Racial and Social Democracy in Sam Greenlee’sThe Spook Who Sat by the Door

Abstract

AbstractIn 2011, Kenneth Warren boldly asserted that the collapse of Jim Crow spelled the end of African American literature. While many have sought to refute Warren on the grounds that the social conditions which originally underwrote African American literature persist in the guise of structural racism and mass incarceration, this essay focuses on Warren’s claim that such literature “constitutes a representational and rhetorical strategy.” Drawing on the work of political scientist Preston H. Smith II, it argues that African American literature represented an attempt to resolve the tensions between “racial democracy,” on the one hand, and social democracy on the other. The essay suggests that Sam Greenlee’s 1969 spy novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door anticipated some of Warren’s concerns and now allows us to see clearly how the demise of Jim Crow rendered any future rapprochement between racial and social democracy narratively untenable. In this way, Greenlee’s novel invites us to consider whether too much of a focus on how African American literature ends tends to distract us from the perhaps more important task of analyzing how it fails as an aesthetic practice in a post-Jim Crow world.Refracting Warren’s counterintuitive claim through the lens of Smith’s dialectic . . . makes clear that the demise of Jim Crow constitutes an aesthetic problem whereby African American literature enters a vexed, less clearly collaborative relationship with leftist politics.