1. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 670–71.
2. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad Press, 1988), 201, 237.
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 130.
4. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 201.
5. Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part 1) (San Francisco: Ministry of Information of the Black Panther Party, 1970), 7.
6. Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 73–74.
7. For an account of the Lumpen, see Rickey Vincent, Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013).
8. Kathleen Cleaver, On the Vanguard Role of the Black Urban Lumpen Proletariat (London: Grass Roots Publications, 1975), 11.
9. Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
10. Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 15, 8–9.
11. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 49–50.
12. Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 182–83.
13. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 50; Foley, Radical Representations, 184.
14. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 50–51.
15. Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front, 24, 23.
16. Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 38.
17. John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U.S. Culture and Literature, 1869–1956 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 140.
18. Ibid., 143.
19. Louise Thompson Patterson, “Unpublished Memoirs of Louise Thompson Patterson,” in We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices, ed. Walter T. Howard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 103–4.
20. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: Morrow, 1967) and Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983).
21. William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 12, 2.
22. Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
23. Ellison, Collected Essays, 87.
24. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 370.
25. Ibid., 419, 420.
26. Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 179.
27. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), 129–31.
28. Ellison, Collected Essays, 813.
29. This distinction between Ellison and Wright is, of course, foundational of the places each writer occupies in the African American canon and in US literary history. Ellison’s essay “The World and the Jug,” published in two parts in 1963 and 1964, is often read as Ellison’s validation of the narrative in which Ellison, because less politically militant than Wright, is held to offer a more sophisticated and varied vision of black art and life.
30. Ellison, Collected Essays, 674.
31. Claudia Tate, “Black Women Writers at Work: An Interview with Margaret Walker,” in Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, ed. Maryemma Graham (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 34.
32. Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 272.
33. Rowley, Richard Wright, 152–53.
34. Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, 124.
35. Ibid., 126.
36. Tate, “Black Women Writers at Work,” 33.
37. Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, 9, 237.
38. Ibid., 128.
39. Margaret Walker, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 64.
40. Ellison, Collected Essays, 322.
41. C. L. R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 196.
1. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
2. Robert L. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat,” History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (1987): 677, 676.
3. Hal Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels,” Économies et Sociétés 6, no. 12 (1972): 2309.
4. Dominick LaCapra, “Reading Marx: The Case of The Eighteenth Brumaire,” in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 284.
5. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 679.
6. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Knopf, 1984), 387.
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.
8. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 122–24.
9. Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 49, 23.
10. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 14; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 75.
11. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, 392.
12. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 36–37.
13. Peter Hayes, “Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’” Review of Politics 50, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 446.
14. Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969), 6.
15. Marx, Class Struggles in France, 50.
16. Peter Stallybrass associates Marx’s descriptions of the lumpenproletariat with a Victorian-era bourgeois gaze that saw the urban underclass as racially othered alongside constructions of its heterogeneous unknowability. See “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 74–75.
17. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 75.
18. Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity,” 72.
19. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1977), 797.
20. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings (New York: Penguin, 1992), 335.
21. LaCapra, “Reading Marx,” 284–85.
22. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 90–100.
23. Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity,” 91.
24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 5.
25. Ibid., 80–82.
26. Kathleen Cleaver, On the Vanguard Role of the Black Urban Lumpen Proletariat (London: Grass Roots Publications, 1975), 3.
27. Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part 1) (San Francisco: Ministry of Information of the Black Panther Party, 1970), 6–11.
28. Ibid., 8, 7.
29. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” Black Scholar 4, no. 3 (1972): 4, 6–7, 8.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. C. J. Munford, “The Fallacy of Lumpen Ideology,” Black Scholar 4, no. 10 (July–August 1973): 50.
32. Henry Winston, “The Crisis of the Black Panther Party,” in Strategy for a Black Agenda: A Critique of New Theories of Liberation in the United States and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 218.
33. Quoted in Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype: Debunking the Panther Mythology,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 43.
34. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 97; Chris Booker, “Lumpenization: A Critical Error of the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 357–58.
35. Cecil Brown, Stagloee Shot Billy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 213.
36. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1991), ix–x.
37. Kathleen Cleaver, On the Vanguard Role of the Black Urban Lumpen Proletariat, 3.
38. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays (London: Verso, 1990): 59, 225, 230.
39. Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Knopf, 1967), 309–40.
40. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 82.
41. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 108.
42. Michael W. Jennings, introduction to Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 11.
43. Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 130.
44. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 49–50.
45. Ibid., 49.
46. Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, in Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 18–19.
47. Ibid., 62.
48. William J. Maxwell, “Banjo Meets the Dark Princess: Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Transnational Novel of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170.
49. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), 6.
50. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 198, 210.
51. Maxwell, “Banjo Meets the Dark Princess,” 174–76.
52. McKay, Banjo, 312.
53. Maxwell, “Banjo Meets the Dark Princess,” 176.
54. McKay, Banjo, 312–14.
55. See Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), and Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
56. Mike Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996), 308, 309.
57. Ibid., 27, 125, 136, 140, 31.
58. Ibid., 309, 37, 45.
59. Rideout, Radical Novel in the United States, 185.
60. Foley, Radical Representations, 287.
61. Edward Dahlberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 284.
62. Edward Anderson, Hungry Men (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 192, 44.
63. Nelson Algren, “A Lumpen,” in Entrapment and Other Writings, ed. Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 33–35.
64. William Solomon, Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124.
65. William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 193–96.
66. Nelson Algren, Somebody in Boots (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1965).
67. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40.
68. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 351–52.
69. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37.
70. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
71. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Vesey (New York: New Press, 1992), 217.
72. Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 219, 226.
73. Ibid., 17.
74. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 39.
1. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 50.
2. Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” in Native Son: The Original 1940 Text (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968), xx; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.
3. James Smethurst, “After Modernism: Richard Wright Interprets the Black Belt,” in Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary, ed. Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 15.
4. Of the three writers of this study, Wright was the one most publicly associated with the Communist Party. Wright entered the Communist orbit in 1933, when he joined the party-backed Chicago John Reed Club, and joined the party itself shortly after. Wright was then active in the Communist movement in both Chicago and New York until he broke from the party during World War II, over its unilateral support for the US war effort and attendant deprioritization of antiracist and anticapitalist activism. For accounts of Wright’s transactions with the left and formative influence by Communism, see Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) and Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
5. James Baldwin “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 34.
6. William Solomon, Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123–24.
7. William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 191, 184.
8. The novel’s approach to subjectivity has been analyzed through various conceptual lenses that both complement and diverge from my reading. In a sophisticated consideration of Wright’s corpus, Abdul JanMohamed offers a psychoanalytic reading of Bigger’s actions as constituting an instrumental misrecognition and appropriation of death, Mary’s as well as his eventual own, to demonstrate the black individual’s subjectivity and freedom and thus protest the social death imposed on African Americans. See Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). The social and political significances of subjectivity in Native Son are analyzed in a host of diverse readings, such as Anthony Dawahare’s Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Kimberly S. Drake’s Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Matthew Elder’s “Social Demarcation and the Forms of Psychological Fracture in Book One of Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 31–47; Stephen George’s “The Horror of Bigger Thomas: The Perception of Form without Face in Richard Wright’s Native Son,” African American Review 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 497–504; and Cynthia Tolentino’s “The Road Out of the Black Belt: Sociology’s Fictions and Black Subjectivity in Native Son,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 377–405.
9. Richard Wright to Mike Gold, c. 1940, box 98, folder 1354, Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT (hereafter RWP).
10. Samuel Sillen, “The Meaning of Bigger Thomas,” New Masses (April 30, 1940): 26, 28.
11. Donald Gibson, “Wright’s Invisible Native Son,” American Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 728.
12. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 298.
13. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” xxiv.
14. Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2003), 54, 49, 64.
15. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” Black Scholar 4, no. 3 (1972): 4, 7.
16. Rowley, Richard Wright, 143.
17. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad Press, 1988), 126.
