Subversive Invisibility during the Cold War: Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn”

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores how Paule Marshall engages issues of leftist politics and homosexuality in “Brooklyn,” her only fiction set during the Cold War. On the surface, this novella, the second in Marshall’s 1961 collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing, is a story of sexual harassment that, she has explained, was based on an experience she had at Brooklyn College. Marshall’s boldness in confronting the sexual and racial politics of the 1950s in the story’s depiction of an African American woman’s sexual harassment by her white professor has been noted by many. But less remarked is the fact that beneath the surface narrative of this story, Marshall has incorporated transgressive subtexts that address leftist politics and homosexuality, two issues that were deeply contested during the McCarthy years. A close examination of “Brooklyn” highlights the previously unrecognized narrative strategies that Marshall employs to both produce and conceal these subversive subtexts, thus creating a story that seems to reject communism at the same time that it incorporates a pro-communist political statement, and that seems to reflect the dominant culture’s assumption of heteronormativity while simultaneously endorsing the necessity of existential choice in the area of sexuality. In addition, Marshall shapes her characters so as to make existential choice more broadly the core theme of the story. This essay also situates the narrative in the context of Marshall’s own political activism as well as in the context of the negative impact that the Cold War political tensions had on African American writers during the 1950s.