Intentional communities: The public life of race in American literature, 1925--1961.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Carmody, Todd, 1979-

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature.

Music.

Black people--Research.

Black people.

Research.

African Americans--Research.

African Americans.

United States--Research.

United States.

0296.

0323.

0325.

0413.

0591.

Local Subjects:

0296.

0323.

0325.

0413.

0591.

Physical Description:

193 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 71-11A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This project considers white representations of blackness in twentieth-century literary and cultural productions that engage explicitly with nationalist discourses of liberal inclusion. Parting ways with critics attentive to the privatizing logics of desire and disavowal, I recover a cultural history in which aesthetic strategies of racial appropriation are central to popular articulations of liberal individualism, heteropatriarchy, and American exceptionalism. Scholarly emphasis on the transgressive erotics of the cross-racial encounter, I argue, has obscured the new forms of exclusion that emerged when white writers began to locate blackness within, rather than in opposition, to the liberal state. The white-authored literary and cultural texts I examine vary in genre and theme but are middlebrow in orientation and explicitly, though ultimately ambivalently, invested in black culture. Tracing the ideological continuities between the Negro Vogue of the 1920s and the deployment of black expressive forms in the cultural Cold War, each of my chapters focuses in particular on the intersections of official discourses of U.S. nationalism and the construction of unofficial racial imaginaries. My first chapter considers the Slave Narrative Collection compiled by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s alongside the dialect poetry of Sterling Brown. Brown's editorial work at the FWP, I argue, rethinks racial ventriloquism as "bureaucratic blackface" or "administrative appropriation." In my second chapter 1 turn to the convergence of racial liberalism and gender conservatism during the New Deal. Situating Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life (1933) within the feminized culture of Depression-era dieting, I argue that the emerging ethnicity paradigm of race foundered on the question of racialized embodiment. Chapter Three situates John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961) in relation to Griffin's collaboration with the FBI and his awareness of international criticism of U.S. racism. I argue that Black Like Me attends to the phenomenology of emotion in order to imagine American national culture as an affective public sphere. My final chapter, on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy (1925) and George Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), surveys analogies linking blackness to disability from the Harlem Renaissance to the cultural Cold War. The discursive overlap of liberal individualism and primitivism in Porgy, I argue, provides the ideological basis for the State Department-sponsored tours of Porgy and Bess during the 1950s.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 71-11, Section: A, page: 4022.

Adviser: Heather Love.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2010.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781124276786

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.