Apart and a Part: Dissonance, Double Consciousness, and the Politics of Black Identity in African

220 Pages·2015·1.86 MB·English

by  David Jones

Apart and a Part: Dissonance, Double Consciousness, and
the Politics of Black Identity in African American Literature,
1946-1964

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2015

David C. Jones

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
Contents

Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 3
Declaration .............................................................................................................................. 4
Copyright statement ............................................................................................................... 4
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 5
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 7
African American Literature in the Age of Three Worlds ............................................... 7
Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................... 29
‘Never Quite on the Beat’: Towards a Transnational America in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man ..................................................................................................................... 29
Introduction: Dissensus Culture ..................................................................................... 29
Part 1: Ellison among the New Liberals ......................................................................... 39
Part 2: Ellison’s Textual Politics ..................................................................................... 46
Part 3: ‘Whence All This Passion Toward Conformity?’ ................................................. 55
Conclusion: Ellison’s Transnational America ................................................................. 63
Chapter 2 ............................................................................................................................... 71
Richard Wright: Yearning For Identification in Paris and the Third World ................. 71
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 71
Part 1: ‘For Paris is the Crossroads of the Earth’ ........................................................... 74
Part 2: Wright and The Parisian Cold War ..................................................................... 92
Part 3: Translating Two-ness ......................................................................................... 99
Conclusion: Towards a Diasporic Identity in Black Power ........................................... 104
Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................. 116
‘Something Unspeakable’: James Baldwin and the Closets of American Power .... 116
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 116
Part 1: ‘Something in Your Closet’ ............................................................................... 124
Part 2: Blackness as Queerness/Queerness as Blackness ......................................... 142
Part 3: ‘Transatlantic Commuter’ .................................................................................. 149
Conclusion: Saying Yes to Baldwin .............................................................................. 174
Chapter 4 ............................................................................................................................. 181
‘It Makes Me Think of Africa’: Subverting Suburbanisation in Lorraine Hansberry’s A
Raisin in the Sun ............................................................................................................ 181
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 181
Part 1: ‘Acute Ghetto-itis’ .............................................................................................. 184
Part 2: ‘In Preparation for a Journey’ ............................................................................ 191
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 197
Afterword ............................................................................................................................. 199
Dissonance in a Post-Racial America .......................................................................... 199
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 203

84,199 Words

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Abstract

This thesis examines the politics of black identity in African American
literature during what has come to be known as the ‘age of three worlds’.
Across four chapters, I analyse texts by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, exploring the way in which their writing
plays out within and against the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and
contemporaneous discourses of Civil Rights and black (inter)nationalism. In
doing so, I explore the contrasting ways in which each of them displaces the
binary logic that is typically seen as defining the 1950s, as a means of
reconstituting both American and African American identity. Rejecting
either/or identities, they all decentre prevailing notions of national and cultural
identity by juxtaposing them with alternative spaces and temporalities, the
result of which is a dual perspective that is simultaneously local and
transnational.
By extricating themselves, whether physically or intellectually, from a
monolithic discursive framework, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry
recast the idea of double consciousness famously articulated by W. E. B. Du
Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead of being a self-negating non-
identity that serves as the psychological corollary to African Americans’
marginalised status, ‘two-ness’ is transmuted into a privileged vantage point
that allows them to both intervene on the world historical stage as empowered
modern subjects and renegotiate their relationship with the United States.
What this two-ness amounts to, I argue, is a kind of dissonance.
‘Dissonance’, Duke Ellington claimed in 1941, names black people’s ‘way of
life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part’. The principle of
introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music in order to generate new
modalities of expression found in jazz is transposed into a social and literary
context by the writers examined in this thesis. Each of them embodies and
mobilises the socially grounded sense of being apart and a part alluded to by
Ellington as a means of defamilarising normative notions of race, gender, and
sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In their place, they posit
alternative forms of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it
means to be both black and American in the middle of the twentieth century.
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Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application
for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or institute of learning.

Copyright statement

i. The author or this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain
copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester
certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes.

ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be
made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and
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graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by
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cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the
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declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see
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Presentation on Theses.
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Acknowledgements

