Bronzeville's Tribunes: Sociology, Marxism, and Literary Afro-Modernism in the Midwest Metropolis, 1936-1947
Creators: name: Rodriguez Barrera, Juan
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Black Chicago Renaissance
subject: Communism
subject: Marxism
subject: Chicago Sociology
subject: African American Literature
subject: African-American Studies
subject: English Language and Literature
subject: Humanities (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: Equal parts intellectual history, literary history, and literary criticism, “Bronzeville’s Tribunes” is a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Black Chicago Renaissance, an African-American cultural movement that spanned the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that the relationship between Chicago sociology and Marxism—which I call the “sociology/Marxism nexus”—influenced and was influenced by Renaissance writers through their participation in Chicago’s institutional, cultural, intellectual, and political networks. This relationship supplied the basis for a distinctive type of sociologically inflected class-conscious writing that appealed to African-American authors concerned with the entwined causes of working-class liberation and racial equality. In chapters devoted to a select group of Black writers, I illuminate the latter’s multiple and unique interactions with the Chicago School of Sociology and the Communist Left, as well as the specificities of the works that such interactions led them to compose. My dissertation relies heavily upon archival materials, periodicals, and biographical information to reconstruct my subjects’ intellectual trajectories and “read forward” to a wide array of texts, all of which display the dynamism of the sociology/Marxism nexus. The integrative approach that my study employs is a response to scholars’ tendency to emphasize either the sociological or the Marxist orientation of the movement: a tendency that has obscured the methodologically and theoretically complex ways in which both intellectual currents interfaced in the literary domain. An intervention into studies of literary urbanism, migration and culture, and literary Communism, “Bronzeville’s Tribunes” aims to complicate prevailing notions about the intellectual foundations of 1930s and 1940s Black writing, which has typically been viewed as simpler than—if not inferior to—the literary “high” modernism of later years. First, I posit that the pro-Communist South Side Writers Group (SSWG) and the Illinois unit of the Federal Writers’ Project (IWP), a government agency that embraced urban sociology, constituted the institutional cornerstone of the sociology/Marxism nexus in the early Renaissance. My account unearths Margaret Walker’s unpublished fictional experiments from the late 1930s—which she penned while she was both an SSWG member and an IWP employee—to illustrate her individualized engagement with the nexus, proving that sociologically inflected class-conscious writing was not the exclusive province of her male peers. Second, through an examination of William Attaway’s “disalienating realism” in his novel Blood on the Forge (1941), my discussion shows that in some Renaissance texts the link between sociology and Marxism was predicated on the latter’s subsumption of social-scientific modes of historical analysis. Third, I maintain that the intellectual partnership between Richard Wright and sociologist Horace R. Cayton during wartime interrogated the adequacy of sociological and Marxist approaches to yield capacious assessments of the race problem, effecting a psychological turn that prefigured one influential strand of postwar Afro-modernist literature. My dissertation proposes that Wright and Cayton built upon their prior engagement with sociology and Marxism, compelling psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis to anchor their interpretive procedures in the material circumstances of Black Americans. Finally, “Bronzeville’s Tribunes” demonstrates that throughout the 1940s Arna Bontemps and white writer Jack Conroy broadened the appeal, accessibility, and didactic value of sociologically oriented Marxist writing through the joint publication of two children’s books and a social history of Black migrations. I claim that these sociologically grounded volumes “labored” Renaissance literature by upholding the social-democratic, pro-labor politics of the wartime Popular Front.