劳依德·布朗:划燃火柴伸向油桶(英文)

Lloyd Brown: Lighting a Match to Kerosene

劳依德·布朗在1951年发表了小说《铁城》,其亲共产主义和亲黑人的政治观注定了它在20世纪50年代冷战时期被谴责和被压制的命运。如果说在麦卡锡主义时期对这部政治上极左的小说的拒绝还可以理解,那么它仍被排除在当前的非洲裔美国文学及其批评史之外这一事实却令人费解——除非它仍处于一种没有被意识到的反共气氛之中。本文认为,正是由于布朗在50年代与共产主义的密切联系,他不仅可以自由地拒绝加在黑人作家身上的知识束缚和美学束缚,特别是要求他们放弃黑人人物和黑人主题以赢得白人主流文学认同的压力;而且能够接触并利用那些与由政治色彩较淡的作家们所发起的文学形式实验相关的左翼文学和文化产品。正是由于这样的影响,《铁城》富有想象地将黑人民间传统、现代主义实验以及激进观点融合起来。本文同时认为,尽管布朗的作品,包括"黑人作家该走哪条路?"(1951)和他在左翼期刊上发表的批评文章,旨在挑战理查德·赖特、拉尔夫·艾利森、切斯特·海姆斯、J·桑德斯·雷丁等同时代作家的保守立场,而在当今布朗仍被排除在经典之外也暴露了当代非洲裔美国文学批评实践中的保守立场。

The pro-Communist, pro-black politics of Lloyd Brown＇s 1951 novel Iron City guaranteed that the novel would be castigated and dismissed during the cold war 1950s. While the rejection of a radical left novel during the MCCarthy period is understandable, it is harder to explain Brown＇s exclusion from contemporary African American literary and critical history-except on the grounds of a persistent and unexamined anticommunism. I argue that Brown＇ s affiliation with the Communist Party in the 1950s allowed Brown the freedom to reject the intellectual and aesthetic constraints on black writers, especially the pressure to abandon black characters and black themes in order to achieve acceptance by the white literary mainstream. That affiliation also gave Brown access to a rich well of left-wing literary and cultural productions that facilitated the kind of formal experimentation that is most often attributed to less politically engaged writers. The result is a remarkable novel, which imaginatively integrates black folk traditions, modernist experimentation, and a radical viewpoint. While all of Brown＇ s writings, including a 1951 essay “Which Way for the Negro Writer？” and his critical reviews in left-wing publications, were attempts to challenge the conservative drift of his contemporaries Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and J. Saunders Redding, I argue that Brown＇ s exclusion from literary canons also exposes the conservatism of contemporary African American critical practices.