Download or read book Nationalism Marxism and African American Literature between the Wars written by Anthony Dawahare and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces—nationalism and Marxism—clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse. Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination. During the period known as the “Red Decade” (1929–1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class. As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the “Negro Question,” the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.
Download or read book The New Negro written by Alain Locke and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African American Literature in Transition 1930 1940 Volume 10 written by Eve Dunbar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.
Download or read book Nationalism Marxism and African American Literature Between the Wars written by Anthony Dawahare and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination.".
Download or read book Black Fascisms written by Mark Christian Thompson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative new book, Mark Christian Thompson addresses the startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of African American political resistance. Thompson surveys the work and thought of several authors and asserts that their sometimes positive reaction to generic European fascism, and its transformation into black fascism, is crucial to any understanding of Depression-era African American literary culture. The book considers the high regard that "Back to Africa" advocate Marcus Garvey expressed for fascist dictators and explores the common ground he shared with George Schuyler and Claude McKay, writers with whom Garvey is generally thought to be at odds. Thompson reveals how fascism informed a rejection of Marxism by McKay--as well as by Arna Bontemps, whose Drums at Dusk depicts communism as antithetical to any black revolution. A similarly authoritarian stance is examined in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, where the striving for a fascist sovereignty presents itself as highly critical of Nazism while nonetheless sharing many of its tenets. The book concludes with an investigation of Richard Wright's The Outsider and its murderous protagonist, Cross Damon, who articulates fascist drives already present, if latent, in Native Son's Bigger Thomas. Unencumbered by the historical or biblical references of the earlier work, Damon personifies the essence of black fascism. Taking on a subject generally ignored or denied in African American cultural and literary studies, Black Fascisms seeks not only to question the prominence of the Left in the political thought of a generation of writers but to change how we view African American literature in general. Encompassing political theory, cultural studies, critical theory, and historicism, the book will challenge readers in numerous fields, providing a new model for thinking about the political and transnational in African American culture and shedding new light on our understanding of fascism between the wars.
Download or read book Left of Poetry written by Sarah Ehlers and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this incisive study, Sarah Ehlers returns to the Depression-era United States in order to unsettle longstanding ideas about poetry and emerging approaches to poetics. By bringing to light a range of archival materials and theories about poetry that emerged on the 1930s left, Ehlers reimagines the historical formation of modern poetics. Offering new and challenging readings of prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jacques Roumain, and uncovering the contributions of lesser-known writers such as Genevieve Taggard and Martha Millet, Ehlers illuminates an aesthetically and geographically diverse matrix of schools and movements. Resisting the dismissal of thirties left writing as mere propaganda, the book reveals how communist-affiliated poets experimented with poetic modes—such as lyric and documentary—and genres, including songs, ballads, and nursery rhymes, in ways that challenged existing frameworks for understanding the relationships among poetic form, political commitment, and historical transformation. As Ehlers shows, Depression left movements and their international connections are crucial for understanding both the history of modern poetry and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change.
Download or read book Mosaic Fictions written by Emily Robins Sharpe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mosaic Fictions is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Exploring published and archival writings, the book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in the language of a nascent North American multiculturalism. Placing Jewish Canadian writers within overlapping North American networks of Jewish, Black, immigrant, female, and queer writers challenges the national distinctions that dominate current critical approaches to Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature. Reframing the narrative of Spain’s noble but tragic struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own. Mosaic Fictions examines texts composed between the war’s outbreak and the present to illuminate the integral connections between Canada’s developing national identity and global leftist action.
Download or read book The Worlds of Langston Hughes written by Vera M. Kutzinski and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation throughout Europe, Asia, and especially the Americas. In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes's autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, she shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes's own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism.As Kutzinski maps the trajectory of Hughes's writings across Europe and the Americas, we see the remarkable extent to which the translations of his poetry were in conversation with the work of other modernist writers. Kutzinski spotlights cities whose role as meeting places for modernists from all over the world has yet to be fully explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and of course Harlem. The result is a fresh look at Hughes, not as a solitary author who wrote in a single language, but as an international figure at the heart of a global intellectual and artistic formation.
Download or read book On the Scale of the World written by Musab Younis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This expansive history of Black political thought shows us the origins—and the echoes—of anticolonial liberation on a global scale. On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation. Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, Younis excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation,' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.
