Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers' Project
Autor J. J. Buttsen Limba Engleză Paperback – 7 iul 2024
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258033
ISBN-10: 0814258034
Pagini: 188
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.3 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258034
Pagini: 188
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.3 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Dark Mirror successfully shows how African American writers destabilize [Federal Writers’ Project] subunits’ portrayals of inclusion and modernization. … And as we observe federal attempts to heal the nation at present, Dark Mirror advances the possibility that New Deal–era African American literature may foresee what current legislative efforts might lay bare for a nation looking toward the promise of a brighter tomorrow.” —Christin Marie Taylor, Journal of African American History
“In situating intertexts primarily in their relationship to the New Deal, and the beginnings of the liberal welfare state, Dark Mirror is a significant contribution to an expanded analysis of the cultural and political complexities and tensions of these works and this era. Encouraging scholars to continue to further identify these enduring connections, Dark Mirror is itself a counter-modern intertext.” —Robin Lucy, MELUS
“Dark Mirror is an astute reading of a wide array of Black literary and nonfiction work . . . The genre-crossing in Dark Mirror is a welcome change from the perspective of a historian, and it is well worth it when the result is an altered reading of some of the most important intellectual productions of the twentieth century.” —Dylan O’Hara, Black Perspectives
“Dark Mirror is a fascinating look at the making of Black history as it was produced by writers on Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). It offers many unknown and complex ways that Black WPA writers engaged US literary modernism.” —Brian Dolinar, editor of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers
“In situating intertexts primarily in their relationship to the New Deal, and the beginnings of the liberal welfare state, Dark Mirror is a significant contribution to an expanded analysis of the cultural and political complexities and tensions of these works and this era. Encouraging scholars to continue to further identify these enduring connections, Dark Mirror is itself a counter-modern intertext.” —Robin Lucy, MELUS
“Dark Mirror is an astute reading of a wide array of Black literary and nonfiction work . . . The genre-crossing in Dark Mirror is a welcome change from the perspective of a historian, and it is well worth it when the result is an altered reading of some of the most important intellectual productions of the twentieth century.” —Dylan O’Hara, Black Perspectives
“Dark Mirror is a fascinating look at the making of Black history as it was produced by writers on Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). It offers many unknown and complex ways that Black WPA writers engaged US literary modernism.” —Brian Dolinar, editor of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers
Notă biografică
J. J. Butts is Associate Professor of English at Simpson College.
Extras
Descriptive in form but prescriptive in outlook, the guidebooks promote a specific vision of the New Deal, one that does not reflect the complex and often ad hoc nature of New Deal programs but rather gives them a sense of unity as a national community project influenced by Progressive ideals. The guidebooks envision a new liberal nation based in shared contribution and forged by federal interventions. The political firestorms the FWP encountered spoke as much to its progressive reimagination of the nation’s future along pluralist lines, as to its rumored status as a platform for communist subversion. Widely accessible and garnering considerable critical attention in both the literary and regular press, the FWP guides were crucial in the New Deal’s self-promotion and national vision, and they fueled important debates about the reach and role of the state.
The conversation between this vision and the FWP’s literary and documentary intertexts provides a preview of the forces that would shape both national and global spatial policy in the postwar era. These developments helped birth the terms on which African Americans would reformulate their claims on justice in the 20th century. African Americans were central in developing the conceptual tools by which urban populations were being understood. New Deal cultural programs offered a crucial opportunity to address questions of representation and inclusion that had long been central to both African American uplift work and to national self-imagining. The welfare state offered a new set of targets for organizing, such as housing, transportation, labor, education, social insurance, access to consumer goods, and civil rights. By the 1940s, African Americans and allies adapted a new set of state-oriented strategies effective in challenging Jim Crow: the ballot, the courts, laws, executive orders, and federal commissions. At the same time, racial nationalist strategies began to emerge, which more fundamentally challenged liberalism by calling into question its core presumptions.
When Richard Wright proclaims in 12 Million Black Voices, “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us,” he imagines writers at the forefront of a specific vision of countermodernity. Yet his image of a “dark mirror,” signaling the tension between the community he hoped for and the vision of liberal and communist modernizers, proved as prophetic as the warning in his essay on Harlem for New York Panorama. An account of Black writers’ involvement locates cultural politics at the heart of socioeconomic transformation during the emergence of the modern welfare state, while also showing how the resources provided by the welfare state would fuel cultural politics in the difficult years ahead. African American writers exposed a more fundamental irony than unintended consequences undermining New Deal liberalism: the failure to match its rhetoric of liberal inclusiveness with a democratic approach to progress.
The conversation between this vision and the FWP’s literary and documentary intertexts provides a preview of the forces that would shape both national and global spatial policy in the postwar era. These developments helped birth the terms on which African Americans would reformulate their claims on justice in the 20th century. African Americans were central in developing the conceptual tools by which urban populations were being understood. New Deal cultural programs offered a crucial opportunity to address questions of representation and inclusion that had long been central to both African American uplift work and to national self-imagining. The welfare state offered a new set of targets for organizing, such as housing, transportation, labor, education, social insurance, access to consumer goods, and civil rights. By the 1940s, African Americans and allies adapted a new set of state-oriented strategies effective in challenging Jim Crow: the ballot, the courts, laws, executive orders, and federal commissions. At the same time, racial nationalist strategies began to emerge, which more fundamentally challenged liberalism by calling into question its core presumptions.
When Richard Wright proclaims in 12 Million Black Voices, “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us,” he imagines writers at the forefront of a specific vision of countermodernity. Yet his image of a “dark mirror,” signaling the tension between the community he hoped for and the vision of liberal and communist modernizers, proved as prophetic as the warning in his essay on Harlem for New York Panorama. An account of Black writers’ involvement locates cultural politics at the heart of socioeconomic transformation during the emergence of the modern welfare state, while also showing how the resources provided by the welfare state would fuel cultural politics in the difficult years ahead. African American writers exposed a more fundamental irony than unintended consequences undermining New Deal liberalism: the failure to match its rhetoric of liberal inclusiveness with a democratic approach to progress.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 New World Symphony: New Deal Civic Pluralism in the FWP Guidebooks
Chapter 2 This Wise Geolatry: Modernization and Urban Planning in the FWP Guidebooks
Chapter 3 Other Than What We Seem: The Folk Histories of Hurston and Wright
Chapter 4 They Seek a City: The Future of African America in FWP Social Histories and Intertexts
Chapter 5 Patterns of Modernity: The Urban Folk, State Power, and Citizenship in Petry and Ellison
Conclusion Irony and Liberalism
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Chapter 1 New World Symphony: New Deal Civic Pluralism in the FWP Guidebooks
Chapter 2 This Wise Geolatry: Modernization and Urban Planning in the FWP Guidebooks
Chapter 3 Other Than What We Seem: The Folk Histories of Hurston and Wright
Chapter 4 They Seek a City: The Future of African America in FWP Social Histories and Intertexts
Chapter 5 Patterns of Modernity: The Urban Folk, State Power, and Citizenship in Petry and Ellison
Conclusion Irony and Liberalism
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Demonstrates how Black writers negotiated and revised New Deal ideas through their contributions to the Federal Writers’ Project, ultimately introducing a more inclusive, pluralist understanding of American culture and history.