Left Lineages of Post-45 Literature

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Jeffrey Lawrence's proposal for movements-based study of post-1945 US literature is most welcome. Numerous writers and artists were involved with or influenced by social movements across the twentieth century. Indeed, liberation movements were a primary force behind the cultural turn in the second half of the twentieth century when cultural critique and politics assumed prominence around the world.1 Yet US literary studies unevenly registers the cross-fertilization of literature and sustained collective mobilizations. Lawrence posits that post-1945 US literary studies has neglected social movements due in part to influential modes of cultural materialist and institutionalist analysis.

However, a major body of scholarship has developed robust movements-based US literary history and analysis: left literary and cultural studies. Beginning in the late twentieth century, scholars in these fields challenged the literary left's confinement to the thirties and social(ist) realism. They theorize and periodize the relationships between culture, social movements, and other social forces, as Michael Denning does with his Gramscian analysis of the Popular Front.2 In reconstructing writers' ties to social movements and the cultural institutions of or adjacent to movements, left literary studies discloses the techniques, themes, conventions, and styles that writers developed in response to historical and contemporaneous movements.

Left literary studies excavates lineages of post-1945 literature that bridge social and artistic movements of the Depression through the 1960s and 1970s. The Communist left is often centered due to the Communist Party's leadership in interwar struggles for justice and liberation, which ramified into the post-World War II era. However, left literary and cultural history is replete with coalitions and influences traversing a range of movements. Alan Wald's monumental trilogy on mid-twentieth-century pro-Communist writers illuminates the scope of the left's impact on post-1945 literature, including the revolutionary romanticism of Depression-era poets that re-emerged in 1960s political poetry, pro-Communist women's writing that bridges first- and second-wave feminism, the persistence of gay, lesbian, queer, and gender-nonconforming characters and themes in the face of both the "Lavender Scare" and Communist homophobia, and the Left melancholia of post-World War II Jewish American novelists.3 The linkages running from the Old Left through the civil rights and Black Power movements are especially significant to post-1945 African American writing and its institutions, as shown by Wald's trilogy, James Smethurst on the Black Arts Movement, and Mary Helen Washington on the 1950s Black Cultural Front.4 Left literary studies thus provides a long perspective on the 1960s movements that comprise Lawrence's starting point for post-1945 US literary history.

Eschewing long movement paradigms, Lawrence apprehends social movements' impact on literature through their differences — the competing ideological frames of movements that generate narrative conflict, characterological schemas, and rhetorics in post-1945 fiction and nonfiction. While this is a necessary approach, left literary studies also tracks movements' continuities and influences that register in styles and themes of post-1945 US literature. For example, mid-twentieth-century fiction, New American Poetry, and literary nationalisms bear influences of cultural forms and aesthetics that developed with left movements beginning in the late 1920s and 1930s: the resistant folk and worker cultures promoted by the Communist Left, and the Popular Front's mixing of popular, regional, "ethnic," and "high" cultures.5 Even as movements contended and factionalized, their constituents and cultures often traversed and reformulated ideological divides between, say, Communism and pan-Africanism or cultural and revolutionary nationalisms.

Left literary studies also provides generative institutionalist approaches to post-1945 literature. In addition to investigating the development of literary organizations in relation to movements — as Lawrence does with the magazine n+1's shifts in relation to Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo — scholars of the left examine the many movement institutions that supported and shaped literature: writers' conferences and workshops, presses, periodicals, schools, and more. Nathaniel Mills's forthcoming book on writers' organizations of the Communist Left, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and African American writers in both spaces will advance institutionalist, movements-based research. Smethurst's study of the Black Arts movement in the Northeast, the Midwest, the West Coast, and the South shows the need for regional and transregional approaches to movement institutions and ideologies. Wald and Washington develop what could be considered institutionalist biographical approaches to post-1945 literature.

Finally, left literary and cultural scholarship offers a robust foundation for pursuing Lawrence's call for transnational movements-based studies of post-1945 US literature. Denning asserts that in the age of three worlds (1945-1989), transnationalism was unrealized due to the division of the capitalist First, Communist Second, and decolonizing Third Worlds.6 Consequently, Denning's transnational history of culture in the age of three worlds tracks the parallel but discontinuous developments of New Left cultural politics and the world novel. However, scholars such as Bill Mullen on Afro-Orientalism and Benjamin Balthaser on anti-imperialist modernism demonstrate that transnational conceptions of capitalism, race, citizenship, and liberation infuse cultural work and activism affiliated with and inspired by twentieth-century movements.7 All of these studies show that internationalism, as a worldwide working-class movement that intersected with anticolonialism and produced its own literary movement, is critical to transnational and global literary histories.

With its long movement perspectives, critical interdisciplinary methods, and nuanced theorizations of culture, institutions, and social forces, scholarship on the left is vital to pursuing movements-based literary studies that does not succumb to the erasure of radical, anti-imperialist, and utopian imaginations.

Cheryl Higashida is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (University of Illinois Press, 2012). Her current research on the co-development of U.S. New Left social movements, sound media, and race has been published in American Quarterly and African American Literature in Transition: 1960-1970.