Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War by Cedric Tolliver, and: Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson by Shana L. Redmond

Abstract

Reviewed by: Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War by Cedric Tolliver, and: Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson by Shana L. Redmond Samantha Pinto Cedric Tolliver. Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2019. 244 pp. $24.95. Shana L. Redmond. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95. When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers in the late 1990s, June Jordan came to give a reading in the Paul Robeson Lounge. She opened her talk by way of a joke—that this man who spoke so many languages, lettered in so many sports, was so incredibly multitalented, could have a lounge named after him. A lounge! Paul Robeson, critically understudied, and the time period he most saliently represents in Black arts and culture—the Cold War era—are finally getting their due in two new monographs: Cedric Tolliver's Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers and Shana Redmond's Everything Man. Joining recent work on the Black feminist political history of this time period by scholars such as Keisha Blain, Cheryl Higashida, Mary Helen Washington, and Carole Boyce Davies, as well as the literary studies work of Michelle Stephens, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Eve Dunbar, Tolliver and Redmond map deeply different takes on the legacies of an unsung era of African American cultural and political work. The Cold War era is a time of unprecedented political change and artistic production, sitting as it does amid World War II and burgeoning global decolonization movements. Tolliver and Redmond want to retrace figures in Black literature and culture who didn't toe even liberal lines around Black freedom struggles of the period, rewriting Robeson and others into the legacy of figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, who also recurs throughout Tolliver's text as a key theorist of the significance of culture and class to Black political movements. Tolliver thinks deeply around those who incorporated class and economic struggles as at the center of African American bids for equality with stunning archival work and a nuanced Marxist approach to difference within the African diaspora. He centers "those confrontations in the cultural realm between the US and the Soviet Union that paralleled and reinforced operations in the political, economic, and military spheres" (5) to capture the 'hearts and minds' of a global populace. This populace, particularly in decolonial Africa, was skeptical of the US not least because of its continued racist policies and politics, including legal segregation in the South and economic injustice nationwide. Tolliver's thick (re)description of the history of Black cultural expression in the Cold War political context is both forceful and eloquent in its open insistence on "restor[ing] culture to a primary site of struggle, refusing the capitalist society imperative, intensified during the Cold War, of according culture an autonomous [End Page 343] function removed from the materiality of social reproduction" (16) and claiming some Black artists (and activists) as particularly "disruptive" (17) to this equation and political economy as usual, even as it was difficult to escape what he refers to as its ideological—and often material—enclosures. Tolliver reframes this period of African American literature around the Cold War era in a first chapter that anchors scholarly work on the diaspora by critics like Brent Hayes Edwards in his The Practice of Diaspora into the frame of the Cold War, and engages important thinkers in diaspora literature such as Aimé Césaire through Cold War politics and critiques. From here, Tolliver moves to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean engagements with US imperial histories in the region. His reading of George Lamming's classic In the Castle of My Skin recasts it as a primer on Cold War development in the shadow of a century of American occupation. The emphasis on US foreign policy in Lamming's and Jacques Stephen Alexis's work here is thought-fully and thoroughly sutured to close readings of their texts that open up African diaspora and Cold War studies of the period's literature. Robeson appears as a...