In the process of writing this thesis, I have inevitably accumulated a number of debts that
gratitude alone cannot repay. Nonetheless, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to
everyone who has helped me with this project. Firstly, I would like to thank Michael Bibler. His
enthusiasm for the project and guidance during its early stages played a pivotal role in
shaping its intellectual focus. When Michael answered the call of his beloved South and
returned to the United States, Douglas Field kindly agreed to step into the supervisory breach,
for which I am hugely thankful. During the past two years, his friendship, intellectual
generosity, and steadfast support when I needed it most has been nothing short of
inspirational. I would also like to thank the other members of my supervisory team, Monica
Pearl and Robert Spencer, for their encouragement and scholarly insights. Monica’s ability to
distil my ideas into a single sentence has proved invaluable in the development of my
thinking. Similarly, Robert’s perceptive analysis of my work has allowed me to address issues
that I would not have otherwise considered.
Without the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, I would not
have been able to pursue this project. As such, I would like to extend my thanks to them for
their gratefully received assistance. Away from Academia, I would also like to extend my
gratitude to Amelia Martin and Laura Williams for helping to guide me through the difficult final
stages of this thesis, while ensuring my wellbeing.
Throughout the time it has taken me to write this thesis, my friends and family have been
a constant source of support and reassurance. Particular thanks must go to my mum and
dad, whose unstinting love and insistence that I pursue my interests has provided me with the
best possible grounding in life. To my sister Helen, brother-in-law, Andy, and wonderful
nephews, Jack and Charlie, I would like to offer my thanks for their encouragement and for
keeping me in touch with the world beyond the ivory tower. I would also like to dedicate this
thesis to the memory of my late grandparents, Cliff and Glenys, who, sadly, are not here to
see its completion, but who always encouraged me to ‘get an education’.
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Finally, I am eternally indebted to my partner, Tamsin. Without her patience, friendship,
and love – to say nothing of her unerring ability to know when I needed a cup of tea or coffee
– I would never have been able to complete this project. This thesis is for her.
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Introduction

African American Literature in the Age of Three Worlds

There was always a border beyond which the Negro could not go, whether musically
or socially. There was always a possible limitation to any dilution or excess of cultural
or spiritual reference. The Negro could not ever become white and that was his
strength; at some point, always, he could not participate in the dominant tenor of the
white man’s culture, yet he came to understand that culture as well as the white man.
It was at this juncture that he had to make use of other resources, whether African,
sub-cultural, or hermetic. And it was this boundary, this no-man’s land, that provided
the logic and beauty of his music. And this is the only way for the Negro artist to
provide his version of America – from that no-man’s-land outside the mainstream. A
no-man’s-land, a black country, completely invisible to white America, but so
essentially part of it to stain its whole being an ominous gray.
– LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, ‘The Myth of a Negro Literature’ (1962)1

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
– Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)2

Interviewed in Los Angeles in 1941 to promote his new musical, Jump For Joy, the legendary
jazz musician, Duke Ellington, was asked to expound on the preoccupation with dissonance
that characterises his music. Ellington’s response was to transfigure this aesthetic trait into a
metonym for African American identity. As a phonograph played a recording his music, he
instructed the interviewer to listen, before declaring: ‘That’s the Negro’s life. Hear that chord!
That’s us [….] Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an
integral part’.3 What Ellington describes here is a variation of the ‘two-ness’ identified by W. E.
B. Du Bois forty years earlier as the psychological counterpart to African Americans’
marginalised status in the United States.4 However, where the latter’s theory of ‘double
consciousness’ names the alienation that stems from viewing oneself through the prism of
white hegemony, Ellington’s conception of dissonance, as Ajay Heble observes, reconstitutes
the notion of being out of tune with the assumptions of a racially delineated status quo as
‘something profoundly empowering’ that opens up new realms of knowledge.5 Outside of ‘the

1 LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], ‘The Myth of a Negro Literature’ (1962), Home: Social Essays (New York: Akashic
Books, 2009 [1966]), 133-4.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Trans. Rober Hullot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [1970]), 151.
3 Duke Ellington quoted in John Pittman, ‘The Duke Will Stay on Top!’ (1941), The Duke Ellington Reader, eds. Mark
Tucker and Duke Ellington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148-151 (150).
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994 [1903]), 2-3.
5 Ajay, Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice (New York and London:
Routledge 2000), 20.
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dominant tenor’ of the nation’s culture, it names the liminal space – the ‘no man’s land’
described by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka – from which African Americans recast the
representational terrain of American culture.
The duality described by Ellington is one of the central organising themes of this thesis.
His ‘socially grounded interpretation’ of dissonance as something ‘politically and culturally
salient’ corresponds to the way in which four of postwar America’s most prominent black
writers negotiate the vexed relationship between their race and their nationality.6 The principle
of introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music to generate new modalities of expression, I
propose, is transposed into literary and social contexts in the works of Ralph Ellison, Richard
Wright, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry. Set against the political and cultural
backdrop of the of the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporaneous discourses of black
(inter)nationalism, I explore how each of them makes manifest the sense of being at once a
part of and apart from the United States that Ellington alludes to.
To this end, what follows is articulated within the historical context of what Leerom
Medovoi and Michael Denning have each defined as ‘the age of three worlds’. A triangular
relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the rapidly decolonising nations
of Africa and Asia provided ‘the globe’s dominant topological imaginary’ during the 1950s,
Medovoi argues, with the former two power blocs engaged in an ideological battle to secure
the allegiance of the latter, in order to tilt the balance of power in the Cold War in their favour.7
In a similar vein, Denning claims that ‘[t]he rhetoric of the three worlds – the capitalist First,
the Communist Second, and the decolonizing Third – emerged in the early 1950s, and,
though it was challenged on all sides, it dominated the period.’8 As this thesis will
demonstrate, the context described by Medovoi played a pivotal role in shaping the terms in
which African Americans articulated their demands for freedom and equality during the 1950s
and early 1960s. The four writers I examine are each, in their own way, illustrative of this
point. While differences in age, ideological perspective, artistic sensibilities, gender, and
sexuality mean that there are inevitable divergences in how they respond to it, Ellison, Wright,
Baldwin, and Hansberry are all attuned to the shifting power dynamics of the postwar world.

