Spectres Of 1919

Download Spectres Of 1919 full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Spectres Of 1919 ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Spectres of 1919

Author : Barbara Foley
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252091248
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Spectres of 1919 by : Barbara Foley

Download or read book Spectres of 1919 written by Barbara Foley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved. Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.

Modernisms

Author : Peter Nicholls
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137114924
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (371 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Modernisms by : Peter Nicholls

Download or read book Modernisms written by Peter Nicholls and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-07 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Nicholls provides original analytic accounts of the main Modernist movements. Close readings of key texts monitor the histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. This new edition includes discussion of the recent research trends, examination of developments in the US, and a new chapter on African-American Modernisms.

Radical Sensations

Author : Shelley Streeby
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822352915
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Radical Sensations by : Shelley Streeby

Download or read book Radical Sensations written by Shelley Streeby and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significant anarchist, black, and socialist world-movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth adapted discourses of sentiment and sensation and used the era's new forms of visual culture to move people to participate in projects of social, political, and economic transformation. Drawing attention to the vast archive of images and texts created by radicals prior to the 1930s, Shelley Streeby analyzes representations of violence and of abuses of state power in response to the Haymarket police riot, of the trial and execution of the Chicago anarchists, and of the mistreatment and imprisonment of Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and other members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano. She considers radicals' reactions to and depictions of U.S. imperialism, state violence against the Yaqui Indians in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the failure of the United States to enact laws against lynching, and the harsh repression of radicals that accelerated after the United States entered the First World War. By focusing on the adaptation and critique of sentiment, sensation, and visual culture by radical world-movements in the period between the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the deportation of Marcus Garvey in 1927, Streeby sheds new light on the ways that these movements reached across national boundaries, criticized state power, and envisioned alternative worlds.

Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross

Author : Professor Neville Kirk
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 178694801X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (869 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross by : Professor Neville Kirk

Download or read book Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross written by Professor Neville Kirk and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering study of the neglected transnational activities and influences of two important, connected socialists, British-born Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Australian-born Robert Samuel ‘Bob’ Ross (1873-1931)

Race Capital?

Author : Andrew M. Fearnley
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231544804
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Race Capital? by : Andrew M. Fearnley

Download or read book Race Capital? written by Andrew M. Fearnley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For close to a century, Harlem has been the iconic black neighborhood widely seen as the heart of African American life and culture, both celebrated as the vanguard of black self-determination and lamented as the face of segregation. But with Harlem’s demographic, physical, and commercial landscapes rapidly changing, the neighborhood’s status as a setting and symbol of black political and cultural life looks uncertain. As debate swirls around Harlem’s present and future, Race Capital? revisits a century of the area’s history, culture, and imagery, exploring how and why it achieved its distinctiveness and significance and offering new accounts of Harlem’s evolving symbolic power. In this book, leading scholars consider crucial aspects of Harlem’s social, political, and intellectual history; its artistic, cultural, and economic life; and its representation across an array of media and genres. Together they reveal a community at once local and transnational, coalescing and conflicted; one that articulated new visions of a cosmopolitan black modernity while clashing over distinctions of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. Topics explored include Harlem as a literary phenomenon; recent critiques of Harlem exceptionalism; gambling and black business history; the neighborhood’s transnational character; its importance in the black freedom struggle; black queer spaces; and public policy and neighborhood change in historical context. Spanning a century, from the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance to present-day controversies over gentrification, Race Capital? models new Harlem scholarship that interrogates exceptionalism while taking seriously the importance of place and locality, offering vistas onto new directions for African American and diasporic studies.

Jean Toomer

Author : Barbara Foley
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252096320
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Jean Toomer by : Barbara Foley

Download or read book Jean Toomer written by Barbara Foley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post–World War One radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. In Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution, Barbara Foley explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, she recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. Foley's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, she traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, she argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private.

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

Author : Claudrena N. Harold
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820335126
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by : Claudrena N. Harold

Download or read book New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South written by Claudrena N. Harold and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One: The Hour Has Come -- Two: Now Comes the Test -- Three: Making Way for Democracy -- Four: On the Firing Line -- Five: The South Will Be Invaded -- Six: New Negro Southerners -- Seven: Stormy Weather -- Epilogue: In the Whirlwind -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y

The New Negro in the Old South

Author : Gabriel A. Briggs
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813574811
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The New Negro in the Old South by : Gabriel A. Briggs

Download or read book The New Negro in the Old South written by Gabriel A. Briggs and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction. In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois. The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.

Alabama in Africa

Author : Andrew Zimmerman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140083497X
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Alabama in Africa by : Andrew Zimmerman

Download or read book Alabama in Africa written by Andrew Zimmerman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. Alabama in Africa explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United States. The cross-fertilization of histories and practices led to the emergence of a global South, reproduced social inequities on both sides of the Atlantic, and pushed the American South and the German Empire to the forefront of modern colonialism. Zimmerman shows how the people of Togo, rather than serving as a blank slate for American and German ideologies, helped shape their region's place in the global South. He looks at the forms of resistance pioneered by African American freedpeople, Polish migrant laborers, African cotton cultivators, and other groups exploited by, but never passive victims of, the growing colonial political economy. Zimmerman reconstructs the social science of the global South formulated by such thinkers as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, and reveals how their theories continue to define contemporary race, class, and culture. Tracking the intertwined histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas at the turn of the century, Alabama in Africa shows how the politics and economics of the segregated American South significantly reshaped other areas of the world.

Illiberal America: A History

Author : Steven Hahn
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393635937
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Illiberal America: A History by : Steven Hahn

Download or read book Illiberal America: A History written by Steven Hahn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals. A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology. Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.

Negro with a Hat

Author : Colin Grant
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199839921
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Negro with a Hat by : Colin Grant

Download or read book Negro with a Hat written by Colin Grant and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New in paperback, this groundbreaking biography captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Marcus Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century. "A searching, vivid, and (as the title suggests) complex account of Garvey's short but consequential life." --Steve Hahn, The New Republic "The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant.... Grant's book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history.... Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated." --New York Times Book Review "Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s 'Back to Africa' movement.... Grant's learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page. A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders." --Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "This splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Grant's strength lies in his ability to re-create political moods and offer compelling sketches of colorful individuals and their organizations.... An engaging and readable introduction to a complicated and contentious historical actor who, in his time, possessed a unique capacity to inspire devotion and hatred, adulation and fear." --Chicago Tribune "A monumental, nuanced and broadly sympathetic portrait." --Financial Times

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

Author : Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252092084
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 by : Bryan D. Palmer

Download or read book James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 written by Bryan D. Palmer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.

Indigenous Vanguards

Author : Ben Conisbee Baer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548966
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Indigenous Vanguards by : Ben Conisbee Baer

Download or read book Indigenous Vanguards written by Ben Conisbee Baer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.

Rethinking Revolution

Author : Leo Panitch
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583676333
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (836 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Rethinking Revolution by : Leo Panitch

Download or read book Rethinking Revolution written by Leo Panitch and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred years ago, “October 1917” galvanized leftists and oppressed peoples around the globe, and became the lodestar for 20th century politics. Today, the left needs to reckon with this legacy—and transcend it. Social change, as it was understood in the 20th century, appears now to be as impossible as revolution, leaving the left to rethink the relationship between capitalist crises, as well as the conceptual tension between revolution and reform. Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. Change needs to be understood in relation to the distinct trajectories of radical politics in different regions. But the main purpose of this Socialist Register edition—one century after “Red October”—is to look forward, to what might happen next. Acclaimed authors interrogate and explore compelling issues, including: • Greg Albo: New socialist strategies—or detours? • Jodi Dean: Are the multitudes communing? Revolutionary agency and political forms today. • Adolph Reed: Are racial minorities revolutionary agents? • Zillah Eisenstein: Revolutionary feminisms today. • Nina Power: Accelerated technology, decelerated revolution. • David Schwartzman: Beyond global warming: Is solar communism possible? • Andrea Malm: Revolution and counter-revolution in an era of climate change.

Radical Legacies

Author : Arthur Redding
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498512674
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Radical Legacies by : Arthur Redding

Download or read book Radical Legacies written by Arthur Redding and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What use is thinking? This study addresses the ways in which modern American thinkers have intervened in the public sphere and attempted to mediate relations between social and political institutions and cultural and intellectual production. Chapters on both well-known (Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, C. Wright Mills, Angela Davis) and neglected (Randolph Bourne, Mary McCarthy, Paul Goodman) public intellectuals considers how these figures have address a range of problems, including the dangers and difficulty of critical dissent thought during wartime, the contemporary crisis of the humanities under neoliberalism, the legacy of American anti-intellectualism, academic professionalism, and the perils of consumer culture and popular tastes. This book reviews in as critically sympathetic a manner as possible a select few of the minor and major currents of twentieth-century American radical thinking in order to see where they might take us, and how they inflect our current social and intellectual predicaments. Arguing that any "use-value" theory of intellectual production is limiting, Radical Legacies endeavors to maintain and expand a space and reassert an argument for the importance of sustained critical reflection on our collective dilemmas today. It assesses a practice of thought that is engaged, committed, involved, and timely, without being necessarily “practical” or even useful.

The New Negro

Author : Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400827876
Total Pages : 606 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The New Negro by : Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Download or read book The New Negro written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture. These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.

Representing the Race

Author : Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814743404
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Representing the Race by : Gene Andrew Jarrett

Download or read book Representing the Race written by Gene Andrew Jarrett and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama’s creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what’s at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.