The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s by Washington, Mary

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780231152716)

Vendor: Mary Washington
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$27.00
$27.00
$27.00
Subtotal: $27.00
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s by Washington, Mary

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

$27.00
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s by Washington, Mary

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

$27.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x

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.

Author: Mary Washington
ISBN-10: 023115271X
ISBN-13: 9780231152716
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/22/2015
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.60w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2015 pg. 103
By Mary Washington
By Mary Washington
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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.

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