The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

The Secular Rabbi

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, Doris Kadish delves into Rahv’s complex and enigmatic character, his experience teaching Hebrew in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR; his attitudes toward class, race, and gender. Kadish positions herself in relation to Rahv in attempting to understand her own Jewish identity and perspective as a 21st century woman. The book draws on historical accounts, genealogical records, memoirs by Rahv’s friends and associates, interviews, and secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. Key components of Rahv’s Jewishness—appearance, voice, name, attitudes toward Yiddish and Zionism—are explored, as is his deep-seated faith in Marxism. Textual analyses of Rahv’s works are interwoven with analyses of writers whose works appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Rahv’s relations with writers who figured prominently in his life—most notably T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe—are explored. Events relating to anti-Stalinism, responses to the Holocaust, and alleged ties with the CIA, are discussed. Kadish sheds light on modernism, proletarian literature, and Jewish writing as well as movements that defined American political history in the 20th century: immigration, socialism, Communism, fascism, the cold war, feminism, and the New Left.

Revisiting German Proletarian-Revolutionary Literature

This article provides an overview of the emergence of proletarian literature in Germany, and the focuses in on the key texts, figures and debates of the Communist Party-affiliated Federation of Revolutionary-Proletarian Writers (BPRS) and the important debates about literature and politics in its journal Die Linkskurve between 1929 and 1932. At the same time, I argue for a complicated and sometimes conflictual relationship between the increasingly Hegelian aesthetic position of the journal and the more operatively-oriented work of BPRS authors.

The Proletarian Literature Movement: Japan’s First Encounter with Working-Class Literature

This essay explores Japanese working-class literature as it developed within the wider context of the so-called Proletarian Cultural Movement that was in operation for about ten years, peaking in the late 1920s. While tracing the origins of the initiative to create a “proletarian” literature in Japan to Marxist study circles at universities, it discusses the movement’s quest to foster “true” worker writers based on the factory floor. Next, the chapter highlights literary works by female writers who were encouraged at the time by international communism’s focus on the Japanese women issue due to their high inclusion in the industrial work force. Finally, the chapter discusses the legacy and continuing relevance of Kobayashi Takiji’s The Crab Cannery Ship, the flagship of working-class literature in Japan. Throughout, the essay endeavors to paint a vivid picture of writer activists within the movement.

DOS PASSOS’S U.S.A. THROUGH THE LENS OF LEFT-WING PUBLICATIONS IN THE USSR

The subject of this paper was borne out of engagement with the genre of proletarian literature in 1930’s America, the artistic output of the Popular Front era, as well as the multifaceted scholarly debates that surround them. Slightly refining the scope of this investigation, I will be examining John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, and situating it within the context of the nuanced interconnection of aesthetics and politics in that era. I wish to argue that U.S.A. became a highly contested space of literary and ideological conflict. Within this space, a wide-ranging and sometimes heated debate on form and content transpires which is inseparable from the political project of socialist construction in the USSR. This debate was held between proponents of the aesthetic movements of modernism and realism, and was intensely present in organs and publications affiliated with these left-wing institutions. Therefore, I divert my attention towards one of these Anglophone publications, namely International Literature, in order to map Dos Passos’s presence within them and gauge the extent to which my hypothesis is legitimate. I will develop an exposition of archival material from this journal which serve the purpose of illuminating the extent to which there was a preoccupation with the work of Dos Passos within the literary circles of the organised Left, as well as outlining the content of the attitudes expressed towards him. This exposition however will necessarily be accompanied by an engagement with the scholarship around this subject, especially taking into consideration the historicity of the scholarship itself; that is to say, the recognition of historical limitations within the scholarship, as well as the attempt to supersede these limitations by more recent critical works. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0760/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Malygina, N. (2018). Andrey Platonov and literary Moscow: А. К. Voronsky, A. M. Gorky, В. А. Pilnyak, B. L. Pasternak, Artyom Vesyoly, S. F. Budantsev, V. S. Grossman. Moscow; St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya. (In Russ.)

Malygina’s book portrays Andrey Platonov in the context of the literary period in which he was active. Malygina also summarizes the history of the journal Krasnaya Nov, the Krug Publishers, and the Pereval Group. While depicted as particularly close to Pilnyak due to his expressionist tendencies, Platonov, however, remained faithful to the utopian ideal of ‘proletarian literature’ and reserved tongue-incheek comments for Soviet literary aristocrats. Although a fi ce critic of Soviet reality, Platonov cherished his own ‘Soviet project’ – he envisaged a truly revolutionary, progressive ideal of a genuinely democratic nature. The literary period in question is shown to have a complex structure, unyielding to ideological abstractions.