Bill V Mullen. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
Democracy does not and cannot mean freedom. On the contrary it means coercion. It means submission of the individual will to the general will and it is justified in this compulsion only if the will is general and not the will of special privilege. — W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Revelation of St. Orgne the Damned,” 1938
A special burden of “race” in U.S. history is its illuminating attachment to a variety of conceptions of propaganda. The two terms enfold the dissemination, or diaspora, of human beings across time and place and the role of the printed word in attributing and assigning to them racial characteristics. Writings from the dominant, especially Anglo-Saxon, tradition have tended to promote or “propagate” ideas about White cultural, intellectual, and physical superiority to non-Whites, especially where Whites have constituted a majority readership and controlled publishing means. In Western democracies, this tradition would include well-known writings such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, religious and scientific discourse on White supremacy, and tracts and pamphlets by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. This tradition of propaganda constitutes an exclusionary, oppressive, and exploitative hegemony—what W.E.B. Du Bois called in Black Reconstruction “lies agreed upon” (Du Bois 1998 : 714 ). African Americans have most frequently among U.S. ethnic minorities been the target of racial propaganda and have in turn created the longest countertradition. Indeed, African American writing has directly contended with the idea and problem of racial propaganda in several ways: first, by creating networks of print culture and communities of non-White and White readers intended to combat the reach and effects of White supremacist writing; and second, by using print culture, and its distribution, to forward progressive and emancipatory definitions of African American life. Third, African American writing has engaged in theoretical debate about the very meaning of the term propaganda. And, fourth, it has placed discussion about the nature and role of propaganda at the center of generative debate about Black group solidarity and the meaning of Black nationalism. Given the diasporic nature of Black population movements and literary production, it should also not be surprising that considerations of propaganda have been fundamental to the creation of Black internationalist and transnational thought. Indeed, the quest to create broader readerships and political constituencies, as well as for deterritorialized considerations of African American expression in the world, might be seen as the most radical aspect and characteristic of propaganda as an imagined tool of Black liberation.
Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Jacques Ellul, and others have pointed to the prominent role of print culture in the emergence of modern nationalisms. For Ellul, print culture is an aspect of what he calls the “technological society,” a matrix of social, economic, and political institutions producing “national self-awareness,” a precondition for the production of myths and ideologies that concretize in the name propaganda (1973: ix). In their important study, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson (1979) align the history and historical development of African American periodical culture with Black efforts to both respond to and alter normative conceptions of race and national identity in the United States. Like nearly all early African American literary production, from Phyllis Wheatley’s Revolutionary-era poetry to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal (Walker 1997) early Black periodicals were bound tightly to the mission of combating White supremacy and promoting Black racial solidarity. These included John Russworm and Samuel Cornish’s Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper to appear in 1827; the National Reformer, 1833; Mirror of Liberty, 1837; and Douglass’s Monthly, originating in Rochester, New York, and carrying the name of the most famous Black abolitionist. The appearance of Black periodicals prior to the widespread organization of U.S. abolitionism reflects the efforts of Black intellectuals to combat what Ellul calls “pre-propaganda,” that is, the formal and informal dissemination of damaging or inaccurate ideas about a subject, here race. By 1900, African American periodical culture had assumed a vanguard role in combating White supremacist thought, inaugurating a period of at least seventy years in which it would become the central venue for reflection, writing, and debate on tactics and strategies for African American cultural expression and political organizing. In general, contemporary periodicals demonstrated a commitment to some version of “racial uplift,” hitched to the personal agenda of strong-minded founders and editors. Booker T. Washington managed the editorial politics largely in his own image of Alexander’s Magazine, Colored Citizen of Boston, and, most importantly, the Colored American of Washington. Washington demonstrated the capacity of the new Black periodical to constitute Black subjectivity almost by itself. Walter Wallace, Jesse Watkins, Harper S. Johnson, and Walter Alexander Johnson responded with a far broader conception of racial uplift by founding the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company and Colored American Magazine, which released its first issue in May 1900. The editors underscored the role of periodical culture in challenging U.S. racial hegemony by citing the absence of a “monthly magazine” dedicated to Black letters as a mirror held up to the fact that, “as a rule, the Anglo Saxon fails to sufficiently recognize our efforts, hopes and aspiration” ( Johnson and Johnson 1979: 3). The magazine attracted Pauline Hopkins to serve as literary editor from 1902 to 1904. “Above all,” the editors wrote, Colored American “aspires to develop and intensify the bonds of that racial brotherhood, which alone can enable a people, to assert their racial rights as men, and demand their privileges as citizens” (Johnson and Johnson 1979: 4).
