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Through his novels and journalism Thomas Pynchon has repeatedly demonstrated a deep interest in African and African American culture and history, and has spoken out against both past colonial atrocities and present-day racial discrimination. As an author who produced his first mature work in the 1960s, Pynchon's interest in racial oppression is rooted in his experience of that unruly decade. It must also be seen as part of a broader political agenda to critique all forms of oppression, an agenda which reflects Pynchon's sympathy with core New Left and counterculture values. Expressed perhaps most directly in "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" (1966), an article Pynchon wrote for the New York Times Magazine in which he explores the causes of the incendiary riots of the previous summer and defends the actions of the inhabitants of Watts, this affinity for revolutionary ideals remains highly visible throughout his literary career to date, as in the anarchist current running through Against the Day (2006), and in the characteristically 1960s-era social criticism of Inherent Vice (2009). This article explores some important aspects of Pynchon's countercultural sensibility as expressed through certain sections of perhaps his most "sixties" novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973): his respect for black protest organizations, his attitude towards the turn to violence taken by some such groups and by the counterculture more generally in the late 1960s, and his assessment of the forces to blame for the general demise of the counterculture movement by the early 1970s. This will be achieved via an analysis of Gravity's Rainbow's commentary, discernible amongst the myriad political perspectives and positions in the novel, upon the most notorious of the revolutionary black rights groups, the Black Panther Party (BPP).
Founded in Oakland, California in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers aimed to protect and gain autonomy for African American communities within the United States; their ten-point "Platform and Program" demanded, among other things, freedom, employment, decent housing and an end to police brutality.1Far from desiring equality within the capitalist system as earlier civil rights activists had, the Panthers perceived the capitalist ethos as a key cause of racism in America.2Describing themselves as Marxist-Leninists and strongly influenced...