Synopses & Reviews
In this provocative new book, Mark Christian Thompson addressesthe startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathizedwith fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of AfricanAmerican political resistance. Thompson surveys the work and thought of severalauthors and asserts that their sometimes positive reaction to generic Europeanfascism, and its transformation into black fascism, is crucial to any understandingof Depression-era African American literary culture.
The book considers the high regard thatBack to Africa advocate Marcus Garvey expressed for fascistdictators and explores the common ground he shared with George Schuyler and ClaudeMcKay, writers with whom Garvey is generally thought to be at odds. Thompson revealshow fascism informed a rejection of Marxism by McKay--as well as by Arna Bontemps, whose Drums at Dusk depicts communism asantithetical to any black revolution. A similarly authoritarian stance is examinedin the work of Zora Neale Hurston, where the striving for a fascist sovereigntypresents itself as highly critical of Nazism while nonetheless sharing many of itstenets. The book concludes with an investigation of Richard Wright'sThe Outsider and its murderous protagonist, CrossDamon, who articulates fascist drives already present, if latent, inNative Son's Bigger Thomas. Unencumbered by thehistorical or biblical references of the earlier work, Damon personifies the essenceof black fascism.
Taking on a subject generallyignored or denied in African American cultural and literary studies, Black Fascisms seeks not only to question theprominence of the Left in the political thought of a generation of writers but tochange how we view African American literature in general. Encompassing politicaltheory, cultural studies, critical theory, and historicism, the book will challengereaders in numerous fields, providing a new model for thinking about the politicaland transnational in African American culture and shedding new light on ourunderstanding of fascism between the wars.