The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (Thinking Literature)

McCarthy, Jesse

ISBN 10: 0226832171 / ISBN 13: 9780226832173

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2024

About this Item

Gently used with minimal wear on the corners and cover. A few pages may contain light highlighting or writing, but the text remains fully legible. Dust jacket may be missing, and supplemental materials like CDs or codes may not be included. May be ex-library with library markings. Ships promptly!

Seller Inventory # DBV.0226832171.G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (Thinking Literature)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226832171
• ISBN 13: 9780226832173
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

Addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls “the Blue Period.”

In the years after World War II, to be a black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was a global one—an ideological battle that dominated almost every aspect of the cultural agenda. On the one hand was the Soviet Union, espousing revolutionary communism that promised egalitarianism while being hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand was the United States, a country steeped in racial prejudice and the policies of Jim Crow.

Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right, Jesse McCarthy argues, and they channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet communism. From the end of World War II to the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paule Marshall defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy terms the Blue Period.

In McCarthy’s hands, this notion of the Blue Period provides a fresh critical framework that challenges long-held disciplinary and archival assumptions. Black writers in the early Cold War went underground, McCarthy argues, not to depoliticize or liberalize their work, but to make it more radical—keeping alive affective commitments for a future time.

About the Author

Jesse McCarthy is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and director of undergraduate studies, at Harvard University. He is the editor of the Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and the first volume of Minor Notes, an anthology of African American poetry. He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award for Non-Fiction, and the novel The Fugitivities.