African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940: Volume 10

This book illustrates African American writers' cultural production and political engagement despite the economic precarity of the 1930s.

Eve Dunbar (Edited by), Ayesha K. Hardison (Edited by)

9781108472555, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 April 2022

350 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.7 cm, 0.696 kg

The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.

Introduction Eve Dunbar and Ayesha K. Hardison
Part I. Productive Precarity and Literary Realism: 1. Black excesses and deprivations in literature and photography of the 1930s Sharon Lynette Jones
2. Arna Bontemps and black literary archives Emily Lutenski
3. Black women's 1930s protest fiction Jennifer D. Williams
Part II. New Deal, New Methodologies: 4. Folklore, folk life and ethnography in African American Writing of the 1930s Robin Lucy
5. New deal discourses J. J. Butts
6. Black theatre archives and the making of a black dramatic tradition Kate Dossett
Part III. Cultivating (New) Black Readers: 7. Racial representation and the performance of 1930s African American literary history John Edgar Tidwell
8. 1930s black print cultures Shawn Anthony Christian
Part IV. International, Black and Radical Visions: 9. Democracy unfinished: African Americans writing 'Africa' Nicole A. Waligora-Davis
10. Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell
11. Communism and African American literature in the great depression Nathaniel Mills.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Social classes [JFSC], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]