Whatever Happened to Interracial Literature?

Several decades ago, a critic would have been forgiven for thinking that the future of US literary studies belonged to what the scholar William J. Maxwell had hailed as “the new integrationism.” In his 1996 review of recently published monographs by Barbara Foley, George Hutchinson, and Michael North, Maxwell observes that “critics of American literature have begun to treat black-white integration as a literary-historical obligation,” suggesting that the then-burgeoning focus on the interracial character of US literature among professional critics was not a mere trend but rather evidence of a seismic disciplinary shift (205). Although Maxwell saw Ralph Ellison as the lodestar of this generation of critics, its governing ethos is perhaps best summed up in the following passage from The Omni-Americans (1970), a brilliant collection of polemical essays penned by Ellison's best friend, the novelist and critic Albert Murray: “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto” (22). One marvels at the sheer volume of critical texts that espoused some version of this ethos in the late twentieth century. In the 1990s, critics such as Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Susan Gubar, Eric Lott, Walter Benn Michaels, Dana Nelson, Werner Sollors, Eric Sundquist, and Kenneth Warren—not to mention Maxwell and the subjects of his review—all published important interracially themed works. But if this list, which reads like a who's who of Americanist literary and cultural critics, helps to capture the sense that the field experienced an integrationist renaissance in the late twentieth century, it also calls attention to the fact that the renaissance was short-lived and less than transformative. Today a new integrationist approach to US literature—one that explores the various ways in which writers of different races and ethnicities have inhabited and constructed interpenetrating worlds—no longer appears to rank high on the literary-critical agenda. Indeed, far from being “a literary-historical obligation,” it is now something of an aberration.Why has the critical school identified by Maxwell fared so poorly in recent years? Surely it has something to do with the fact that this approach derived much of its salience from the fin de siècle canon wars and debates over multiculturalism, both of which abruptly subsided in the new millennium. Yet another likely reason is the emergence of “post-racial” politics during the Obama era, which led to a renewed interest in the counterdiscourse of Black exceptionalism. The latter, epitomized by what several scholars have recently termed “the cult of Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism”1 and the widespread turn to Afro-pessimism in literary and cultural studies, has not only enabled critics to account for the stubborn persistence of racial inequality after the election of the country's first Black president; it has also buttressed a new wave of efforts to reassert the importance of Black cultural distinctiveness. The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency, which spurred a resurgence of white Christian nationalism, and the recent spate of high-profile killings of unarmed Black people at the hands of law enforcement that culminated in the George Floyd protests of 2020, have likewise only served to make talk of integrationism, literary or otherwise, seem politically naive or passé. Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that scholars of US literature are more interested in anatomizing anti-Blackness and the construction of discrete ascriptive identities than in exploring interracial literary exchanges, particularly between Black people and white people.This situation is regrettable, not least because there remains much to learn about the lengthy history of interracial literary collaboration in the United States, as Korey Garibaldi's new book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, successfully reveals. Although there exists a substantial body of criticism on interracial literature, it tends to cluster around two historical nodes: the antebellum period and the Harlem Renaissance. Consequently, important “histories of Black and interracial authorship, literary work, and institutional support before—and after—the 1920s are less well known” (6). A worthy heir to the new integrationist tradition, Garibaldi has taken up the task of filling some of those gaps that endure in the scholarship on twentieth-century interracial literature. His book unearths a fascinating history of Black-white literary alliances that stretches from the Progressive Era to the mid-1960s, when the explosion of long-simmering racial tensions ostensibly rendered such interactions untenable. This declinist narrative of cross-racial cooperation, which bears a striking resemblance to the trajectory of the new integrationism as a field, speaks powerfully to the historical contingency of not only interracial solidarity in the United States but also racial categories themselves. Indeed, after reading Impermanent Blackness, one wonders how much of the literature that now falls under the rubric “African American” might instead be more accurately characterized as “interracial”—a term that, according to Garibaldi, many Black writers once proudly embraced.Garibaldi's central claim is that an interracial coterie of poets, novelists, anthologists, children's book authors, literary agents, and publishers waged an unsung battle to vitiate the color line during the first half of the twentieth century. His first and strongest chapter reconstructs the historical “erasure” of William Stanley Braithwaite, the Boston-bred man of letters who spearheaded this crusade in the early 1900s (68). That erasure is especially troubling because, as Garibaldi reveals, “many white readers and publishing insiders considered