ABSTRACT
In a critical (though not unfavorable) review published in the Black Scholar in 1969, Robert Chrisman describes Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) as “five hundred pages on a razor’s edge of ambivalent fury.”1 This eloquent characterization captures something essential about Cruse’s great book-namely, that it is difficult to read it without being alienated by Cruse’s relentless pursuit of the correct cultural and political line, in which virtually no black public figure he discusses emerges unscathed. More than this, a careful reading of Cruse’s work leaves one reeling from its apparent contradictions: acute Marxist sensibilities coupled with relentless anticommunist invective, abiding admiration for the ethnocultural politics of Jewish American intellectuals combined with borderline anti-Semitism, and a ruthless puncturing of the American pretensions to universality along with the repeated insistence on the analytical protocols of American exceptionalism. If this weren’t enough, Cruse’s grandiose portrayal of himself as the one black intellectual finally bringing theoretical clarity to the cultural politics of race, ethnicity, and nationality in America makes it almost impossible to read The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual without being disappointed by his ultimate and often bitter default on his own ambitious promise. This might explain the fact that while Cruse might be one of the most historically significant precursors to the contemporary intersections of black studies, cultural studies, and multicultural and colonial discourse analysis, his work is rarely incorporated within the multiple genealogies and mappings of U.S. multiculturalism now
fashioned on a regular basis.2 Contemporary treatments of Cruse tend to define his importance in narrowly political, historical and biographical terms. This generally occurs in the specific context of African American intellectual history, and in essays addressing the shortcomings (or the “crisis”) of modern, black intellectual life.3 These works tend to use Cruse as a framing device and point of departure, frequently rehearsing his tired-but powerful-counterposition of a black nationalist politics of culture against a Left/liberal politics of “racial integration.” Others reference Cruse in the context of their own efforts to correct his skewed-but powerful-portraits of particular black intellectuals.4 At this point, perhaps the most that can be said of Cruse’s intellectual legacy is that even thirty years later his work brings forth sectarian impulses, eliciting the desire to settle accounts and scores, mostly with Cruse himself.
