An important though under-examined novel of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928) is conversant with its contemporary intellectual and social developments. These include the assault on the racist biology-culture correspondence that was commonplace in anthropology and other sciences, and the political and symbolic gestures toward Africa, like those of the Back to Africa movement. But the novel’s poignancy stems from the fact that it portends critical developments in race theory by underscoring the manifold—even fragmented—nature of black social and historical experience. Despite its rejection of biological determinism and its ambivalence about Africa as a referent and a source of identity, Fisher’s novel does not relinquish its commitment to black struggle and black political consciousness. "Rudolph Fisher’s Walls of Jericho (1928) inhabits an auspicious discursive and historical intersection—the revisions to “scientific” ideas of race in the early twentieth century and the then-current turn to Africa in some strands of black political thought in the USA. While the novel constitutes an answer to W. E. B Du Bois’ call to the “talented tenth” to form an “advance guard of the race”, it ultimately refuses biological race as the location of blackness, which also means that it refuses Africa as point of return for America’s black population."
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