The CPUSA's Line and Atmosphere: Did Ellison and Wright Walk It as They Breathed It as They Wrote?

Abstract

The CPUSA's Line and Atmosphere:Did Ellison and Wright Walk It as They Breathed It as They Wrote? Brian Roberts (bio) I am grateful to the editors at Journal of Narrative Theory for arranging the present exchange between Barbara Foley andme. Foley's several and meticulously researched articles on African American writers and communism situate her as someone particularly well-positioned to comment on my recently published essay. I am pleased with her attention. William J. Maxwell, in his book New Negro, Old Left, thanks Foley for seeing "the wheat in the chaff" even when his work was less well known (ix). Although Foley has, perhaps, seen in my work less of the wheat and more of the chaff, I appreciate her detailed critique of my essay "Reading Ralph Ellison Synthesizing the CP and NAACP: Sympathetic Narrative Strategy, Sympathetic Bodies." Her comments shed important light on the incorporation of biography, history, and politics into the study of literature. However, I want to examine a handful of issues within her response, including a certain uneasiness with ambivalent cultural signs and subjectivities, her suggestions for what ought to be studied when addressing African Americans' responses to the Communist Party, and her treatment of what I call the sympathetic narrative strategy and sympathetic bodies that arise in Ellison's story. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire offers much to take with a grain of salt, but I think the writers are correct when they observe that "the [End Page 258] real social situation [. . .] never breaks down neatly into an absolute binary between pure and opposing forces. Reality presents proliferating multiplicities" (128). Foley's response at times seems to eschew reality's multiplicities in favor of pinning down a more "pure" (mis)representation of cultural signs and subjectivities. For instance, in my essay I note the colonialist implications of the NAACP's use of a newspaper article portraying white lynchers as African cannibals. I problematize the irony of using the category of "black brute" to condemn a white mob (18-19). Foley dismisses the colonizing facets of notions such as barbarism and savagery by noting that lynching was widely characterized in these terms. The NAACP, Foley points out, employed the slogan "SAVAGES EAT PEOPLE WITHOUT COOKING—AMERICANS COOK HUMAN BEINGS WITHOUT EATING," which used the categories of savage and cannibal to condemn white mobs. She further notes that this strategy's "patent intent" would be "to de-racialize the notion of barbarism altogether" (235). While this historical information is interesting and her observation of the NAACP's intent is undoubtedly correct, Foley's reliance on the NAACP's intent results in a failure to admit the effects of cultural signs whose resonances exceed the intent of their users. For instance, in seeking gender equality, one might use a slogan such as "WOMEN ARE PART OF MANKIND TOO." Even if the intent were to de-gender the term "mankind," intent is ultimately less relevant in that few have thought that any amount of application of the term "mankind" to women will succeed in extricating the word's complicity with patriarchy.In the case of the discussion within my essay, "intent" seems less relevant because the cultural signs (i.e., images of savagery, barbarism, and cannibalism) are ambivalent and shot through with unintended meanings. For this reason, my essay was not interested in the NAACP's intent but rather in the colonial baggage carried by its representational practices. Another distracting drive toward representational purity surfaces in Foley's arguments concerning Ellison and Wright's attitudes toward the CP. In my essay, I read Wright's 1944 "I Tried to Be a Communist" and highlight its trend of representing the CP as "using" and "manipulating" Wright because of his race. In my essay I admit that to some degree Wright would have been superimposing his present feelings onto his past experiences, but I also suggest that "it seems logical to grant that Wright felt at least some of these reservations while a member of the CP" (6). [End Page 259] Foley, I think justifiably, notes that I provide scant evidence for this suggestion. As she attempts to refute my suggestion, however, her own evidence, historically...