Of vagabonds and fellow travelers: African diaspora literary culture and the cultural Cold War

Abstract

Throughout the writing of my book Cultural Entanglements: Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature, certain questions lurked irritatingly in the margins. The American writer Langston Hughes, I argued, spent his life cultivating networks of mutual support, promotion, translation, and influence across the pan-African world. But I also recognized that these efforts were ineluctably entangled (to use the book’s central metaphor) with systems of commodification and cultural exchange within a global capitalist system. What I had a harder time answering was the precise degree to which Hughes and the African and Caribbean writers in his orbit were knowingly complicit in the Anglo-American side of the “cultural Cold War.” When Hughes agreed to participate in and co-organize the conference sponsored by the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961, or when he connected young African writers to the radio programs produced by the Transcription Centre in London, did he have any suspicion that both institutions were covertly funded by the CIA? When Es’kia Mphahlele moved to Paris in 1961 to become Director of the African Program at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, did he know that it, too, was a front for the CIA’s campaign to win “hearts and minds” in the decolonizing nations of Africa and Asia? The series of articles in the New York Times that revealed these connections was published in April 1966, just over a year before Hughes’s death; was he caught by surprise, or merely caught? After all, many critics, in Hughes’s time and since, have speculated that the series of lecture tours he gave in Europe in the 1960s, sponsored by the US Department of State, was part of an agreement Hughes might have reached with American authorities to promote US interests in exchange for not being blacklisted or further persecuted following his appearance before Joseph McCarthy’s senate subcommittee in 1953. How deep did these entanglements go? I found nothing in the archival record to answer these questions definitively, and they were ultimately peripheral to my argument, but I was haunted by the knowledge that their answers could change the way we think about these writers. I begin my review of Cedric Tolliver’s erudite and masterful book Of Vagabonds and Travelers with this account of some blind spots in my own book for a reason: I sorely wish I could have read Tolliver before I finished Cultural Entanglements. While he does not answer the particular questions I pose above, he does offer a framework for understanding the tensions and pressures that Hughes and other African diaspora writers of the early Cold War period had to navigate. Black writers who declined to challenge the agenda of anti-communism and racial liberalism were rewarded with opportunities to publish, have their work promoted, and win awards, effectively drowning out the voices of more radical critics who insisted that racism was woven into the basic fabric of capitalism and imperialism alike. Writers who opposed the “cultural front” of anticommunism “faced the contempt of their peers; they were regarded as mere vagabonds for their refusal to accept the discipline of the new situation and conveniently branded as communist fellow travelers” (161). Tolliver does not attempt to hide his admiration for these vagabonds of African diaspora cultural production who used their marginalized art to articulate a fundamental critique of and an alternative vision to right-wing anti-communism and its concessions to racial liberalism.