18. Rowley, Richard Wright, 40.
19. Richard Wright, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” in Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper-Perennial, 2004), 28.
20. Richard Wright, “Almos’ A Man,” Harper’s Bazaar (January 1940): 40, 107.
21. Ibid, 107.
22. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
23. Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), 54–55.
24. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 87–88.
25. Richard Wright, “Transcontinental,” International Literature, January 1936, 52.
26. Ibid., 52, 54.
27. Rowley, Richard Wright, 103.
28. Ibid., 55.
29. Richard Wright, Lawd, Today! (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 51, 89, 116, 143–44.
30. Ibid., 149.
31. Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature, 112.
32. Drake, Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel, 64, 65.
33. Wright, Lawd, Today!, 19–20.
34. Brannon Costello, “Richard Wright’s Lawd, Today! and the Political Uses of Modernism,” African American Review 37, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 47–48.
35. Wright, Lawd, Today!, 152–53.
36. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 14.
37. Wright, Lawd, Today!, 31, 151, 150.
38. Ibid., 175–76.
39. Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” xi, xiii.
40. Ibid., xiv-xv, xvii.
41. Ibid., xx.
42. Wright, Native Son, 109–10.
43. Ibid., 7.
44. Ibid., 10–11.
45. Ibid., 12–13, 307, 16.
46. Ibid., 61.
47. Susan Edmunds, “‘Just Like Home’: Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the New Deal,” American Literature 86, no. 1 (March 2014): 78, 76.
48. Wright, Native Son, 20.
49. Richard Wright, introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945): xxxii–xxxiii.
50. Wright, Native Son, 21–23.
51. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso, 2014), 264.
52. Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 151.
53. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 264.
54. Wright, Native Son, 32.
55. Ibid., 33.
56. Ibid., 36.
57. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 101.
58. Ibid., 180, 41, 190.
59. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 54, 24, 241, 238.
60. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 75, 136, 145.
61. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968), 43.
62. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 219, 223.
63. Sartre, Search for a Method, 97, 109.
64. Wright met both Arendt and Sartre at the New York apartment of his friend Dorothy Norman, the editor of the journal Twice a Year, in 1946. Wright became close to both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir following his permanent relocation to Paris in 1947. Wright discussed existentialism with Arendt in 1946, and would later read the English edition of her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism. See Rowley, Richard Wright, 326; and Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 434. Wright’s engagement with existentialist philosophy has been most frequently discussed in analyses of his Paris period and his 1953 novel The Outsider, most recently by Konstantina M. Karageorgos in “Deep Marxism: Richard Wright’s The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic,” Mediations 28, no. 2 (2015): 109–27.
65. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 160.
66. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 59.
67. Wright, Native Son, 16–17.
68. Ibid., 17–18, 40–41.
69. Ibid., 34–35.
70. Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, in Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism (New York: Knopf, 1972), 334.
71. Wright, Native Son, 86–90.
72. Ibid., 101, 24, 101.
73. Ibid., 100, 334–35.
74. Ibid., 102, 166–67.
75. Ibid., 101, 123.
76. JanMohamed, Death-Bound-Subject, 109.
77. Joseph Entin notes Wright’s enthusiasm for mysteries and detective fiction, and argues Native Son uses “the narrative drama and racial formulas of pulp fiction to challenge stereotypes about African Americans.” See Joseph B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 241. Incorporating the detective plot’s implications for the public revelation of Bigger’s subjectivity should be read as a further politicization of pulp fiction on Wright’s part.
78. Wright, Native Son, 108, 123, 213.
79. Ibid., 214.
80. Drake, Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel, 59–61.
81. Wright, Native Son, 228–30.
82. Ibid., 215, 219, 222, 305–6.
83. JanMohamed, Death-Bound-Subject, 110.
84. Wright, Native Son, 131–32, 226.
85. Ibid., 235–36.
86. Ibid., 231, 233.
87. Ibid., 248.
88. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 297.
89. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Queer Guerrillas: On Richard Wright’s and Frantz Fanon’s Dissembling Revolutionaries,” Mississippi Quarterly 61, no. 4 (September 2008): 617.
