Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box

A call to recognize Marxism's underestimated influence on the course of African American letters

During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces --nationalism and Marxism--clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day.

Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse.

Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depr

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Dawahare, Anthony
Published: 11/15/2002
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110515
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.40d