Left of the Color Line

Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States

Bill V. Mullen, James Smethurst, Bill V. Mullen, James Smethurst

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807854778, 9780807827994
• eBook ISBN: 9780807882399
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American, Chicano/Chicana, and Asian American literature and culture. By placing the Left at the center of their examination, the authors reposition the interpretive framework of American cultural studies.

Tracing the development of the Left over the course of the last century, the essays connect the Old Left of the pre–World War II era to the New Left and Third World nationalist Left of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the multicultural Left that has emerged since the 1970s. Individual essays explore the Left in relation to the work of such key figures as Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot, Chester Himes, Harry Belafonte, Américo Paredes, and Alice Childress. The collection also reconsiders the role of the Left in such critical cultural and historical moments as the Harlem Renaissance, the Cold War, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The contributors are Anthony Dawahare, Barbara Foley, Marcial González, Fred Ho, William J. Maxwell, Bill V. Mullen, Cary Nelson, B. V. Olguín, Rachel Rubin, Eric Schocket, James Smethurst, Michelle Stephens, Alan Wald, and Mary Helen Washington.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Modernism and the Aesthetics of Management, or T. S. Eliot's Labor Literature
• F. B. Eyes: The Bureau Reads Claude McKay
• The Specter of Radicalism in Alain Locke's The New Negro
• W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International
• Barrios of the World Unite!: Regionalism, Transnationalism, and Internationalism in Tejano War Poetry from the Mexican Revolution to World War II
• Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse
• From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man
• Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front
• Voice of the Cracker: Don West Reinvents the Appalachian
• The First Negro Matinee Idol: Harry Belafonte and American Culture in the 1950s
• Bamboo That Snaps Back!: Resistance and Revolution in Asian Pacific American Working-Class and Left-Wing Expressive Culture
• Poetry and Sympathy:NewYork, the Left, and the Rise of Black Arts
• A Marxist Critique of Borderlands Postmodernism: Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Chicano Cultural Criticism
• The Letters the Presidents Did Not Release: Radical Scholarship and the Legacy of the American Volunteers in Spain
• Contributors
• Index