Beyond The Color Line And The Iron Curtain

DIVRe-examines the relations between African Americans and the Soviet Union from a more transnational perspective and shows how these relations were crucial in the formation of Black modernism./div

DIVRe-examines the relations between African Americans and the Soviet Union from a more transnational perspective and shows how these relations were crucial in the formation of Black modernism./div

One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.

Examines various forms of African-American literature, with the aim of delineating the political legacy of black Americans. Simultaneous. Hardcover available.

New criticism and the object of American democracy -- Melvin B. Tolson's belated bomb -- Tactical criticism -- Culture as a powerful weapon.

Vaughn Rasberry turns to black culture and politics for an alternative history of the totalitarian century. He shows how black writers reimagined the standard anti-fascist, anti-communist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the U.S. as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also an agent of Asian and African independence.

"Explores Hughes's intellectual method and its relation to social activism. Examines his involvement with socialist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and contends that the goal of overthrowing white oppression produced a "socialist joy" expressed repeatedly in his later work, in spite of the anticommunist crusades of the cold war"--Provided by publisher.

Here, a variety of distinguished scholars revisit and rethink the legacy of the New York intellectuals, showing how this small, predominantly Jewish group moved from communist and socialist roots to become a primary voice of liberal humanism and, in the case of a few, to launch a new conservative movement.