Braithwaite the most influential voice in American poetry and creative writing” (19). Born to an upper-class West Indian father and a formerly enslaved African American mother, Braithwaite presided over what many of his contemporaries “characterized as an American literary renaissance during and after the mid-1910s” (20). This was a decidedly interracial renaissance, one that, Garibaldi reminds us, saw the publication of works like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, and the first issues of the Crisis, a magazine cofounded by W. E. B. Du Bois and Braithwaite under the auspices of the fledgling NAACP. Braithwaite's reputation rested largely on his career as a poet and editor of the annual Anthology of Magazine Verse, which appeared for sixteen years and outsold “the entire sea of ‘little magazines’” in circulation at that time (39). Indeed, so important a literary tastemaker was Braithwaite that he became the bête noire of none other than Ezra Pound, who derided him as “a nigger” and “Boston coon” while conspiring with other white anti-interracialists to dispel his influence on US literature (qtd. in Garibaldi 45). Thus, it is no accident that few know Braithwaite's name today. His erasure, Garibaldi maintains, is directly attributable to a “secret boycott” of his work at the hands of his racist white peers after World War I (63).And yet Garibaldi also implies that such efforts were unwittingly aided by both Black and white proponents of the new “essential Black aesthetic” that came into fashion in the postwar period (51). As the interracial renaissance of the 1910s gave way to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a paradoxical shift took place: on the one hand, the white audience for literary works revolving around the lives of Black people expanded; on the other hand, the conception of what belonged to the domain of “authentic” Black life, and, by extension, Black writers, narrowed. Put simply, Black writers were expected to adopt racially distinctive themes and aesthetics. Under these circumstances, figures like Braithwaite, a committed interracialist who had eschewed dialect poetry, became déclassé. By the same token, it became easier for virulent racists like Pound to make the case that Braithwaite had no business dictating the direction of US literature writ large. In other words, the widespread notion that Black writers possessed their own ethnic literature effectively reinstated the color line so that no Black writer—no matter how professedly interracial—could lay claim to supraracial or universal literary authority. Such authority was the prerogative of white authors, who supposedly lacked ethnic particularity. Thus, although few would gainsay the remarkable artistic achievements of Black authors during the Harlem Renaissance, the fate of Braithwaite serves as a stark reminder of how even the well-meaning embrace of ethnic literary categories—to say nothing of ethnicity as such—can have baleful consequences.In the succeeding chapters, we see how numerous writers took up the torch of interracial literature and confronted similar challenges as they sought to negotiate the dialectic between ethnic particularity and universality. The second chapter focuses on key breakthroughs in interracial literature that occurred during the Great Depression, World War II, and the immediate postwar period. Once again Garibaldi performs important recovery work, drawing our attention to the little-known story of Juanita Harrison, a fair-skinned Black woman from Mississippi who in 1936 published a bestselling memoir of her experiences traveling abroad and working in the service industry called My Great, Wide, Beautiful World. According to Garibaldi, Harrison's somewhat deracinated public image, which emphasized her humanism and noncommittal politics, and her tremendous commercial success charted a path for Black writers like Frank Yerby and Willard Motley, the two other authors who figure prominently in this chapter. The incisive contrast between Yerby and Motley's careers underscores how the tendency to expect authors of interracial literature, particularly Black novelists, to act as spokespeople for social causes could be debilitating. After he published the bestselling 1947 novel Knock on Any Door, which centered on the exploits of a queer Italian American hoodlum, “Motley eventually became overwhelmed by his position as a prominent, peripatetic public intellectual” and never regained his footing as a fiction writer (98). He died in obscurity decades later in Mexico City (Wald 213). For his part, Yerby—having decamped to Franco's Spain “to escape the virulence of American racial discrimination in this period” (Garibaldi 103)—also died in a Spanish-speaking country, albeit as “the best-selling Black author of the twentieth century” (1). While his debut novel The Foxes of Harrow (1946) depicted interracial romance in the antebellum south, Yerby strenuously and unapologetically resisted efforts to interpellate him as a “Black” author and to persuade him that he had a special obligation to fulminate about racial issues in the public sphere. Many bristled at his quietism, but Garibaldi rightly contends that Yerby's self-assertion signaled an important advance for Black authors. Some of them now had the power to dictate the terms on which they addressed matters of race.Such advances were made possible as much by the work of interracialists themselves as by geopolitical events. In his third chapter, Garibaldi argues persuasively that the struggle to defeat Nazism and fascism led the publishing industry to seek out narratives that promoted racial tolerance and more positive portrayals of Black people. To illustrate this point, he turns to the world of children's literature: “Sponsoring various forms of interracialism in the corporate children's book sector during World War II was the publishing