Aunt Sue's children: Re-viewing the gender(ed) politics of Richard Wright's radicalism

American Literature

Volumn 75, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 395-425

  Higashida, Cheryl ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949566380     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-75-2-395     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 114; further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as AH
2. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), 208
3. Zora Neale Hurston, "Stories of Conflict," review of Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright, Saturday Review of Literature, 2 April 1938, 32
4. see also Richard Wright, "Between Laughter and Tears," review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, New Masses, October 1937, 22, 25
5. In his discussion of the Hurston-Wright debate and its rearticulation in recent African American literary scholarship, William Maxwell persuasively argues that the polarization of these two writers, primarily seen as an example of the dominance of black men's over black women's voices, has given rise to its own Manichean allegory in which Hurston (representing race, modernism, Harlem Renaissance, black nationalism, rural folk) is posed against Wright (representing class, naturalism, Chicago Renaissance, Marxism, urban masses). Maxwell's literary history and close readings of Wright and Hurston challenge the oversimplifying tendencies of this polarization (see New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999], 153-57)
6. Trudier Harris writes: "Wright himself was perhaps so blinded by the treatment of males, particularly in relation to Communist ideology, that he failed to see that Bessie could carry out his theme just as effectively" ("Native Sons and Foreign Daughters," in New Essays on "Native Son," ed. Keneth Kinnamon [Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], 80.)
7. Sherley Anne Williams, "Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright," American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 395
8. Nagueyalti Warren, "Black Girls and Native Sons: Female Images in Selected Works by Richard Wright," in Richard Wright: Myths and Realities, ed. C. James Trotman (New York: Garland, 1988), 70
9. My reading of Wright draws on but differs from earlier scholarship that has reassessed his misogyny, in particular, the work of Paul Gilroy and William Maxwell. In his discussion of Wright's later works, Gilroy argues that we need to recognize Wright's contribution to gender studies through his "inauguration of a critical discourse on the construction of black masculinity" and his "proto-feminist statements" (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995], 176)
10. See Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1951)
11. and Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: Quill, 1984)
12. For a different analysis of Wright's evolving thought on Marxism and nationalism, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983)
13. Robin D. G. Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 112
14. See Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), 83
15. Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993). Further references to Uncle Tom's Children are to this reissue of the 1940 edition and will be cited parenthetically as UTC
16. Williams, "Papa Dick," 409
17. Miriam De Costa-Willis, for example, argues that Sarah and Sue "cannot be viewed as women of flesh and blood but as symbols of primal forces or as mythic figures who evoke memories of a tribal past" ("Avenging Angels and Mute Mothers: Black Southern Women in Wright's Fictional World," Callaloo 9 [summer 1986]: 542)
18. Richard Wright, "How 'Uncle Tom's Children' Grew," The Writers' Club Bulletin II, May 1938 (New York: University Extension, Columbia University), n.p
19. For the most thorough history of the Scottsboro case, from which I draw, see Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975)
20. For details on the Communist Party's work in Harlem, see Naison, Communists in Harlem, 66-69
21. Maxwell, Old Negro, New Left, 137-41
22. Ada Wright, "Save Their Lives," Working Woman, April 1934, 12
23. Carter, Scottsboro, 143-44
24. J. Louis Engdahl, "A Scottsboro Mother Fights," Labor Defender, July 1932, 124. Regarding the exposure of the Scottsboro mothers, Carter writes that "[a]t one time, there were so many 'Scottsboro mothers' traveling through the country that [NAACP executive secretary] Walter White charged fraud." Carter adds that while there may have been a few instances of such duplicity, it was generally unnecessary as most of the Scottsboro mothers were willing and available to tour (Scottsboro, 143)
25. Viola Montgomery, quoted in Sasha Small, "Your Son May Be Next!" Working Woman, December 1933, 4
26. Louise Thompson, "And So We Marched," Working Woman, June 1933, 6
27. Mary Heaton Vorse, "Hard Boiled," Working Woman, May 1933, 6
28. Ada Wright and Ruby Bates, "Save Their Lives," Working Woman, April 1934, 12. ("Save Their Lives" comprises two separate articles, one by Wright and one by Bates.)
29. Thompson, "And So We Marched," 6
30. Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 62