Colored American’s double-voiced mission to demand from the dominant culture recognition of universal “hopes and aspirations” for African Americans while asserting a particularist solidarity based on “racial rights” underscores the competing conceptions of national belonging and citizenship that run through much African American propaganda. These mirror what Etienne Balibar has defined as paradoxical conceptions of nationalism often arising from racial and ethnic divisions within the general polity: “There is the one which tends to construct a state or a community and the one which tends to subjugate, to destroy; the one which refers to right and the one which refers to might; the one which tolerates other nationalisms and which may even argue in their defence and include them within a single historical perspective … and the one which radically excludes them in an imperialist and racist perspective” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 47). Much African American theorizing and claim to the meaning of propaganda perceives propaganda in service of the latter tendency as an impetus for Black speech and writing, while striving to define propaganda of the former as just, emancipatory, and inclusive. Indeed, Colored American’s effort to, in Balibar and Wallerstein’s words, “construct a state or a community” points to the role of periodical culture in creating Black readers who might join Black writers in the quest to redefine national democracy, citizenship, and racial unity for both African Americans and a White majority. Beyond that, the periodical’s capacity for self-publishing and self-distribution made it a vanguard vehicle for conceiving the meaning of Black nationalism—even when not called by that name—and the potential for broadly conceived African American self-determination and solidarity, both domestic and international. This cluster of utopian impulses hover over and are central to the fierce, loving, and sustained debate within African American print culture about the very term “propaganda” across early to mid-century.
We might begin with the most famous and influential declaration in this arena. In his 1926 Crisis essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. Du Bois (1996) argued: “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent…” (Sundquist 1996: 328). Several contextual points help illuminate the place of Du Bois’s argument not only within his own shifting thought on the topic of propaganda, about which I will say more later, but about the reverberation of his position across time. Within the essay itself, Du Bois conjures a definition of Black life as the imaginative aspiration for and expression of “conditions” the entire race might enjoy:
[T]here has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that—but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America. (Sundquist, 1996: 325 emphasis mine)
Two observations bear remarking about this passage. First, like his forebears at Colored American, Du Bois looks to both White and non-White readers as targets for his message. Second, and more importantly, Du Bois fixes propaganda here not to argument about the world as it is, but as it might be, an important revision of its historiographic function vis-á-vis race especially. Hence it is the “bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty,” as a means of becoming “the apostle of Truth and Right” (Sundquist 1996: 327). Yet this equivalence is possible only when the Black subject speaks, or creates, from a position of knowing restriction: “Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice” (Sundquist, 1996: 327–328). Du Bois’s insight in this passage is that all Black writing is a form of counterpropaganda combating hegemonic lies already in place. Hence, all Black utterance is true to its condition when it faces that fact squarely. This recognition thus enables a representation of Black life as “Beauty” and “Truth” equal to the conditional and contingent task of Black writing itself: “All Art is propaganda.”
Du Bois’s essay also laid the groundwork for making explicit an implicit equivalence between propaganda and a nascent twentieth-century Black nationalism. The essay proffers a revision of Du Bois’s conception of Black “second sight,” or the Veil, in relation to the apperception and representation of human potential. “Such is beauty,” he writes, “its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless.” And yet “today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly … Who shall let this world be beautiful?” The answer lies in the exceptionalist potential of Black historical experience, what Wilson Moses might call Afrotopic idealization: “We black folk may help,” writes Du Bois, “for we have within us a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be; as though in this morning of group life we had awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams a splendid future” (Sundquist 1996: 326). Du Bois, in effect, fashions a generative creation myth of African American “group life” and national self-awareness—the Birth of a Nation rising dialectically from the ashes of hostile, delimiting—hence ugly and false—national narratives of the past.
Du Bois’s position on propaganda in “Criteria” was the sustained culmination of long-standing debate with figures as diverse as Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Charles Johnson, each of whom had, to his mind, failed to recognize the propagandistic imperative underlying Black lived experience and expressive culture. It was also his intervention in what had become by 1926 a seemingly irresolvable debate over the relationship of aesthetics to propaganda in Black cultural expression. In 1910, Du Bois had attacked Washington, and by implication his editorial guidance of periodicals like Alexander’s Magazine, by asking “Why aspire and delve for Art’s sake and Truth’s sake when you can make MONEY? What is literature compared with bricks? How long, O Lord, how long shall we bow tongue-tied or double-tongued before our enemies” (Du Bois 1910: 4). Du Bois’s 1926 essay would retain this early position that aesthetics was an important dimension of Black life and Black striving, repositioning the argument against, not Washington economic pragmatism, but his Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. Indeed, as Abby and Ronald Johnson note, Du Bois came to the conclusions of his 1926 essay after reading the entirety of Alain Locke’s edited The New Negro volume and concluding that Locke “has newly been seized with the idea that Beauty rather than Propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art” (Johnson and Johnson 1979: 45). Here, Du Bois equated Locke’s conception of Beauty with a “pure” aestheticism or “decadence” equivalent to the “tawdry and flamboyant” purposefully excluded from his own vision of a better world (that the “tawdry” included works of literature, like Carl Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven, is a point important to Du Bois’s essay but secondary to its larger philosophical aims). Du Bois’s poorly articulated differences from Locke’s position on the arts and expression—Locke, too, had urged the New Negro to provide the “augury of a new democracy in American culture” (Locke 1997: 965) and to reject the Old Negro as more “myth than a man” (965) reflected the real subtext of Harlem’s ongoing Renaissance as the collective expression of new national belonging.
