[African American anti-fascist intellectuals sought to link
colonialism and U.S.-style racism with European fascism using a
variety of rhetorical and artistic means. This book offers a portrait
of those efforts.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

RACIAL TERROR & TOTALITARIANISM  
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Mary Helen Washington
January 15, 2018
Solidarity [[link removed]]

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_ African American anti-fascist intellectuals sought to link
colonialism and U.S.-style racism with European fascism using a
variety of rhetorical and artistic means. This book offers a portrait
of those efforts. _

Harvard University Press,

 

_Race and the Totalitarian Century
Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination_
Vaughn Rasberry
Harvard University Press
ISBN 9780674971080

The cover of Vaughn Rasberry’s ambitious and compelling study Race
and the Totalitarian Century features a cartoon by leftwing
African-American political cartoonist Ollie Harrington, titled
“American Crackerocracy and the Polish Ghetto: Sikeston, Missouri,
and Germany.”

The cartoon, published in 1942 in the Black left U.S. newspaper The
People’s Voice, shows two images side by side. On the left lies an
apparently anonymous Polish woman, her lifeless body slumped against a
bullet-ridden wall under a flag bearing the Nazi swastika; the right
half of the cartoon pictures the lynched body of a Black man under a
sign reading “Sikeston, U.S.A, MO,” the Missouri site of the 1942
mob lynching of a Black man, Cleo Wright.

The cover presents in microcosm the central argument and threefold
methodology of Race and the Totalitarian Century, which is (1) to
insist that colonial violence and modern racial terrorist regimes must
be read as forms of totalitarianism; (2) to correct the intellectual
traditional accounts of totalitarianism that “scarcely include
[these] histories of modern racial terror”; and (3) to foreground a
Black tradition of intellectuals, writers, artists and cartoonists who
initiated a dialogue throughout the 20th century (also, scarcely
included) that refused the conventional polarities of totalitarianism
and inserted into that dialogue desegregation, decolonization and Cold
War geopolitics. (78)

If “conventional formulations of totalitarianism excise race, “
Black American writers re-inscribe the experience of Jim Crow violence
not simply [as a domestic matter but as part of a process in which
colonization] — as much as nuclear weaponry and dictatorship —
constitute, in Richard Wright’s words, “terror in freedom.”

Many of us still have a knee-jerk response to the term
“totalitarianism,” associating it with images of surveillance,
dictatorship, nuclear war, concentration camps and political
repression — and the two titans in opposition: the evil Soviet Union
(or Nazis) versus the United States.

Rasberry seeks to complicate and ultimately undercut that binary,
showing that colonial violence and modern racial terrorist regimes are
covered over by conventional theories of totalitarianism. In his
formulation, “totalitarianism is not as remote from racial democracy
and the Black literary imagination as dominant discourses suggest.”
(79)

Re-centering the Black voice in 20th century debates, Rasberry asks
how the history of totalitarianism looks from the vantage point of the
colonized and the racially subjugated. (86) If “conventional
formulations of totalitarianism excise race,” Black American writers
re-inscribe the experience of Jim Crow violence, as not simply a
domestic matter but more fully to be understood as part of a process
in which colonization — as much as nuclear weaponry and dictatorship
— constitutes, in Richard Wright’s words, “’terror in
freedom.’” (343)

But, as Rasberry cautions us, this is not a project of simply
inserting Black voices. He is making the larger claim — that
“usurping the dominance in intellectual traditions of critiquing
totalitarianism” produces “an archive of decolonization” leading
to a different conception of that tradition.

Tradition and Reinterpretation

Black intellectual traditions produce a distinctive view of major
global events, including the Suez Canal Crisis, the Hungarian Revolt,
and the Arab-Israeli War. With this scaffolding in place, a set of
mid-century themes emerge revolving around this rarely inscribed
understanding: that “the terror exercised against Blacks in the U.S.
and other colonized people constitute “an unacknowledged mode of
totalitarian domination.” (11)

Race and the Totalitarian Century is organized around several
historical events and figures that enable Rasberry’s
reinterpretation of the totalitarian tradition. In each instance we
see the “grand narrative of the conflict between totalitarianism and
democracy” undercut by the specter of a global racial regime.

