A call to recognize Marxism's underestimated influence on the course of
African American letters
During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces
--nationalism and Marxism--clashed and changed the future of African
American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with
nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose
of the day.
Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars:
A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that
such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright,
who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance
the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such
as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey,
who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse.
Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors
from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depr