Yet it was Du Bois’s 1926 essay and formula for conceiving art as propaganda that echoed down the corridors of African American critical debate and helped to place Black periodical culture as its center. Zora Neale Hurston published what might be called a personal manifesto on the matter in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Hurston 1997) in The World Tomorrow, a pacifist journal published by the Friends of Reconciliation (FOR) and first edited by socialist Norman Thomas. The journal, Christian, pan-ecumenical, and progressive, was published in New York City by the FOR’s Fellowship Press from 1919 to 1934, when its circulation crested at 40,000 readers. Taking Du Bois’s call for “the right of black folk to love and enjoy” to giddy heights, Hurston’s essay redefined democracy in cosmic terms as the source of her own writing on the world: “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong” (Wheatley 1997: 1010). Hurston, we might say, replaces Jacques Ellul’s assertion that propaganda depends on “national self-awareness” with a concept of the self as nationless. Hers was an effort to emancipate Du Bois’s argument about the function of art into a mode of deterritorialized subjectivity and artistic independence. Within a short time, the onset of the Great Depression, the emergence of fascism worldwide, and the rapid proletarianization of African American life and letters would result in yet another stern reassessment of the relationship of art to propaganda. A defining salvo would be the 1937 group essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Dorothy West’s New Challenge. The magazine was the successor to West’s 1935 New York start-up magazine Challenge, intended mainly as a venue for African American fiction and poetry produced by writers of Harlem’s recent Renaissance. The short-lived New Challenge (it lasted one issue) was the product of a different trajectory. In 1928, the Soviets had launched their “Black Belt” thesis describing African Americans as an oppressed national minority. By the 1930s, the Russian avant-garde, most especially the poet Vladimir Mayakovky, had argued that African American art was vanguard ethnic nationalism to be used as a source for Soviet cultural production. Richard Wright, a veteran of the Communist Party’s John Reed Clubs in Chicago, who had joined the Communist Party USA in 1932, sought to resurrect Challenge as a forum for Soviet-influenced theory on both race and culture. “Blueprint for Negro Writing” was intended to be New Challenge’s manifesto. Co-authored by, among others, Richard Wright, Fern Gayden, Theodore Black, Frank Marshall Davis, and Margaret Walker, the essay, citing Lenin, defined African Americans as an oppressed national minority upon whom it was incumbent to recognize the “true” sources of Black national culture—here folk and blues—while simultaneously recognizing in both the “complex simplicity” shared with masterpieces of modern world literature, like the novels of Gorky. With a particular eye to the international position of the Black writer, the essay assumed the function of art to be advancing new definitions of Black nationalism that might lead to multiracial and multiethnic internationalism. In so doing, it endeavored to imagine a world stage for a newly inspired and globalist African American propaganda:
The ideological unity of Negro writers and the alliance of that unity with all the progressive ideas of our day is the primary prerequisite for collective work. On the shoulders of White writers and Negro writers alike rest the responsibility of ending this mistrust and isolation. By placing cultural health above narrow sectional prejudices, liberal writers of all races can help to break the stony soil of aggrandizement out of which the stunted plants of Negro nationalism grow. And, simultaneously, Negro writers can help to weed out those choking growths of reactionary nationalism and replace them with hardier and sturdier types. (Wright 1994: 98)
The essay’s emphasis on both collective, as opposed to individual expression, on the one hand, and international, interracial correspondence, on the other, looks backward to nationalistic forms of Black “intentionality,” seen as early as David Walker’s Appeal, and forward to postwar cosmopolitanism and Third Worldism, of African American self and group narration. It also helped to peg African American expressive culture for several decades to a new and heavily weighted conception of the propagandisticdeemed “protest” fiction, as best exemplified by Wright’s 1938 short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children and his 1940 novel Native Son. The term was not Wright’s but circulated widely in critical reviews of his work. It drew from theoretical and practical examples of 1930s “proletarian” culture, overtly dedicated to representations of class struggle and working-class life, and from the rapid upsurge in social demonstration against the Great Depression in the form of strikes, walkouts, pickets, and erstwhile agitation. Indeed, from the 1930s to the 1960s, African American culture and lived experience seemed inextricably wedded to decoding and working out what the Southside Writers Group had called a “blueprint,” or plan of social and cultural organization, for Black life. The term itself carried the force of literature as social engineering and seemed a mandate for critical response. That the mandate was fulfilled is evident in the reiteration of topics, terms, and terminology describing key interventions in African American critical debate about propaganda from 1939 to 1977. These would include James Baldwin’s 1939 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” largely a response to Wright’s Native Son; “Race and the Negro Writer” by Hugh Gloucester, an essay included in a special 1950 issue of Phylon dedicated to debate about the function of Black writing; Nick Aaron Ford’s 1950 “A Blueprint for Negro Authors,” included in the Phylon special issue; Ann Petry’s 1952 essay “The Novel as Social Criticism”; Ralph Ellison’s 1963 essay “The World and the Jug,” a reply to Irving Howe’s response to Baldwin’s essays on Wright; and Addison Gayle’s “Blueprint for Black Criticism,” published in 1977 in Black World. A sampling of the critical debate in these essays puts into relief both the category of propaganda in articulations of Black expressive culture and its role in developing conceptions of Black nationalism and nationalist thought in the twentieth century. The same sampling shows African American writers conceiving and reconceiving the propagandistic as a strategy to influence and document White and Black thought on the role of print culture in forming ideas about race and racial injustice.
