Georgia Press. Excerpt from "Spring and All, section XVII" by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909-1939, Volume I. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt from "Sullen Bakeries of Total Recall" by Bob Kaufman, from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. Copyright © 1965 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpts from "Black Mother Praying," "Circle One," and "Circle Two" from Powerful Long Ladder by Owen Dodson. Copyright © 1973 by Owen Dodson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc. From A Gallery of Harlem Portraits by Melvin B. Tolson. Copyright © 1979 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Extensive attempts have been made to contact additional copyright holders of mate- rial quoted beyond the normal boundaries of fair use. This page intentionally left blank for Edward William Smethurst Jr. and Ludlow Bixby Smethurst, and in memory of Edward William Smethurst Sr., who took me to see Shakespeare This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Alany people have supported, influenced, and generally made possible this project. As usual, all shortcomings are strictly my own and should not be attributed in any way to the people listed here. I am grateful to those scholars at Harvard, visiting and resident, who gave me a broad view of American literature and culture and "ethnic studies," especially Dwight Andrews, Sacvan Bercovitch, Juan Bruce-Novoa, King-Kok Cheung, Laurence de Looze, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maryemrna Graham, Phillip Brian Harper, the late Nathan Huggins, Walter Jackson, Meredith McGill, and Jeffrey Melnick. I am also indebted to many scholars outside Harvard who have encouraged me, read drafts of my work, shared panels with me, commented on conference papers, shared their own work, and provided invaluable material and / or advice for my pro- ject. I am most grateful to Kenneth Rosen of the University of Southern Maine and James De Jongh of CUNY who in various ways inspired the direction my work has taken. Among the many other scholars to whom I owe thanks are Byrne Fone, John German, Cheryl Greenberg, Leo Hamalian, Matthew Jacobson, Robin Kelley, Diana Linden, Bill Maxwell, William McFeeley, Jim Miller, Bill Mullen, Richard Newman, Susan Pennybacker, Paula Rabinowitz, Mark Solomon, Patricia Sullivan, Michael Thurston, and Alan Wald (whose knowledge of literary radicalism is only surpassed by his generosity in sharing that knowledge). Much gratitude is due to those friends with whom I have shared (and argued about) poetry, politics, food, music, and all the other things that make life worth liv-

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The New Red Negro surveys African-American poetry from the onset of the Depression to the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African-American poets and organized ideology from the proletarian early 1930s to the neo-modernist late 1940
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