Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers' Project

by J. J. Butts

Overview

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project explores Black writers’ engagement with the emerging welfare state. J. J. Butts highlights the conflicting understandings of culture and modernity that pervaded the New Deal’s most ambitious and important cultural project of the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). FWP guidebooks produced by African American writers such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison introduced an inclusive, pluralist understanding of the nation’s culture and history. Using sociological discourses of urban pathology, they justified rebuilding landscapes to remedy social ills as part of a broader agenda for modernization. Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, Dark Mirror shows how FWP guidebooks sought to minimize the tensions between pluralism and modernization, often at the expense of the former. It also demonstrates how Black FWP authors responded to these ideas in FWP texts and in their own narrative and documentary writing. Highlighting the deep racial currents undercutting the promises of the welfare state, these texts provide what Richard Wright called a “dark mirror” for the nation, setting up new modes of engagement with liberalism and reshaping African American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258033
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	07/08/2024
Pages:	188
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

J. J. Butts is Associate Professor of English at Simpson College.

Read an Excerpt

Descriptive in form but prescriptive in outlook, the guidebooks promote a specific vision of the New Deal, one that does not reflect the complex and often ad hoc nature of New Deal programs but rather gives them a sense of unity as a national community project influenced by Progressive ideals. The guidebooks envision a new liberal nation based in shared contribution and forged by federal interventions. The political firestorms the FWP encountered spoke as much to its progressive reimagination of the nation’s future along pluralist lines, as to its rumored status as a platform for communist subversion. Widely accessible and garnering considerable critical attention in both the literary and regular press, the FWP guides were crucial in the New Deal’s self-promotion and national vision, and they fueled important debates about the reach and role of the state.

The conversation between this vision and the FWP’s literary and documentary intertexts provides a preview of the forces that would shape both national and global spatial policy in the postwar era. These developments helped birth the terms on which African Americans would reformulate their claims on justice in the 20th century. African Americans were central in developing the conceptual tools by which urban populations were being understood. New Deal cultural programs offered a crucial opportunity to address questions of representation and inclusion that had long been central to both African American uplift work and to national self-imagining. The welfare state offered a new set of targets for organizing, such as housing, transportation, labor, education, social insurance, access to consumer goods, and civil rights. By the 1940s, African Americans and allies adapted a new set of state-oriented strategies effective in challenging Jim Crow: the ballot, the courts, laws, executive orders, and federal commissions. At the same time, racial nationalist strategies began to emerge, which more fundamentally challenged liberalism by calling into question its core presumptions.

When Richard Wright proclaims in 12 Million Black Voices, “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us,” he imagines writers at the forefront of a specific vision of countermodernity. Yet his image of a “dark mirror,” signaling the tension between the community he hoped for and the vision of liberal and communist modernizers, proved as prophetic as the warning in his essay on Harlem for New York Panorama. An account of Black writers’ involvement locates cultural politics at the heart of socioeconomic transformation during the emergence of the modern welfare state, while also showing how the resources provided by the welfare state would fuel cultural politics in the difficult years ahead. African American writers exposed a more fundamental irony than unintended consequences undermining New Deal liberalism: the failure to match its rhetoric of liberal inclusiveness with a democratic approach to progress.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 New World Symphony: New Deal Civic Pluralism in the FWP Guidebooks Chapter 2 This Wise Geolatry: Modernization and Urban Planning in the FWP Guidebooks Chapter 3 Other Than What We Seem: The Folk Histories of Hurston and Wright Chapter 4 They Seek a City: The Future of African America in FWP Social Histories and Intertexts Chapter 5 Patterns of Modernity: The Urban Folk, State Power, and Citizenship in Petry and Ellison Conclusion Irony and Liberalism Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Dark Mirror is a fascinating look at the making of Black history as it was produced by writers on Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). It offers many unknown and complex ways that Black WPA writers engaged US literary modernism.” —Brian Dolinar, editor of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers


“Dark Mirror is an astute reading of a wide array of Black literary and nonfiction work . . . The genre-crossing in Dark Mirror is a welcome change from the perspective of a historian, and it is well worth it when the result is an altered reading of some of the most important intellectual productions of the twentieth century.” —Dylan O’Hara, Black Perspectives


“Dark Mirror successfully shows how African American writers destabilize [Federal Writers’ Project] subunits’ portrayals of inclusion and modernization. … And as we observe federal attempts to heal the nation at present, Dark Mirror advances the possibility that New Deal–era African American literature may foresee what current legislative efforts might lay bare for a nation looking toward the promise of a brighter tomorrow.” —Christin Marie Taylor, Journal of African American History


“In situating 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. Encouraging scholars to continue to further identify these enduring connections, Dark Mirror is itself a counter-modern intertext.” —Robin Lucy, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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