James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” first demonstrated midcentury liberalism’s encroaching fatigue with the political and aesthetic debates of the 1930s “social protest” era. The essay made equivalent the protest novel, specifically Native Son, with racial melodrama, and reanimated the “Art Is Propaganda” debate by declaring for complexity in racial representation over naïve mimesis. Baldwin famously accused Wright of writing sentimental agitprop, a virtual Blackface rendition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One year later, Phylon, the journal of Atlanta University started by Du Bois during his earlier tenure there, took up the function-of-literature question full-scale. Nick Aaron Ford’s “A Blueprint for Negro Authors” etched out a middle ground position between “protest” fiction and Baldwin’s lament, defending Wright as among the “first-rate American novelists,” while calling for Black writers to use “social propaganda so skillfully to the purposes of art that it will not insult the average intelligent reader” (Ford 1998: 1113). Ford’s deployment of the term “social” propaganda as the proper “content” of art was meant to delineate anew the form and function of Black letters. Citing Albert Guerard, Tolstoy, and Granville Hicks, Ford argued for “propaganda” as full engagement with the “problems of his age.” And yet: “I do not advocate art for the sake of propaganda. I demand a proper subordination and the observance of good taste,” as exemplified by careful, and typically modernist, use of symbolism (1114). In the same Phylon issue, Hugh Gloucester similarly exalted Native Son’s artistry, while providing the caveat that “While propaganda from inside sources”—named as “racial defense, protest, and glorification”—has frequently assisted colored people in their struggle toward equality and freedom, the preponderating use of racial subject matter has handicapped the Negro writer in at least four important ways” (Gloucester 1998: 1109–1110). These included retarding the attainment of a “cosmic grasp” of human experience, limiting Black contributions to “national and world ideologies,” restricting Black writing to “the moods and substance of race in the United States,” and “cultural segregation” (1110). Echoing in part Baldwin’s embrace of racial liberalism, Gloucester concluded that for Black writers “to accept the principle that racial experience is the only natural province of the Negro writer is to approve an artistic double standard that is just as confining and demoralizing in American literature as is segregation in American life” (1111).
Gloucester’s essay also praised Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street—itself a response to Wright’s Native Son—for disclosing “the common human denominators of passion, marriage, motherhood, and disillusionment in the lives of contemporary Negro women” (1998: 1110). Petry herself, in a 1952 essay rarely cited in African American critical debate, seemed to take aim at Baldwin’s 1949 criticism of Wright, alluding to critics who accuse the novel of being “prostituted, bastardized, when it is used to serve some moral or political end for it then becomes propaganda … Hence, many a critic who keeps up with the literary Joneses reserves his most powerful ammunition for what he calls problem novels, thesis novels, propaganda novels” (Petry 1998: 1115). Petry’s argument genuflected to both Du Bois’s 1926 manifesto against pure aestheticism, the South Side Writers Group advance of literature, and especially African American literature, as always internationalist in orientation: “Being a product of the twentieth century (Hitler, atomic energy, Hiroshima, Buchenwald, Mussolini, USSR) I find it difficult to subscribe to the idea that art exists for art’s sake. It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, or La Giocanda, Madame Bovary, or War and Peace. The novel, like all other forms of art, will always reflect the political, economic, and social structure of the period in which it was created” (1115). Nearly ten years later Ralph Ellison, seeking to punctuate an era of debate on the function of propaganda in Black writing, revisited the moment of Baldwin’s 1949 criticism of Wright via Irving Howe’s vigorous defense of the latter in his essay “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Ellison ultimately used the occasion of the debate itself to instantiate a race-inflected modernism that recuperated irony, ambiguity, and complexity over “intentionality”— personal or social—in Black expressive culture:
Wright believed in the much abused idea that novels are “weapons”— the counterpart of the dreary notion, common among most minority groups, that novels are instruments of good public relations. But I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject. (Ellison 1997: 1554)
Ellison’s rejection of literature as both “weapon” and “public relations” suggests a rejection of a literature of advocacy, particularly that aimed at White readership. The essay couches in a language of archetype a tacit universalism that would implicitly elevate art over the propagandistic, and humanism over racial specificity.