6 Ibid, 21, 20.
7 Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005),
11. See also: Medovoi, ‘Cold War American Culture as the Age of Three Worlds’, Minnesota Review, No. 55 (Fall
2000), 167-186.
8 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 26.
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Their respective attempts to advance the historical claims of African Americans are all,
whether implicitly or explicitly, oriented by contemporaneous geopolitics.
However, with the partial exception of Wright, their aims are not straightforwardly political.
Despite the fact that all of them were, early in their careers affiliated with the Marxist left, by
the time they published the texts I examine in this thesis, their analysis of race no longer
adhered to existing ideological patterns. Instead, repudiating either/or identities that distribute
knowledge within discrete, self-contained frameworks, each of the writers – albeit in
contrasting ways – foregrounds the cultural and political salience of dialogic perspectives that
defamiliarise existing cultural formations. In particular, each of them adopts an intercultural
subject position that simultaneously straddles national and transnational imaginaries, blurring
the ontological distinction between them. As a result, the binary logic underpinning the
American Cold War and the ideology of ‘containment’ that supplemented it is destabilised.
Key to this process is the way in which they all juxtapose knowledge attendant to ‘the
dominant tenor’ of American culture with that found in alternative spaces and temporalities.
Mirroring Baraka’s argument with regards to the way that black artists have been compelled
‘to make use of other resources’ to affirm their identity, all of the writers examined in this
thesis extricate themselves, either physically or intellectually, from a monolithic
representational framework predicated on their marginalisation. The co-presence of
conflicting epistemologies and overlapping genealogies in the work of Ellison, Wright,
Baldwin, and Hansberry I argue, creates spatial and temporal disjunctures that fracture the
mythic wholeness that characterised postwar America’s prevailing hegemony. The resulting
discursive fissures provide a rhetorical space from which they are able to interrogate
normative of notions of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In doing
so, they follow Ellington’s lead by recasting the two-ness of the African American experience
as a potent instrumentality for interpreting the interaction of race and national identity in the
American cultural imaginary. From this unique vantage point, they articulate alternative forms
of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it means to be both black and
American in the middle of the twentieth century.
*
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The impetus for this thesis is twofold. Firstly, I wish to foreground the way that the dissonant
interventions of African American writers respond to and reconstitute the representational
politics of Cold War America. In part, this interest stems from the fact that the relationship
between African American literature and the entwined contexts of the Cold War and
decolonisation remains something of an underexplored area in scholarly discourse. To this
end, using the three worlds topography and mediating between its intersecting axes provides
fertile terrain on which to explore the nexus of culture and politics at a pivotal juncture in both
black and American history. My second preoccupation evolves out of this historical specificity.
By locating the work of Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry within the context of
contemporaneous historical discourses, I want to stress the imperative of not treating African
American literature and the conceptual apparatuses we approach it through as something
monolithic or fixed. Instead, without losing site of the deeper currents of the African American
experience as rendered in literature, I emphasise how these broader themes play out in
specific locales during specific periods. In short, what is at stake in this thesis is how to
negotiate the historical specificity of African American literary and cultural interventions within
and against the wider contexts from which they emerge. This process is both spatial in its
navigating of the local and transnational, and temporal in its traversing of the contemporary
and the historical.
With regards to the specific historical backdrop to what follows, I look to extend the
parameters of Cold War scholarship by reiterating the pivotal role played by African American
writers in rearticulating the terms of American-ness during this period. Notable exceptions
notwithstanding – some of which I return to below – literary studies of what might be termed
the long 1950s (here understood as 1946-1964) have tended to treat black literature as either
peripheral or an addendum to the Cold War imaginary, rather than a central component of it.
For instance, while such staples of Cold War literary studies as Thomas Schaub’s American
Fiction in the Cold War (1991), Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture: American Narratives,
Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995), and Leerom Medovoi’s Rebels: Youth and the
Cold War Origins of Identity (2005) devote chapters to African American literature and culture,
they tend to gloss over the specific implications of black Americans’ relation to Cold War
concerns, by synchronising them with broader – which is to say whiter – historical patterns.
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