In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence
Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent
the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad
today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or
say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to
believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr
breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state
interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship
between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can
art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms
impossible?
Du Bois’s
Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces
implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three
eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by
contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early
twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s;
and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language
works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how
these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut
down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department
propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller
foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works
that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical
anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts.
Spahr does not deny
the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a
sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.