This complex of critical treatises provides a foundation for what became in the 1960s debates within the Black Arts Movement (BAM) about the form and function of African American literature. Echoing Du Bois’s call of “the right of Black folk to love and enjoy,” writers associated with BAM heightened the connections between black print culture and propaganda. Two defining essays here encapsulate the way BAM both synthesized and revised midcentury debate. Addison Gayle’s 1977 essay “Blueprint for Black Criticism” nodded to the mission and message of its 1937 New Challenge prototype by demanding an African American literary criticism of “engagement” (Gayle 1977: 41–45). More significantly, and influentially, Larry Neal’s 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement” provocatively deracinated the category of “protest” literature, somewhat after Baldwin, as an “appeal to White morality” (1998: 1450). The BAM, by contrast, “speaks directly to black people” (1450). Neal and the BAM revolutionized the conception of the reader of African American propaganda by, in effect, discounting White eyes. The essay likewise offered Black cultural expression as an autonomous and closed loop fully divorced from larger Western culture, or more precisely, produced and transmitted only for readers outside of a “Western” orbit. The position might be understood as an internationalism both circumscribed and enabled by Black nationalism, and as a utopianism delimited by dystopic skepticism about the possibility of inter- and intraracial cultural production:
The Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concepts both relate broadly to the Afro-Americans desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics. (Neal 1998: 1450)
Neal effectively redefines propaganda as a dead letter conception: a rhetorical term naïvely invested in a separation of “language” or art from the materiality of race and social conditions. The essay’s elliptical equivalence of “art” and “politics” suggests Black expressivity as a self-sufficient logos for social objectives. Neal’s argument thus collapses, much like Du Bois’s “Criteria” essay, the distinction between Art and Propaganda as the cornerstone of a new formula, and formulation, for Black “group life” tethered to a conception of culture as the engine of Black history. The essay makes explicit the utopian dimensions of BAM’s program for a world to come: “The Black Arts and the Black Power concepts,” writes Neal, “both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics” (Neal 1998: 1450 ). Likewise, Amiri Baraka’s poetic manifesto “Black Arts” presumed that poetry itself was not speech but action, the rhetorical fist, or practice, of Black Arts theory:
Poems are bullshit unless they are Teeth or trees or lemons piled On a step. Or black ladies dying Of men leaving nickel hearts Beating them down. Fuck poems And they are useful, they shoot Come at you, love what you are, Breathe like wrestlers, or shudder Strangely after pissing ( Baraka 1998: 1451)
Two aspects of BAM conception of the propagandistic stand in relief here, in retrospect: the first is its insistence on the intimate relationship between thought and action. Baraka’s conception of the poem as the body and embodiment of Black struggle suggests that writing itself may fulfill what Bukharin and the anarchist tradition deemed “propaganda of the deed.” Second, BAM’s substitution of a “Black aesthetic” for a “Western aesthetic” was meant to signal the substitution of a Pan-African, or “Third World,” conception of cultural politics that revealed the strangulating limits for Black writers of conceiving of writing along exclusively “national” lines. Black “nationalism,” in other words, was also internationalism, a “good” nationalism, in juxtaposition to the racist, imperialist, “bad” nationalism of hegemonic America.
These productive tensions across Black engagement with the propagandistic are played out most fully in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Indeed, by the end of his illustrious life and career, W.E.B. Du Bois had come to see propaganda as a structuring element of many of the social problematics he engaged across a lifetime of writing and activism. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois explained his decision to abandon his early sociological work as a call to develop what might be called an epistemic of advocacy: “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were being lynched, murdered, and starved” (Du Bois, Dusk, 1968: 69). Du Bois famously described The Crisis in 1910 as an “organ of propaganda” meant to sustain “one of the most effective assaults of liberalism upon prejudice, and reaction that the modern world has ever seen” (1995: 391). In 1916, Du Bois led efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to boycott D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film famously popular with President Woodrow Wilson—perhaps the first formal antipropaganda campaign in African American history (Dusk, 1968). In 1950, Du Bois and other members of the Peace Information Center distributed “peace grams” in support of the “Stockholm Proposal” to eliminate nuclear arms, a proposal itself dubbed a Soviet “propaganda trick” by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Du Bois, Autobiography, 1968: 358). In his Autobiography, written in the final years of his life, Du Bois envisioned the struggle over control and distribution of social and political ideas as linked directly to the economic conditions underlying those struggles: “There is no way in the world for us to preserve the ideals of a democratic America, save by drastically curbing the present power of concentrated wealth; by assuming ownership of some natural resources, by administering many of our key industries, and by socializing our services for public welfare” (1968: 378 ).