90. Wright, Native Son, 260–61, 374–75.
91. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 56–57.
92. Sondra Guttman, “What Bigger Killed For: Rereading Violence against Women in Native Son,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 173–74.
93. Wright, Native Son, 53, 66.
94. Ibid., 70.
95. Ibid., 268–69, 333.
96. Arendt, On Revolution, 61.
97. Wright, Native Son, 359, 362–63, 366, 364.
98. Ibid., 391–92.
99. Maria K. Mootry, “Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright,” in Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 119, 122, 118, 117.
100. Trudier Harris, “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters,” in New Essays on Native Son, ed. Keneth Kinnamon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77, 63.
101. See Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature, and Cheryl Higashida, “Aunt Sue’s Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism,” American Literature 75, no. 2 (June 2003): 395–425.
102. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose (New York: Norton, 1995), 212.
103. Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 143.
104. Arendt, Human Condition, 48n39, 30.
105. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin: 2000), 242, 236.
106. Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), 343–44.
107. Danielle Allen, “Law’s Necessary Forcefulness: Ralph Ellison vs. Hannah Arendt on the Battle of Little Rock,” Oklahoma City University Law Review 26 (2001): 861.
108. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 79–80.
109. Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 257.
110. Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism,” 143.
111. Barbara Foley, “‘A Dramatic Picture . . . of Woman from Feudalism to Fascism’: Richard Wright’s Black Hope,” in Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary, ed. Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 113.
112. Richard Wright, Black Hope, box 18, folder 292, RWP, 960–61.
113. Julieann Veronica Ulin, “Talking to Bessie: Richard Wright’s Domestic Servants,” American Literature 85, no. 1 (March 2013): 161.
1. Stanley Edgar Hyman to Ralph Ellison, July 19, 1942, box 1:51, folder 15, Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (REP).
2. Ralph Ellison to Stanley Edgar Hyman, c. July 1942, box 6, Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
3. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 58, 746.
4. Larry Neal, “Ellison’s Zoot Suit,” in Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Hersey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1974): 60.
5. Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. For other critics who have examined Ellison’s radicalism in productive ways, see Frederick T. Griffiths, “Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Case of Angelo Herndon,” African American Review 35, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 615–36; William J. Maxwell, “‘Creative and Cultural Lag’: The Radical Education of Ralph Ellison,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, ed. Steven C. Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 59–83; Christopher Z. Hobson, “Invisible Man and African American Radicalism in World War II,” African American Review 39, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 355–76; and Robin Lucy, “‘Flying Home’: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Black Folk During World War II,” Journal of American Folklore 120, no. 477 (Summer 2007): 257–83.
6. For a biographical account of Ellison’s trip, see Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2008), 44–51.
7. Jesse Wolfe, “Ambivalent Man: Ellison’s Rejection of Communism,” African American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 626.
8. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 198–99.
9. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 313; Foley, Wrestling with the Left, 6.
10. Ellison, Collected Essays, 154.
11. John F. Callahan, “Chaos, Complexity, and Possibility: The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987), 128.
12. Ellison, Collected Essays, 51–52.
13. Ibid., 200–202.
14. Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 209–10.
15. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2006), 65.
16. Ellison, Collected Essays, 64.
17. John S. Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 147, 150.
18. Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3.
19. Ralph Ellison, “A Party Down at the Square,” in Flying Home and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 1998), 11.
20. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 177–78, 365–66.
21. Ibid., 366–67; Norberto Bobbio, “Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society,” in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1979), 34.
22. Ellison, Collected Essays, 773.
23. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 51.
24. Ellison, Collected Essays, 773.
25. Ralph Ellison, Slick Novel, box 1:159, folder 13, REP. The pages of notes in this folder are not numbered.
26. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 55.
27. Ralph Ellison, Memoirs, box 1:110, folder 2, REP, 66, 68. Ellison’s typescript includes revisions added by hand. When quoting from this and subsequent typed documents in Ellison’s archive, I have included these handwritten revisions in my quotations. Throughout this chapter, I have been conservative in correcting any apparent spelling errors in Ellison’s manuscripts.
