Washington The Other Blacklist

The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-52647-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Mary Helen Washington recovers the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington's work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding of mid-twentieth-century African American literature and art and expands our understanding of the creative ferment energizing all of America during this period.

Mary Helen Washington reads four representative writers--Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks--and surveys the work of the visual artist Charles White. She traces resonances of leftist ideas and activism in their artistic achievements and follows their balanced critique of the mainstream liberal and conservative political and literary spheres. Her study recounts the targeting of African American as well as white writers during the McCarthy era, reconstructs the events of the 1959 Black Writers' Conference in New York, and argues for the ongoing influence of the Black Popular Front decades after it folded. Defining the contours of a distinctly black modernism and its far-ranging radicalization of American politics and culture, Washington fundamentally reorients scholarship on African American and Cold War literature and life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Washington, Mary Helen

Washington, Mary

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunstpsychologie und -soziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Rezeption, literarische Einflüsse und Beziehungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Lloyd Brown: Black Fire in the Cold War
2. Charles White: "Robeson with a Brush and Pencil"
3. Alice Childress: Black, Red, and Feminist
4. When Gwendolyn Brooks Wore Red
5. Frank London Brown: The End of the Black Cultural Front and the Turn Toward Civil Rights
6. 1959: Spycraft and the Black Literary Left
Epilogue: The Example of Julian Mayfield
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Leseproben

Read an excerpt from the introduction:

Über Autor(innen)

Mary Helen Washington is a professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has been a Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the editor of Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by Black Women Writers; Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers; Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women; and Memory of Kin: Stories of Family by Black Writers.