New Negro, Old Left

by William J. Maxwell

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 literature―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 initiative―not a seduction of Depression-scarred innocents―brought scores of literary "New Negroes" to the Old Left.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Research

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 1999

About the author

William J. Maxwell is Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught modern American and African American literatures since 2009. He is the author of the books "F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature" (Princeton University Press, 2015), which won an American Book Award in 2016, and "New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars" (Columbia University Press, 1999). He is the editor of the collection "James Baldwin: The FBI File" (Arcade, 2017); of Claude McKay's "Complete Poems" (University of Illinois Press, 2004); and, along with Gary Holcomb, of Claude McKay's previously unpublished novel "Romance in Marseille" (Penguin Classics, 2020). His more than sixty essays and reviews have appeared in academic and popular journals including "African American Review," "The American Historical Review," "American Literary History," "American Literature," "Callaloo," "Harper’s," "The Irish Times," "The Journal of American History," "Modernism/modernity," "Politico," "Publishers Weekly," "Salon," and the "London Times Literary Supplement " ("TLS"). Maxwell is the First Vice President of the international Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and has served on the Modern Language Association (MLA) divisional committees on both black American and twentieth-century American literatures. A former book review editor of "African American Review" and member of the editorial board of "American Literature," he is now a contributing editor at "American Literary History" and "James Baldwin Review." 

Reviews

[Dylan Suher · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those scholarly works which proposes a reevaluation so fundamental that you wonder why nobody thought to do it before. Some arguments are stronger than others (the Mike Gold chapter is an interpretation stretched to the brink of credulity), but all of the arguments here are clear and careful, refreshingly free of the shibboleths of theory, but still well informed and critically dynamic.