28. Ralph Ellison, “I Did Not Learn Their Names,” in Flying Home and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 1998), 89, 91, 93.
29. Ibid., 95–96.
30. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136–37.
31. See J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), and David G. Nicholls, Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
32. Anthony Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African-American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 74–76; Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 184.
33. Lucy, “‘Flying Home,’” 263.
34. Ibid., 274.
35. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (1937): 53–65.
36. Marian Minus, “Present Trends of Negro Literature,” Challenge 2, no. 1 (1937): 10–11.
37. Richard Wright, “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite,” New Masses, October 8, 1935, 19.
38. My use of the term “lumpen-folk” to name the presence of the lumpenproletariat as an operative figure in Ellison’s work is intended, on one level, to dialogue with Robin Lucy’s “working-folk,” which she introduces in her reading of Ellison to name the modernized refiguration of cultures of resistance in the urban black proletariat. See Lucy, “‘Flying Home,’” 263.
39. Ralph Ellison, “Hymie’s Bull,” in Flying Home and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 1998), 82, 83, 88.
40. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 99.
41. Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), 332.
42. Ellison, Collected Essays, 53.
43. Minus, “Present Trends of Negro Literature,” 11.
44. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 332–33.
45. Ibid., 418.
46. Ellison, Collected Essays, 16–17.
47. Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, May 11, 1940, box 97, folder 1314, Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. All Ellison–Wright correspondence cited is contained in this box and folder.
48. Ellison to Wright, April 22, 1940.
49. Ralph Ellison, “Recent Negro Fiction,” New Masses, August 5, 1941, 22.
50. Ellison to Wright, April 14, 1940.
51. Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” in Native Son: The Original 1940 Text (New York: Perennial, 2003), xxvii.
52. Ben Davis Jr., “Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ a Notable Achievement,” Sunday Worker, April 14, 1940, 4, 6.
53. Ellison to Wright, April 14, 1940.
54. Davis Jr., “Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ a Notable Achievement,” 4.
55. Lillian Johnson, “‘Native Son’ Is Personal Triumph, but No Value to a Nation,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 13, 1940, 13.
56. Ellison to Wright, April 14, 1940.
57. Ellison to Wright, April 22, 1940.
58. Ellison to Wright, April 14, 1940.
59. See James Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and his 1951 “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 13–23, 24–45.
60. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 101–4.
61. Ibid., 104.
62. Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 105.
63. Ellison to Wright, November 8, 1937.
64. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 103. Many of Ellison’s writings from this period are composed on the back of letterhead from the Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee and from Sutton’s office.
65. Ellison to Wright, November 8, 1937.
66. Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 109.
67. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 150.
68. Ralph Ellison, Tillman and Tackhead, box 1:165, folder 11, REP, 1. This folder contains the most complete draft of Tillman and Tackhead, and the page numbers in the following citations refer to the manuscript pages numbered by Ellison in this draft.
69. Natalie Spassky, “Winslow Homer: At the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 37.
70. Ellison, Tillman and Tackhead, 3.
71. Ibid., 4–6.
72. Peter H. Wood, Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 16–21, 33–60.
73. Ellison, Tillman and Tackhead, 11, 7, 11.
74. Ibid., 7.
75. Ibid., 8–10.
76. Ibid., 10–11.
77. Ibid., 20–21.
78. Ibid., 15.
79. Ibid., 27–28. Ellison here draws on his own recollections of witnessing the devastation of Tulsa in 1921. See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 21–22.
80. Ellison, Tillman and Tackhead, 30, 32.
81. Ibid., 38–40, 62.
82. Ibid., 45.
83. Ibid., 61, 64, 67.
84. Ralph Ellison, “Slick Gonna Learn,” Direction 2 (September 1939): 10–11, 14, 16.
85. Ellison, Slick, folder 10, 10.
86. Ibid., 16.
87. Ibid., 19, 22–23.
88. Ibid., 33.
89. Ibid., 42–46.
90. Ibid., 46.
91. Ibid., folder 11, 2.
92. Ibid., folder 10, 49–50.
93. Ibid., 52. For an account of the involuntary sterilization of African American women and women from other racial and ethnic groups in the twentieth century, see Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 215–21.
