Deborah Mutnick's "No Race, No Country"

Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, and shared the following:

I love Ford Madox Ford’s theory of opening a book to page ninety-nine to find the quality of the whole revealed. Of course, I had no idea what would be on page 99 of my recently published book until I looked. Ford is right, at least about No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, except that I have to start with the sentence on page 98, which continues onto 99: “As he recounts in Black Boy, he stayed up all night to read issues of the New Masses after his first visit to the John Reed Club in 1933 and woke up to write ‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’ expressing the core principle in interracial, working-class solidarity that would guide him throughout his life, even when he chafed against it.” I then cite this stanza from the poem:

I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers.
And some day—and it is only this which sustains me—
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!

Then comes a section break with the subtitle, “The Marxist Threads of Wright’s Sociology,” in which I contest the idea that Wright appropriated the sociological perspective of the Chicago school of urban sociology, according to literary scholar Carla Cappetti, thus attesting to the “1930s dying movement” of US Communism (40). To the contrary, not only did sociology during the Cold War fall into line with US policy to equate communism with totalitarianism and fascism, a perspective Wright explored and ultimately rejected in his 1953 novel The Outsider, but also the resurgence of Marxist sociology in the 1960s countered that narrative with a critique that he would have shared. For Wright, who remained a Marxist for the rest of his life, the Chicago school of sociology offered useful tools of inquiry, but as was always the case with him, he approached them critically, taking what he needed to pursue his own quest for a more just, egalitarian world.

Learn more about No Race, No Country at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue