Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black RadicalismRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism
Both of these texts derive their power from theorizations of US black radicalisms based on original close readings of neglected texts, offering new radical canons that contribute to the scholarship that documents an intellectual tradition of black radicalism. While other Cold War analyses often emphasize McCarthyism as a technique of fear, James Ziegler argues that anticommunism became embedded in US culture as a national pedagogy, produced as if it represented “abstract, universal reason” (10) and possessing a kind of “innate rectitude” (6) that cast communism in the political imagination as not only un-American but anathema to common sense, a kind of depraved knowledge that is literally “unthinkable” (17). As the title of Ziegler’s book suggests, the Red Scare witch hunt always had a racist subtext, targeting Cold War black radicalism, which was easily smeared by its associations with the Left. The House Un-American Activities Committee, for example, routinely suggested that favoring race equality was a sign of communism. A powerful example of how anticommunist pedagogy and racism worked in tandem is the billboard produced by the John Birch Society in 1965, on the second day of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, featuring a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. at a Highlander Folk School meeting in Tennessee captioned “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” With its suggestion of an underground operation, alien forces, and interracial mixing, the billboard, intended as ocular proof of King as communist, reveals the double design of anticommunism pedagogy—to incite racial tensions and to “[remove] from public culture reasonable deliberation over radical social change” (21).Ziegler proposes a counterpedagogy to disrupt these anticommunist “habits of thought” (8), restoring texts of social protest that have been ignored or misrepresented and that attest to the racism of anticommunism and to the resistance of black radicals. He portrays these autobiographical texts as acts of self-assertion, deployed here because, in his terms, first-person eyewitness reports constitute another kind of knowledge—incorporating personal details, collective memories, and historical nuance—that disrupts the 1950s Cold War “discourse of certitude” (16). He turns to four autobiographical texts: King’s 1967 Riverside address, in which he makes public his opposition to the Vietnam War and his private struggles over the war; Richard Wright’s 1944 essay in the anticommunist screed The God That Failed (1949), which Ziegler reads against Wright’s unpublished personal essay “I Choose Exile”; C. L. R. James’s 1953 Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, written on Ellis Island when he was detained as an “alien subversive” (124); and the weekly newspaper columns of Frank Marshall Davis (Obama’s leftist mentor), “Frank-ly Speaking,” which Davis published for eight years as an African American exile in Hawaii, starting in 1948. Rather than serving as complex Cold War analyses that sustained the links between racism and global capitalism, the writings of the exiles Wright, James, and Davis would never be allowed to penetrate the anticommunist curriculum. Wright’s “I Choose Exile,” written in opposition to Cold War anticommunism from France, was deliberately suppressed by Ebony magazine. The vicious attacks King sustained after his Riverside address made him an exile in his own country but would eventually become his most sophisticated and personal critique of “an exploitative neocolonial world order” (47).The critical focus of GerShun Avilez’s Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism is on the formal and generic experimentations of contemporary black artists that are rooted in the black nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s but incorporate contemporary reformulations of black nationalist thought. While we tend to think of black nationalist thought as static, Radical Aesthetics defines it in terms of its debates, its public disagreements, and its divisions that “helped to shape the larger theoretical terrain of Modern Black Nationalism” (95–96). The key element in what Avilez terms “modern black aesthetics” is an engagement with formal innovation and experimentation as a method of translating the political anxieties, questions, and contradictions of Black Arts–era nationalism. His project is “to queer nationalist rhetoric,” that is, to emphasize its multiplicities and its contradictions, to see it as a “contentious terrain” (168), and to show that it has had a decisive impact on black cultural expression that has pushed contemporary black artists to imagine, explore, and experiment.Because we take for granted notions about black nationalism that were the most publicly expressed during the Black Arts/black power era, Avilez focuses on the ways those tenets were being challenged by queer people of color and black feminists. In contrast to black nationalists such as LeRoi Jones, who figured an issue like rape as a debate between black men and white men over possession of the black female body, or Eldridge Cleaver, who notoriously advocated the rape of white women as a means of recovering black masculine power, the cloth-framed, quilted paintings of Faith Ringgold’s Slave Rape series (1972–73) highlight the way Black Arts–era feminists repositioned reproduction and gender constructs to foreground women and gender violence. In one painting in this series, Ringgold features pregnant, nude black women falling through the air against a background of plants and trees, apparently helplessly, but armed with axes and machetes, thus reconstructing the vulnerability of black women “as resistance and willful force” (105).Avilez cites a number of contemporary artists who queer the nationalist aesthetic, including filmmakers Spike Lee and Cheryl Dunye, poets Cornelius Eady and Jayne Cortez, and novelists Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Avilez notes, as critic Madhu Dubey also does, Morrison’s specific investment in nationalist issues, most obviously in her 1997 novel Paradise, which is fixed on questions of community, with its all-black towns, female community, and the desire for “racialized” spaces. With its ambiguous racial identities and refusal of a realistic ending, Paradise represents the experimental aesthetic that simultaneously desires and deconstructs a black nationalist model of African American community. The brilliant strategy of Radical Aesthetics is in its original interpretations of artists not ordinarily associated with the Black Arts movement, such as Walker, Ringgold, John A. Williams, and Toni Cade Bambara, who are strikingly critical of the patriarchal politics, imagined kinship, and collapse of difference that are considered tenets of black nationalism. Avilez might add to his canon such black feminist aesthetic experimenters as Alexis De Veaux, Ntozake Shange, and Sherley Anne Williams.While traditions of black radicalism seem to be independent strands, these enlightening analyses lead inevitably to what scholar James Edward Smethurst calls the “occluded relationship” between black nationalism and black left radicalism (The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006, 48). Left-wing black radicals often mentored Black Arts nationalists, for example, and black nationalists and civil rights radicals were trained by leftists at historically black colleges like Howard University, where they connected with anticolonial activists. These lines of interchange and continuity have yet to be fully examined. Uncovering them is the necessary next step.
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