94. Ellison, Slick, folder 13.
95. Ibid., folder 9. The drafts of the Snodgrass episode in this folder are not paginated.
96. Ibid., folder 13.
97. William H. Sheldon, Psychology and the Promethean Will: A Constructive Study of the Acute Common Problem of Education, Medicine and Religion (New York: Harper, 1936), 76.
98. Foley, Wrestling with the Left, 131.
99. Ellison, Slick, folder 10, 65–67.
100. Ibid., folder 11, 18.
101. Ibid., 24, 27–29.
102. Ibid., 39, 41; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15.
103. Ellison, Slick, folder 11, 41–44.
104. Ibid., 46–47.
105. Ibid., 48.
1. Margaret Walker and Kay Bonetti, “An Interview with Margaret Walker,” The Missouri Review 15, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 117.
2. Carolyn J. Brown, Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). The fullest overview of Walker’s activity on the Communist left is a brief three-page discussion provided by Alan M. Wald. See Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 271–73. Nancy Berke is the scholar who has most thoroughly examined Walker’s work in the context of her leftism. As Berke explains, Walker criticism otherwise “focuses almost exclusively on her evocations of southern life,” and discussions of For My People, her only published work of Depression-era poetry, generally revolve around the text’s depiction of black life in the South and neglect its left-wing political orientations. See Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 124.
3. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 272; Margaret Walker to Richard Wright, October 9, 1937, and June 1, 1938, box 107, folder 1667, RWP. All Walker–Wright correspondence cited is contained in this box and folder.
4. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 272; Walker to Wright, August 30, 1938.
5. Her journal entry for September 4, 1939, describes how she attended events marking the party’s twentieth anniversary. See Margaret Walker, September 4, 1939, Journal entry, series II, box 3, folder 16, Margaret Walker Alexander Personal Papers, Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS (hereafter MWAP). Walker to Wright, June 30 and March 19, 1938.
6. Walker to Wright, September 29, 1937.
7. Walker to Wright, June 1, 1938.
8. Walker to Wright, November 24, 1937.
9. Margaret Walker, “Radical Revolutionary,” subseries III.A, box 1, Poetry Manuscript Perpetual Date Book (hereafter Poetry Date Book) Part 2, MWAP, 194. Page numbers of this and following manuscript poems are those printed on one of the two date books in which Walker drafted poems during the 1930s. The first book covers the period 1929–1934, the second 1936–1940. The poems in the date books are handwritten and, as drafts, reflect Walker’s writing process, often containing revisions, additions, and deletions. In this chapter, I have generally included these changes when quoting from her poetry manuscripts. In instances when a revision seems thematically significant, or when alternate versions of a part of a poem are available on the manuscript page, I have signaled the nature and status of the revision in the chapter text or notes.
10. Walker to Wright, April 7, 1938.
11. Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 193, 13, 198.
12. Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: Penguin, 1992), 350.
13. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 7–8, 10.
14. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989), 83–84.
15. I here allude to the utopian sense of queerness theorized by José Esteban Muñoz, in which the nonalignment of queerness with the normative and restrictive structures of present social life enables queer culture to gesture negatively toward futurity, toward an order of reality organized beyond and outside those structures. See Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
16. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1977), 797.
17. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 16.
18. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” Black Scholar 4, no. 3 (1972): 10.
19. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad Press, 1988), 70–71.
20. Margaret Walker, “Factory-hand,” Poetry Date Book Part 1, 347.
21. Margaret Walker, “Rich Fokes Worl,” Poetry Date Book Part 2, 40–41. Revisions to the manuscript indicate that Walker considered the title “Monologue” as well, and a version of the poem was eventually published as “Monologue” in Walker’s 1989 volume of collected poems. Perhaps an indication of Walker’s tendency to efface her 1930s Marxist investments by attributing primacy to racial over economic factors, “Monologue” attributes the speaker’s struggles to a “white folks world.” See Walker, This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 161–62. This decision does not cancel the clear intersectional workings of race and class in the body of the speaker’s monologue, however.
22. Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 71.
23. Margaret Walker, “Men at Work,” Poetry Date Book Part 2, 150–51.
24. André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 16.
25. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 598.
26. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 10.
27. Margaret Walker, “Gun Moll,” Poetry Date Book Part 2, 142–44.
28. Margaret Walker, “Prostitute,” Poetry Date Book Part 1, 302.
29. Margaret Walker, For My People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 54.
30. Berke, Women Poets on the Left, 151.
31. Walker, For My People, 54; Berke, Women Poets on the Left, 155.
32. Walker, “Prostitute,” 302.
33. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 59.
34. Walker, “Prostitute,” 302–3.
35. Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8.
36. Margaret Walker, “The Red Satin Dress,” The New Anvil, December 1939, 19–20.
37. Carolyn J. Brown, Song of My Life, 25; Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, 125–26.
38. Solomon Kobrin, “The Chicago Area Project—A 25-Year Assessment,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 322, no. 1 (March 1959): 21, 28.
39. Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, 126.
40. Margaret Walker, Goose Island, subseries III.B, MWAP, ii.
41. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 14.
42. Walker, Goose Island, 78–79.
43. Ibid., 96.
44. Ibid., 96–97, 78, 97.
45. Ibid., 128–32.
46. Ibid., 132–34.
47. Ibid., 136.
48. The line is from Dunbar’s poem “Life,” which appears in his 1893 volume Oak and Ivy.
49. Walker, Goose Island, 134.
50. Ibid., 183.
51. Ibid., 271.
52. Ibid., 272, 274.
53. Walker, For My People, 13–14.
54. Ibid., 25.
55. Derek Furr, “Re-Sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad: Alan Lomax, Margaret Walker, and the New Criticism,” Twentieth-Century Literature 59, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 250–51.
56. Berke, Women Poets on the Left, 144.
57. Walker, For My People, 33–34.
58. Berke, Women Poets on the Left, 145–47.
59. William Scott, “Belonging to History: Margaret Walker’s For My People,” MLN 121, no. 5 (December 2006): 1095.
60. Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), 332.
61. Walker, For My People, 35.
62. Ibid., 38, 35.
63. Ibid., 38–39.
64. Keith Gilyard, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 286–88.
65. Walker, For My People, 49.
66. Furr, “Re-Sounding Folk Voice,” 252.
67. Walker, For My People, 49.
68. Furr, “Re-Sounding Folk Voice,” 252.
69. Walker, For My People, 42–43.
1. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 167.
2. Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 359–60.
3. Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4–5.
4. Margaret Walker, Conversations with Margaret Walker, ed. Maryemma Graham (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 124.
5. Anthony Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 135, xviii.
6. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 293.
7. James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 204.
8. Irving Howe, Selected Writings: 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 127, 131.
9. Quoted in Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 43.
10. Foley, Wrestling with the Left, 1.
11. Nathaniel Mills, “Writing Brotherhood: The Utopian Politics of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” in Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald, ed. Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, and Paula Rabinowitz (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2015), 195–210.
12. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 336–37, 342, 293.
13. Margaret Walker, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 64, 57.
14. Ibid., 51.
15. Margaret Walker, Jubilee (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999), 367.
16. Ibid., 367–69, 373.
17. Richard Wright, The Outsider (New York: Perennial, 2003), 248, 448.
18. Ibid., 300, 436, 376.
19. For an illuminating discussion of The Outsider in the context of Wright’s criticisms of the Communist Party and European existentialist philosophy, and his perception of the possibilities inherent in the global emergence of a postcolonial “outside” of the West, see Jeffrey Atteberry, “Entering the Politics of the Outside: Richard Wright’s Critique of Marxism and Existentialism,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 873–95.