'Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream': Communism in the African American Imaginary

The book is an examination of the impact of Communism on a generation of African American writers and a consideration of how African American identity in three novels is constructed in relation to the political ideology of the Communist Party. Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Chester Himes's Lonely Crusade (1947), and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), generate very different black male subjectivities, all of which are predicated on encounters with the Communist Party. A detailed focus on the political milieu in which these texts operate challenges many of the presumptions about the ‘inability' of Communism to comprehend racial oppression which dominate literary critical approaches to these novels