Download or read book Black Internationalist Feminism written by Cheryl Higashida and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's "nationalist internationalism," which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Black internationalist feminism critiques racist, heteronormative, and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. Cheryl Higashida shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, Higashida illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women to light against their marginalization and silencing. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945–1995, Black Internationalist Feminism contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.
Download or read book Richard Wright written by Keneth Kinnamon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.
Download or read book Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict written by Berch Berberoglu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005-12-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the origins and development of nationalism and national movements in the twentieth century and provides an analysis of the nature and dynamics of nationalism and ethnic conflict in a variety of national settings. Examining the intricate relationship between class, state, and nation, the book attempts to develop a critical approach to the study of nationalism and ethnonational conflict within the broader context of class relations and class struggles in the age of globalization. The book consists of three parts, made up of seven chapters. Part I examines classical and contemporary conventional and Marxist theories of nationalism. Part II provides a series of empirical comparisons of nationalism and ethnic conflict on a world scale, focusing on the Third World, the advanced capitalist countries, and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A highlight of this section of the book is a detailed comparative case study of the Palestinian and Kurdish nationalism and national movements. Part III provides a political analysis of the relationship between class, state, and nation, and lays out the class nature of nationalism and the role of the state in ethnonational conflicts that are the political manifestations of deeper class struggles that have been the driving force of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the era of globalization. Berberoglu contends that future studies of nationalism and ethnonational conflict must pay closer attention to the dynamics of class forces that are behind the ideology of nationalism by examining national movements in class terms. For only through a careful class analysis of these forces and their ideological edicts will we be able to clearly understand the nature of nationalism and ethnonational conflicts around the world.
Download or read book American Studies Ecocriticism and Citizenship written by Joni Adamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common--namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground--and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups--ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional--that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision.
Download or read book Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature written by Anthony Dawahare and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to previous studies of Tillie Olsen’s writing, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.
Download or read book Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic written by White Eric White and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist account of technology's role in the aesthetics, spaces and politics of transatlantic avant-gardesExplores of a range of key avant-garde formations in the modernist transatlantic period, from the Italian futurists and English Vorticists to the Dada-surrealist and post-Harlem Renaissance African American experimentalistsExplores writers' and artists' inventions as well as their texts, and involves them directly in the messy transductions of technology in cultureDraws on previously unknown photos, manuscripts and other evidence that reveals the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown's 'reading machine' - a cross-disciplinary, meta-formational, and transnational project that proposed to transform the everyday act of readingReading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown's 'reading machine' and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett and Ralph Ellison, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change.
Download or read book The Nanyang Revolution written by Anna Belogurova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking analysis of how the Malayan Communist Party helped forge a Malayan national identity, while promoting Chinese nationalism.
Download or read book Montage of a Dream written by John Edgar Tidwell and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a forty six year career, Langston Hughes experimented with black folk expressive culture, creating an enduring body of extraordinary imaginative and critical writing. Riding the crest of African American creative energy from the Harlem Renaissance to the onset of Black Power, he commanded an artistic prowess that survives in the legacy he bequeathed to a younger generation of writers, including award winners Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Amiri Baraka. Montage of a Dream extends and deepens previous scholarship, multiplying the ways in which Hughes's diverse body of writing can be explored. The contributors, including such distinguished scholars as Steven Tracy, Trudier Harris, Juda Bennett, Lorenzo Thomas, and Christopher C. De Santis, carefully reexamine the significance of his work and life for their continuing relevance to American, African American, and diasporic literatures and cultures. Probing anew among Hughes's fiction, biographies, poetry, drama, essays, and other writings, the contributors assert fresh perspectives on the often overlooked "Luani of the Jungles" and Black Magic and offer insightful rereadings of such familiar pieces as "Cora Unashamed," "Slave on the Block," and Not without Laughter. In addition to analyzing specific works, the contributors astutely consider subjects either lightly explored by or unavailable to earlier scholars, including dance, queer studies, black masculinity, and children's literature. Some investigate Hughes's use of religious themes and his passion for the blues as the fabric of black art and life; others ponder more vexing questions such as Hughes's sexuality and his relationship with his mother, as revealed in the letters she sent him in the last decade of her life. Montage of a Dream richly captures the power of one man's art to imagine an America holding fast to its ideals while forging unity out of its cultural diversity. By showing that Langston Hughes continues to speak to the fundamentals of human nature, this comprehensive reconsideration invites a renewed appreciation of Hughes's work and encourages new readers to discover his enduring relevance as they seek to understand the world in which we all live.
