Dartmouth Events

While the anti-imperialist and anti-exoticist aspects of the murals of David Alfaro Siqueiros have been well charted, there has not been a systematic scholarly account of how the painter imagined African-American, African-Caribbean, and African figures in his work and of how that imaginary fit into the painter’s communist politics and aesthetics. In this talk I show how Siqueiros’s intensifying anti-racism dovetailed with the maturing of his aesthetic concepts in the early 1930s as he turned to the concentrated plasticity and emblematic monumentality that would become characteristic of his subsequent work. That anti-racism – in its theoretical and aesthetic form – was both fostered and limited by the Leninist view of race and class struggle that had already characterized Siqueiros’s time as co-editor of the Mexican communist newspaper El machete in the 1920s. Siqueiros’s representation of black bodies reflected key, often contradictory elements of the communist politics of race in the period – a politics that sought to respect the particularity of cultural experience even as it envisioned universal working-class solidarity across national, international, and ethnic divides. These elements - including the fraught relationship of the national to the international, the imperative of self-determination, the theory of the “super-exploitation” of African Americans under US capitalism, the Trotsky-Stalin split, and the notion that lynching was both a product of racist mentalities and a tactic of class rule - were elaborated by African American communist theorists of the time such as Siqueiros’s acquaintances James Ford and Harry Haywood. These ideas had a direct bearing on the painter’s aesthetic approach which included a monumentalization of racial ambiguity as an emblem of Leninist internationalism, an iconography driven by a dialectic of black working-class victimization and activism, and an insistence on representing the need for black leadership in the communist movement.