Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)

Abstract

The first part of the title of J. J. Butts’s impressive and exhaustively researched Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project is taken from the conclusion of Richard Wright’s 12,000,000 Black Voices: A Folk History of the United States (1941). It traces the shifting meaning of this image from a prophetic warning calling for the repudiation of American racism, to the need for mutual struggle during World War II in Wright’s work, to the possibilities of a generative national politics shaped by the continuous presence of Black history in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). In the New Deal era, the writers of Black intertexts, whether those of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Negro Units’ social histories or their subsequent texts, used Black history as a rhetorical lens to scrutinize the federal government’s declared commitment to a civic pluralism, which included Black citizens and its associated efforts at modernization and the equitable “redistribution of social goods” (33). Dark Mirror focuses on a group of Black intertexts written by writers “as FWP writers” (165). Their work documented Black urban neighborhoods in the North, with their influx of Southern migrants from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These intertexts used vernacular narrative modes and materials associated with the Black folk as vital records, as vernacular histories, of “difference, inequity or injustice” (16) and as “memories of oppression, struggle, and hope” (19). These forms remained culturally and politically vital in shaping the present. Butts argues that Black intertexts, including Jack Conroy’s collaboration with Arna Bontemps, have been analyzed largely in the context of the influence of the American Communist Party while “the cultural implications of the liberal state as the ascendant state form in the US” (21) have been overlooked. In situating these intertexts primarily in their relationship to the New Deal, and the beginnings of the liberal welfare state, Dark Mirror is a significant contribution to an expanded analysis of the cultural and political complexities and tensions of these works and this era. Chapter 1 examines how the FWP guidebooks, with their federal authority, were largely “propaganda” (52) for the New Deal and its state-directed ......................................................................................................