African American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940

Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-108-47255-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 350 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 751 g

Reihe: African American Literature in Transition

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dunbar, Eve

Hardison, Ayesha K.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction Eve Dunbar and Ayesha K. Hardison; Part I. Productive Precarity and Literary Realism: 1. Black excesses and deprivations in literature and photography of the 1930s Sharon Lynette Jones; 2. Arna Bontemps and black literary archives Emily Lutenski; 3. Black women's 1930s protest fiction Jennifer D. Williams; Part II. New Deal, New Methodologies: 4. Folklore, folk life and ethnography in African American Writing of the 1930s Robin Lucy; 5. New deal discourses J. J. Butts; 6. Black theatre archives and the making of a black dramatic tradition Kate Dossett; Part III. Cultivating (New) Black Readers: 7. Racial representation and the performance of 1930s African American literary history John Edgar Tidwell; 8. 1930s black print cultures Shawn Anthony Christian; Part IV. International, Black and Radical Visions: 9. Democracy unfinished: African Americans writing 'Africa' Nicole A. Waligora-Davis; 10. Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell; 11. Communism and African American literature in the great depression Nathaniel Mills.

Über Autor(innen)

Hardison, Ayesha K.
Ayesha K. Hardison is an associate Professor at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (2014) which won the Nancy Dasher Award and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Dunbar, Eve
Eve Dunbar is Professor of English at Vassar College (NY). She is the author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (2012).