Humankinds: Humanism and race in American fiction, 1903--1963

"Humankinds: Humanism and Race in American Fiction, 1903-1963" argues that mid-twentieth-century novelists who wrote about race rejected the racial exclusions of humanism without rejecting its primary ideals and values. In recent decades, many antiracists have dismissed humanism as being based on a false universalism and therefore hostile to the needs of minorities. This dissertation shows that African Americans---the very subjects who have conventionally been elided from humanism's central concepts and concerns---were actually active participants in American humanist discourse. I show that authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ann Petry all believed that a universalist ethics---and the corresponding literary strategy of sympathetic identification---could help bring into being a more racially inclusive and equitable society. Indeed, it was this hope that gave African American fiction such prominence in the mid-twentieth-century fight for racial equality. The key challenge in this body of fiction, therefore, was to make what was, in practice, an exclusive discourse about universal human values attentive to and compatible with the struggles of racially subordinated people. More recently, works by Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have called for new models of humanism capable of insisting on common values while respecting sociopolitical differences. This dissertation charts an important prehistory to such a call by examining a series of antiracist engagements with the underlying universalism of such doctrines as primitivism and cultural pluralism in the Harlem Renaissance, Marxism in the Great Depression, and sociology in the postwar period. By exploring this forgotten history, this dissertation restores and reevaluates the varied attempts of mid-twentieth-century African American fiction to make American humanist discourse offer in practice what it offered in theory---inclusiveness and equality. In doing so, it not only reevaluates the utopian promise and practical limits of antiracist humanism, but it restores African American writing to the center of American humanist discourse.