Paule Marshall, Urban Crisis, and the Bildungsroman in a Totalitarian Age

Abstract This article presents Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) as a novel whose aesthetic engagements with totalitarianism disclose broader ideological ambivalences within 1950s-era Black antiracist thought and art. Marshall, like other midcentury Black authors, refashions a language of totalitarianism commonly wielded by cold warriors, directing it toward an anticolonial critique of Western racism. A central facet of this critique is Marshall's representation of inner-city America as an internal colony whose race-based oppression resonates with overseas colonial injustices. However, in Marshall's novel, this critique unfolds through the Bildung of a protagonist whose rebellious growth ultimately connotes the geopolitical value of freedom trumpeted abroad by the US state at midcentury. The political energies the article's reading discerns in the novel are thus at once liberal and radical, nationalist and internationalist. Brown Girl, Brownstones contains residues of a radical internationalist critique of globalized racism articulated by Black anticolonial activists of 1940s; however, its major antiracist currents reflect the ascension among 1950s activists of a liberal narrative foregrounding the struggle for civil rights within America itself, one in which the nation-state struggled to actualize its democratic potential. Marshall's novel, that is, ultimately dissents from midcentury US liberalism while never quite entirely disavowing its tenets.