Labor pains : New Deal fictions of race, work, and sex in the South / Christin Marie Taylor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taylor, