Communist rhetorics and reception in black bohemian writers : the case of Hughes, McKay, and Nugent.

Abstract

Currently we are witnessing a revolution in U.S. literary critical studies, a radical recovery movement. Critics have started reevaluating the progressive literature of the 1930s, previously deliberately forgotten, dismissed, and largely undifferentiated because of its thematic similarity. They propose a rereading both of the silence accompanying the literature of the American Left and an analysis of the reasons behind it. To be sure, this literature appealed to multiple audiences and dealt with major social and political issues of the moment, participating in a cultural dialogue that complicated or resisted the influential leftist perspectives on current condition. Most of the texts approach unfamiliar topics, employ rhetorical strategies, and embody aesthetic principles different from those valued in canonical literature. Therefore, modern readers should be taught new ways to read progressive literature by investigating history, biography, or, in some cases, the collective enterprise that sometimes triumphed over individual voices. Attempts have also been made to restore the history of black radicalism in America. Recent studies bring about a re-visioning of black and white Marxism in the U.S., showing how African American Communist intellectuals influenced or even transformed their white radical counterparts. In addition, they at first rearticulated the Communist ideology to fit a class approach to black oppression and later reshaped it to fit a view of African Americans as an oppressed nationality. Poststructuralist and Marxist theory can be applied to the study of writers like Hughes, McKay, and Nugent, exposing the interplay among their bohemianism, their homosexuality, and their relationship with the Communist Party.