Du Bois here fashions a variation on Marx and Engels’s classic conception of ideology as “the ruling ideas” of a ruling class and “the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” of a society (Marx and Engels 2004: 64). Marx and Engels’s formulation of ideology resonates with Harold Lasswell’s enduring description of the function of propaganda as to “to maximize the power at home by subordinating groups and individuals, while reducing the material cost of power” (quoted in Ellul 1973: 10). Du Bois complements both of these arguments by specifically linking the historical function of propaganda to both the delimiting of democracy and the formation and repression of the working class. In his Autobiography, Du Bois argued that the struggle to end slavery in the United States failed to gain majority sympathy “because a persistent propaganda campaign had been spread as slave labor began to increase in value, to prove by science and religion that black men were not real men” (1968: 352). As a result, “the fight for democracy and especially the struggle for a broader social control of wealth and of individual effort was hindered and turned aside by widespread contempt for the lowest class of labor” (352). It is thus his turn to a historical materialistic interpretation of (removed from “an idealized”) history that explains Du Bois’s radical reconceptualization of “democracy” with which I began this essay: “Democracy does not and cannot mean freedom. On the contrary it means coercion. It means submission of the individual will to the general will and it is justified in this compulsion only if the will is general and not the will of special privilege” (1986: 1060). For Du Bois, “coercion” refers to the forced redistribution of wealth and ideas for social development from the hands of few to the hands of many. Du Bois unmoors liberalism’s classic invocation of “freedom” and “free speech” from its material base in a history of class formation to replace it with a literal articulation—as both expression and social process—of history made from below. This is the central argument of Du Bois’s opus magnum on the matter, his essay “The Propaganda of History,” published as the final chapter of his epic history Black Reconstruction, in 1935. Du Bois equates the formal historical record of Reconstruction up until the publication of his own book as a “fairy tale of a beautiful Southern slave civilization” (1998: 715), or “lies agreed upon” (714) premised on the argument that “the faults and failures of Reconstruction” are due to “Negro ignorance and corruption” (713). The essay cites the exclusion from the historical record of Black participation in the Civil War, the role of Blacks in the development of Black freedmen schools, the organization of the Black vote, the role of Black labor and soldiers, and the neglect of Black historical sources as an effort to reconsolidate a master narrative of triumphant capitalism and White supremacy in the past, in order for both to reconstitute their hold in the present. Here is Du Bois’s thundering conclusion to his argument:
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of the our industrial triumph; no part of our religion experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future. (Du Bois 1998: 727)
Du Bois here elaborates upon, and best explains, the implication of his essay’s title. “The Propaganda of History” refers us both to the genre of History as one of constant and inevitable coercion of fact, as well as its causal relationship to the social formation, or facts on the ground. Du Bois endeavors to wrestle control over the historical record by defining history as something made by mass human action, not historians or a ruling class. Black Reconstruction, with its repudiation of state-centered histories, assertion of a Black historical archive and record of achievement, lyrical dramatizations of racist violence, and headlong attacks on political foes, intends to displace and disfigure two equally coercive national narratives: one textual, understood as hegemonic writing on History, and the other Historical, the titanic struggle over material goods and resources. The book itself is a mirror held up to a history of Black self-activity as well as a history of a type of history not yet written: a literally utopian undertaking. How then might we understand Du Bois’s work and career as an index to the relationship of African American engagement with propaganda? I will argue in the space that remains that Du Bois aspired to create a transgeneric internationalism as a literary and political practice equal to the challenge of his conclusions in “The Propaganda of History.” Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Empire has helped to identify some coordinates of this feature of Du Bois’s work. Kaplan’s book takes its title from a phrase in the poem “A Hymn to the Peoples” that concludes Du Bois’s magisterial 1920 essay collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. “Anarchy of Empire,” for Kaplan, references the simultaneous formal and thematic apparatus of a book dedicated, she writes, to stake out “literal and figurative space from which to map counter-geographies of the postwar world” (Kaplan 2002: 180). In the aftermath of a world war that Du Bois attributed almost exclusively to the European scramble for African and Asian colonies, Du Bois’s quest for nowheres or utopias unseen is tethered for Kaplan both to empire’s irrational territorial reach and the constant, sporadic, and disorganized responses of its victims. For every moment of empire’s consolidation, in Darkwater, Du Bois finds a location for its coming unmoored. This dialectic is reflected in the book’s violent aesthetic turbulence, its sui generis admixture of poetry and autobiography, prose fiction and essay, credos and postscripts, as well as its international overreach in describing the simultaneity of imperial conflicts in modern world history: from East St. Louis to Berlin, Congo to America, Great Barrington to Paris: “The disjunctive qualities of the text in time and space, its vertiginous motion, jarring and fragmented juxtapositions, and cacophonous dialogues” writes Kaplan, “together chart the anarchic routes and irrational workings of empire” (184). Kaplan’s analysis centralizes in a different register the dystopic realpolitik impulses behind Du Bois’s transgeneric internationalism while casting shape to its utopian longings for resolution, or transformation. It allows us to understand Du Boisian propaganda as a radically new antigenre of modernism and modernity. Du Bois’s own throwaway meditation on this innovation in Darkwater—“Between the sterner flights of logic,” he writes in a postscript that actually precedes the text, “I have sought to set some little lightings of what may be poetry” ( Sundquist 1996 : 483 ) anticipates the train of experimental thought that would formalize and concretize five years later in “Criteria of Negro Art.”