In Part One, Rasberry uses the figure of the World War II Black
soldier (French, American, and African) tracing that figure across
several texts to show the linkages of Nazism, fascism, colonialism and
U.S. Jim Crow. Writers, photographers, filmmakers and visual artists
took up the figure of the Black soldier as he returned to his
homeland, an emblem of the contradictions of racial modernity — as
both protector of democratic freedoms withheld from him on the basis
of race, and victim of a racial democracy, which refused him the
“rights, privileges, and affective dimensions of citizenship.”
(32)

Rasberry’s astute reading of the Black soldier in Gwendolyn
Brooks’ 1945 sonnet sequence “Gay Chaps at the Bar” is one of
the highlights of this section. As with many of his other superb
readings of the Black soldier in narratives by Ann Petry, John Oliver
Killens and Chester Himes, Rasberry incorporates these readings into a
political and historical understanding of the way the returning Black
soldier was inscribed textually: aware of his place in a racial
democracy, “compelled to reenter a social order less hospitable than
Nazi Germany.” (46)

In the second chapter of Part One, “Our Totalitarian Critics:
Desegregation, Decolonization, and the Cold War,” Rasberry begins to
assemble a “rhetorical arsenal,” an intellectual history of Black
cultural and political expression that reconceives totalitarianism in
the light of Cold War politics, which made blackness — that is,
radical Black activism and ideas — “a radical domestic and
international threat.” (72)

In the Cold War era, Blacks faced a Faustian choice — to proceed
with caution towards a limited kind of equality and acceptance, or
continue the tradition of radical agitation for full civil rights and
turn up on the blacklist. Within the containment policies of the Cold
War, Rasberry reminds us, blackness acquired “a new significance”
(72); it became both a domestic and international threat.

For Blacks who could summon the right amount of deference to the State
Department and circumspection about American racism, it was possible
to be approved for a Government-authorized State Department tour
abroad. But political activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois
activated the totalitarian impulses of the U.S. Cold War government.
Both spoke forcefully and openly about the U.S. and global racial
regimes; both refused to bow to the State Department protocols; both
were blacklisted and denied passports.

Helped along by the blacklisting of figures like Robeson and Du Bois,
American postwar liberalism crafted its own version of modern
totalitarianism that could and did cover over its own democratic
regime of racial terror.

Rasberry thus reconceptualizes the idea of totalitarianism from
“within the frame of postcolonial modernity” in order to include
these democratic regimes. For example, if concentration camp
literature is one subgenre of anti-totalitarian literature, Rasberry
reads Richard Wright’s 1945 autobiography Black Boy as an
Afrocentric version of anti-totalitarianism written against the
“regime of segregation,” another system of racial domination and
terror that “parallels the narratives of totalitarian experience
proliferating contemporaneously in Europe.” (88)

The situation where Wright finds himself as a boy growing up in
Mississippi and Memphis in the Jim Crow South features Kafkaesque
trials, unprovoked lynching, Black silence in the face of racial
terror, and fears of castration. Black writers and thinkers were
navigating the waters of the postwar world, perceiving not just a
Soviet bloc versus a U.S. arsenal of safety but a collision of the two
in Egypt/Suez, Italy/Ethiopia, and Hungary and Bandung.

Suez from a Black Perspective

I want to focus here on the final chapter of Part One, “The Twilight
of Empire: The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 and The Black Public
Sphere,” as a perfect case study of how Black engagement with the
postwar global world produced a public counter-discourse. While
conventional periodization has foreclosed Black engagement with the
Suez Crisis, the literary and political imagination of African
Americans did in fact become important commentators on the events of
Suez. (108)

In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasir (or Nasser) reclaimed
the Canal Zone from the colonial control of the British and the
French. In its campaign to discredit Nasser, the European media
branded him another “Hitler,” and “a menace to world order,”
deploying a major propaganda campaign to pave the way for the military
intervention.

For Black writers and activists, however, Nasser was fearless in his
determination to decolonize the Suez Canal, and African Americans in
many instances supported that anticolonial resistance.

In fact, Rasberry claims that the Eisenhower government’s refusal to
support French and British war efforts (the Anglo-French-Israeli
seizure of the Canal — ed.) was an unanticipated U.S. turnaround due
in no small part to Black opposition to colonialism, an opposition
that was provided by writer and activist Langston Hughes and his
character “Simple” as well as by other major Black writers and
newspapers.

