Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Jesse McCarthy. The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024. 306 pp.  

Review by Christopher Freeburg

31 October 2024

In Jesse McCarthy’s writing, Black culture speaks through music. Nas’s verses and En Vogue’s vocal riffs send him into the upper room of his imagination, shaping his approach to all varieties of Black expression. This was certainly the case in his book of published essays, Who Will Pay Reparations for My Soul? (2021), and his first book of literary criticism, The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, is no different. He encourages his readers to reimagine the geographical, political, and temporal scope of midcentury Black writers through the lens of a famous traditional color in Black music, “the blue.” Critics, in his estimation, have lost sight of the “strategic retreat” that he identifies across a variety of Black authors writing between 1945–1965 (p. 9). In the quiet alienation of authorship in a kitchenette on Chicago’s southside or the streets of Paris, France, McCarthy hears “the blue.” He untethers “Blue Period” figures like James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and Richard Wright from the routine questions about their affiliations with communism or liberalism, claiming that this focus on whether or not these Black Writers’ works were either politically engaging or reactionary prevents critics from reimagining the “radical political intent” demonstrated by Black writers of this era (p. 12).

McCarthy’s idea of what constitutes a period is just as important as the revolutionary thinking that strategic retreat makes possible. In What Was African American Literature? (2012), Kenneth Warren also emphasizes the importance of historical periodization for defining the parameters of African-American literature. While Warren’s boundaries for African-American literature correspond to the beginning and end of legal segregation in the US, and other critics tie their topics to the rise and fall of political movements, McCarthy’s periodizing takes on a different shape. He forms his period by submitting the end of World War II (1945) and the assassination of Malcolm X (1965) as bookends for an experimental phase of Black writing, mining these two decades for the refinement of Black writerly independence that is irreverent to preexisting literary forms.

McCarthy’s book is less interested in litmus tests for the Communist Left or exploring modes of crisis during expatriation or exile. He is most interested in showing writers’ revelations of “affective dissonance” and alienation (p. 13). Brooks, Baldwin, and Wright’s revolutionary independence, for instance, stems from their relentless sparring with the aesthetic and political conventions of a modern antiblack world.

This lonely road of experimental inquiry has a soundtrack: Miles Davis’s “The Blue Room” (1952). Inspired by Nathaniel Mackey’s reading of Davis, McCarthy discovers blue space in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) that helps him uncover a vibrant authority in John Grimes’s religious conversion at the novel’s end. According to McCarthy, Baldwin’s protagonist arrives at self-definition through the power of solitude. The music of Pentecostal storefront churches is globally famous, but these raucous harmonies drift into the background and make way for the moody blue notes McCarthy hears. In discussing Wright’s The Outsider (1953), McCarthy steers us away from reading Wright’s novel in terms of protest fiction or humanism. He encourages us to probe the depths of interiority wherein lie productive new possibilities for reimagining how to express Black alienated consciousness.

Given this idea, one would expect to see Ralph Ellison playing a central role. The Blue Period does not have a chapter on Ellison. McCarthy assures his readers that this omission will allow critics to see beyond Invisible Man (1952) and to discover other worthy writers we have not taken seriously enough. Ellison, however, still hovers in and around McCarthy’s beautiful writing throughout. I do think that if McCarthy took a sustained look at him it would help readers refresh his relationship to the writers in focus as well as the overall period, and that this could have been done without overweighting his work. Nevertheless, I see that Ellison’s centrality has the potential to inhale the oxygen in the book space and prevent other writers like Édouard Glissant, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paule Marshall, and Vincent O. Harding from getting necessary attention.

In this vein, The Blue Period takes full advantage of Ellison’s absence by reintroducing us to Glissant’s very much neglected 1950s writing. McCarthy also features Brooks and Marshall, who remain an important focus in Black feminist studies, but still need more serious attention by the broader Americanist field. In addition to bringing our attention to Glissant’s nearly invisible origins, as well as the existential angst of Marshall and Brooks, McCarthy unearths Kansas City’s own Vincent O. Carter. Carter wrote his Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind in 1957 but published it in 1973. The chapter on Carter’s explorations of genre, style, and medium in his texts of high comedy exemplifies McCarthy’s crafty knack for innovative renderings of largely unknown writers.

In The Blue Period, McCarthy collects all these writers as part of his jazz room that pulsates with underground rhythms. The Blue Period overall is outstanding, masterfully crafted, brilliantly written, and impeccably researched. The most significant drawback lies in his insistence that the strategic alienation he showcases throughout should be read by critics as a political act. On the one hand, he is right to see value in the aesthetic experimentation that he feels expands the parameters of Black writers’ political impacts. On the other hand, I think the distinction he does not make loudly enough is that these artists can be profoundly radical and valuable without the assurances of insurgent political grounds. I’ve argued in Black Aesthetics in the Interior Life (2017) that the uncharted, chaotic, and mysterious mind of the artist and their protagonists defines what it means to be a person, and the different personal forms that Black writers create often exceed the expedient political scripts imposed by critics. The marvel, then, of intensely realizing Black interiority, with all its irreverent and enigmatic slipperiness, is transcending the imperative to render it political.