We might extend this “formalist” reading of Du Bois’s transgeneric internationalism into the realm of his wider body of work, political activism, and their political and aesthetic interrelation. Du Bois willfully undermined generic conventions—of history, sociology, psychology, fiction—as discursive strategies complementary to his efforts to escape the “tyranny” of U.S. racism, capitalism, and empire. This strategy is writ large across the field of his work: the constant interweaving of self-narration, or autobiography, with social history and analysis (Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater, Dusk of Dawn, The Autobiography); his polymathic participation in African American periodical publishing ventures (The Crisis, Phylon, Freedomways); his academic hopscotching across disciplines (history, sociology, literary criticism, international relations, sovietology, sinology); and his physical traveling and writing across the world stage (Moscow, Berlin, New York, Beijing, Prague, Accra). These gestures were accompanied by the expanded transmission of Du Bois’s writings into international journals and newspapers including Izvestiia (Russia), Aryan Path (India), and Peking Review (China)—a transnational propagation of his thought. Taxonomic shifts in the oeuvre of Du Bois’s expressive life also represented an effort “to produce underdetermined and possibly unprecedented action” as represented by Du Bois’s role in developing, fomenting, and organizing a wide and increasing international range of organizations and institutions dedicated to social uplift, reform, or revolution: the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Pan-Africanism, the Peace Information Center, and the Communist Party of the United States. These complementary gestures constitute an inner dialectic in Du Bois’s work grounded in a deconstruction of “difference” between thought and action, spirit and material, “word and deed,” a strategy finally rooted and grounded in Du Bois’s embrace of historical materialism as the resolution of putative contradictions between them. Perhaps the defining and most illustrative example of Du Bois’s efforts toward a transgeneric internationalism as propagandistic foray remains his one and only unpublished major manuscript, Russia and America: An Interpretation, written in the late 1940s and completed in 1950, and still, today, on the shelf. The book is also something like a sequel to Black Reconstruction and a coda to Du Bois’s concluding essay therein.
Written in 1949 and 1950, the manuscript of Russia and America endeavors to analyze the legacy of the Russian Revolution in twin contexts: Du Bois’s 1926, 1936, and 1949 visits to the Soviet Union, and the immediate moment of the Cold War. Like Black Reconstruction, it is a sui generis effort to narrate a defining moment in history—here the Russian Revolution—against the grain of scholarly, political, and public consensus. From the beginning, the book marks its readership’s investment in prior or prevailing views of its topic; the text is prefaced by an “Apology” in which the author appeals for “mercy” on his word, a gesture made all the more ironic by Robert Giroux’s (Du Bois’s publisher) refusal to publish the book: Russia and America, he wrote, was an “uncritical apologia” for Stalin’s Russia and an “excessive condemnation of the United States” (Baldwin 2002: 167). Russia and America’s failed publication bespeaks a premise central to both Russia and America and Black Reconstruction instantiated in the epigraph to this paper; namely, that democracy itself is an exercise in “coercion”: “With all of our talk about democracy,” he writes in Russia and America, “there is not today a single nation in the world, which attempts to practice democratic government without modifications and restraints” (Du Bois 1950: 268). Russia and America then may be read as a sequel, or intertext, to his earlier search for democracy unbound. As Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction, and laments again in Russia and America, Reconstruction itself was “a great advance toward real democracy and incipient socialism in the United States, without color caste and with full economic opportunity” (159). Yet these nascent aims were smashed by “Threat and Compromise” in the form of corporate dictatorship, the destruction of labor solidarity, and the unleashing of racial violence against African Americans. These examples of “propaganda of the deed” have not, Du Bois argued, met sufficient retaliation in the United States: and yet, in Soviet Russia, “people, of both sexes and all economic classes and groups, take wider and more continued and more intelligent part in democratic processes than is the case in any other modern nation” (289). Du Bois cites heavy Soviet voting patterns, participation in local political debate, increasing literacy rates, collective forms of decision making and land ownership as examples of a successful “second” Reconstruction or Revolution fulfilled. Hence, although “Russia is not today a democracy”—in the systemic sense of the term, since elections are “influenced by the Communist Party” (269)—Russia is a “democracy” in political practice. Du Bois in effect inverts, or signifies upon, hegemonic meanings of “democracy” in Black Reconstruction in a manner similar to his inversion of the term “propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art,” as a prescription for an egalitarian future not yet fulfilled.
This aspiration for “generic” revolutions in democratic theory and practice is echoed in Russia and America’s overtly propagandistic structure, which assumes opposition to its own message. The book asks (and responds to) ten questions about the Soviet Union Du Bois knows readers have already answered, among them: “How much personal freedom is there in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?,” “Is the Soviet Union a slave state?,” “Does the Soviet Union suppress religion?,” “Is it true that the Soviet Union had driven out race prejudice?” The rhetorical nature of the questions is likewise belied by the comparative nature of the text: Russia and America: An Interpretation, is meant to replace the “propaganda of history” with a clean slate of ideas tantamount to a revolution in public consciousness. Du Bois uses the text to bend the history of the two nations to the will of their democratic majorities, or rather, he creates from their imagined division, unity: Du Bois insists simultaneously that the majority of Russians and Americans, unlike their leaders, don’t want war, do not seek domination of other nations, do not desire nuclear annihilation. Du Bois appeals to “common will,” a majority worldview, literally, as the antidote to a coercive Cold War history governed from above by racism, capitalism, and divisive nationalisms. Du Bois ventures toward the elimination of “nationalisms” themselves by conceiving Russia and America as a singular, mutually defining entity, or what he called enigmatically in Darkwater, an “inter-nation”: the book uses the logic of analogy and comparison only to eliminate the concept of difference. Russia and America, in Du Bois’s imagining, becomes Russia Is America, and vice versa. Hence, the putative gap between good and bad nationalisms, nationalisms and internationalism, is effectively bridged. The utopian expanse of the endeavor is indexed by Du Bois’s smashing of generic, temporal, and spatial boundaries (between History and Propaganda, Soviet and U.S., Black Reconstruction and the Soviet Revolution) and seeing them rather as dialectical coordinates for the articulation of a new world history that might avoid repeating errors of the past, including Global Civil War:
Americans, Russians: in a third World War, whoever wins, will lose; what any nation gains, the world will pay for; world conquest through force, means the death of civilization for a thousand years. (Du Bois 1950: 314)
Writing in the immediate aftermath of history’s most costly war, punctuated by Holocausts in Auschwitz, Leningrad, and Osaka, Du Bois recasts the Jeremiad from prophecy to historical revisionism. Russia and America seeks to dislodge the seemingly monolithic correspondence between Cold War propaganda and Cold War history by invoking the annihilating consequences of each against themselves. This “signifying” dimension of the longue duree of African American engagement with modern propaganda, and the capacity of writing to achieve what might be called utopian reversals of history, may be finally best captured by Du Bois’s recurring engagement with the writer he once described as the “most persistent propagandist” of his age, Rudyard Kipling. As Kaplan has noted, “Hymn to the Peoples,” which closes Darkwater, is Du Bois’s response to Kipling’s 1897 poem “Recessional,” a poem seeking moral justification for the British Empire. In 1946, just after the close of the Second World War, Du Bois published The World and Africa. The book was, in many ways, a sequel to Darkwater and a bridge to the composition of Russia and America. A meditation on the role of Western colonialism in both anticipating and bringing about the human devastation of the Second World War, Du Bois ends chapter 1 of the book, “The Collapse of Europe,” with ten lines again from Kipling’s “Hymn to the Peoples,” referring to it this time as the “Epitaph” of Imperialism. Du Bois’s intertext use of Kipling is meant to correlate for the reader the relationship of propaganda to its deed, Kipling’s words to world war. In closing The World and Africa, Du Bois comes full circle to the function of political literature, providing a de facto Epitaph to Kipling’s era, while announcing his own ascension as master propagandistic of a world waiting to be born. Titled “The Message,” Du Bois begins with this dramatic apostrophe, “Reader of dead words who would live deeds,” a kinetic mode of address meant to animate, literally, the words that follow:
I dream of a world of infinite and invaluable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, in a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to this world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracy— that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity … There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even Peace. (Du Bois 1965: 261)
Du Bois’s dream of democratic freedom is the antithesis to Kipling’s long nightmare of Empire. Yet it is not a dream of democracy as “freedom” qua freedom, per the epigraph to this paper, but freedom as a realm struggled for, and won, by the world’s majority: “freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to this world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality.” Tellingly, for this essay, Du Bois also concludes The World and Africa with this self-referential sentence: “This is this book of mine and yours.” The finale endeavors to democratize writing and reading themselves as co-equal tasks; Du Bois produces out of and within his dream of an egalitarian world “readers of dead words who would live deeds.” The vision in turn alchemizes the equivalence of literary production and reception to the process of building, or coercing, democracy. The propagandistic thus becomes inseparable from its own objective, a unity of form and idea that is as elegant, symmetrical, and fantastic as Du Bois’s democratic vista.