industry's equivalent to the ‘Double Victory Campaign’ led by the Black press” (123). During the war and its aftermath, Garibaldi explains, white elites in the publishing industry and beyond “feared that interracial and interethnic tensions might lead to the undoing of mankind” (108). Thus, a whole host of “paraliterary institutions,” to borrow a term from Merve Emre, arose at this time to encourage the kind of interracial and racially sensitive children's literature that Black education reformers like Carter G. Woodson had demanded for years (Emre 10). These included the Writers’ War Board, the Child Study Association of America, the Bureau of Intercultural Education, and the Children's Book Council. Unfortunately, the white professional-managerial class's newfound enthusiasm for diversity proved fleeting. Already in the years preceding the Cold War, which would produce a chilling effect on progressive politics, the publishing industry had begun to move away from interracial children's literature on the grounds that people had grown “tired of thinking about ‘social tolerance’” (133). It was not until 1954, when the momentous Brown v. Board of Education overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public schooling, that the children's book industry reestablished its commitment to interracialism and the long overdue process of what Garibaldi calls—invoking author Helen Bannerman's notoriously racist turn-of-the-century storybook—“Challenging Little Black Sambo” (108).Chapters 4 and 5 are of a piece. Taken together, they recount how the breakdown of the specious postwar liberal consensus on race dealt a crippling blow to interracial literature. In chapter 4, Garibaldi notes that, despite the stifling political atmosphere of the Cold War, interracial literary fiction flourished throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Black novelists like Yerby, James Baldwin, Ellison, John Oliver Killens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and, to a lesser extent, Chester Himes benefited from two historical phenomena: the paperback revolution in trade publishing and the culture of postwar (racial) liberalism that emphasized “universal” human values (145). Brooks's winning the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Annie Allen in 1950 and the bestowal of the National Book Award on Ellison's Invisible Man three years later demonstrated that Black writers, particularly those who laid claim to an interracial literary lineage, could be assimilated into mainstream middlebrow culture. At the same time, the festishization of universalism in Cold War discourse encouraged Black writers to tone down the purportedly racial contours of their works, leading some to worry about the survival of Black ethnic literature: “Black critics were particularly irked by any signs or evidence of racial abandonment” (160). When the civil rights movement began its lurch toward Black Power in the mid-1960s, as discussed in chapter 5, interracialists increasingly drew the ire of Black and white critics alike. Focusing mainly on evocative episodes in the lives of Baldwin and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (including their disastrous civil rights–themed meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy at his New York apartment in 1963), Garibaldi shows how prominent Black literary interracialists of this period wrangled fiercely with white liberals over the pace of desegregation in public life while nonetheless remaining squarely within the crosshairs of Black nationalists, especially those associated with the Black Arts movement. Eager to capitalize on the more disputatious national mood signaled by the latter, the publishing industry soon jettisoned interracial literature in favor of works “designed to accentuate seemingly irreconcilable divides between Black and white Americans” (188–89). Consequently, by the end of the 1960s, the heyday of interracial literature, much like that of postwar liberalism, was definitively over.The concluding chapters of this richly detailed, pathbreaking study might leave one with the impression that interracial literature has some sort of natural affinity with racial liberalism. After all, their fortunes seem strangely connected. Indeed, even the turn toward integrationist literary criticism in the academy corresponded to the brief revival of racial liberalism during the Clinton era. But if the story Garibaldi tells gives one to understand that the two go hand in hand, it is because Impermanent Blackness leaves out a crucial historical detail: the major force behind much of the most important interracial literature produced during the first half of the twentieth century was the Communist Party USA. As research by scholars such as Maxwell, Foley, Michael Denning, Bill V. Mullen, Alan Wald, and Mary Helen Washington has established, the CPUSA maintained a steadfast commitment to racial integration and became a haven for Black writers, especially between the world wars. In fact, several of the book's major players—namely, Brooks, Hansberry, Himes, and Motley—and countless others who appear throughout its pages were onetime Communists or fellow travelers. By overlooking this, Garibaldi misses the extent to which postwar interracial literature was both deeply indebted to the CPUSA and hampered by Cold War liberal anti-communism. These contradictory circumstances might indicate that the beginning of the end of interracial literature dates back not to the racial conflicts of the 1960s, as he suggests, but rather to the Second Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, which devastated the CPUSA and its cultural apparatus. Only more research on interracial literature and its afterlives can give us a fuller picture of what happened. One hopes that a new generation of integrationist critics will soon join Garibaldi in filling in the canvas.