Hughes created his alter-ego Jesse B. Semple (aka Simple) as a working
class spokesman for his columns in the nation’s leading Black paper
the Chicago Defender and, though he may have intentionally encouraged
a simplistic reading of his character, deployed Simple during the
1950s as a sophisticated voice for international politics.

In the Black political and literary imagination of radicals like
Hughes, Nasser was Black against a white world. In his influential
columns in the Chicago Defender, Hughes used Simple to comment on
domestic and world events, “translating international politics into
“the Harlem vernacular and rhythm of Black metropolitan life.”
(107)

Hughes links European aggression against Egypt with domestic attacks
on Black militancy” as Simple claims Nasser as the “Adam Powell of
Egypt” [Adam Clayton Powell, Congressman representing Harlem —
ed.] for nationalizing the Suez Canal. Reminding his readers that the
same imperial England that kept India down was behind the Suez Crisis,
Hughes became part of “a robust counter-discourse” on the Suez
Crisis in the Black public sphere. (109)

The Baltimore Afro-American, along with other Black newspapers,
published sections of Nasser’s speech announcing nationalization of
the Canal. The Chicago Defender suggested the connections between
Egyptian nationalization and U.S. racial issues.

Du Bois contributed his own take on the Suez Canal Crisis with a 1956
poem “Suez,” which celebrated Egypt “rising” against the
“British lion,” beginning with this line: “Young Egypt rose and
seized her ditch/And said: ‘What’s mine is mine!’”

Black intellectuals such as George Schuyler, Horace Cayton and
Benjamin Mays published articles in the Black press on the Suez
Crisis. Shirley Graham Du Bois, writing from her experience living in
Cairo, championed the idea of Egypt as African with an article
“Egypt is Africa” that suggested the parallels between colonialism
in Egypt and elsewhere on the African continent.

The Suez Crisis may have had little or no direct impact on the plight
of African Americans, but the pro-Nasser position of Black
intellectuals set up a tension with the European and U.S.
representations of Nasser that showed that Black involvement in
foreign affairs had to be factored in the mounting global opinion in
favor of Nasser.

Simple’s refusal to accept the conventional U.S. or Soviet position
on Suez Crisis set “a fearless example for the Black America and the
colonized world” (115) and showed that in refusing to be hijacked by
either of the world’s superpowers, African Americans had to be
considered a significant player in global politics. (109)

Regardless of the political implications or outcomes of the crisis,
African Americans produced an important counter-discourse about the
crisis that “linked European aggression against Egypt with domestic
attacks on black militancy.”

Black Internationalists at Freedom

Rasberry succeeds impressively in foregrounding the role of Black
writers, activists and intellectuals in “[restoring] this buried
rapport between colonial fascism and postwar America’s ideological
makeover.” (106)

If there is any omission in this comprehensive archive of mid-century
Black intellectuals it is the literary and cultural figures who make
up Paul Robeson’s left-wing newspaper Freedom.

For its entire five-year period (1950-1955) Freedom consistently
publicized the connections between colonialism, imperialism and racism
and did so during the most dangerous years of the Cold War.

The Black internationalists who published in Freedom — Lorraine
Hansberry, Robeson, Claudia Jones, Du Bois, Lloyd Brown, Ollie
Harrington (Freedom’s art editor) and Alice Childress — had
connections with the literary and cultural figures Rasberry includes
here. They were important as individual thinkers but also collectively
as part of the Freedom family, the most powerful Black left think tank
of the 20th century.

The radicals at Freedom are a vital source of the lesson at the heart
of Rasberry’s project: that U.S. anticommunism, itself a form of
totalitarian domination, was directed in large measure towards “the
suppression, surveillance, and censorship of Black activism.” (356)

What Rasberry has done in Race and the Totalitarian Century — as his
subtitle claims — is to deploy “the Black literary imagination”
to reconstruct mid-century geopolitics and to challenge dominant ideas
and paradigms of 20th century political thought.

In turning to and listening to those Afro-modernists, with “neither
nation-state power [n]or territorial sovereignty,” Race and the
Totalitarian Century reminds us that what is obscured by the term
“totalitarianism” are the systems that shaped the modern world:
imperialism, colonialism and racial violence.

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