Blue Period - Black Writing in the Early Cold War

"To be a Black writer in the early years of the Cold War was to face a stark predicament. On the one hand, revolutionary Communism promised egalitarianism and lit the sparks of anticolonial struggle, but was hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand, the great force opposing the Soviets at midcentury was itself the very fountainhead of racial prejudice, represented in the United States by Jim Crow. Jesse McCarthy argues that Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right and channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet Communism. Ranging from the end of World War II to the rise of Black Power in the 1960s, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin to Gwendolyn Brooks and Paule Marshall and others, Jesse McCarthy shows how Black writers defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy calls "the Blue Period."--

About the author

Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of the Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and the first volume of Minor Notes, an anthology of African American poetry. He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award for Non-Fiction, and the novel The Fugitivities.

Product details

• Authors: Jesse McCarthy
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.04.2024
• EAN: 9780226832173
• ISBN: 978-0-226-83217-3
• No. of pages: 304
• Series: Thinking Literature
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Education, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, United States of America, USA, Regional / International studies, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Literature: history and criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American & Black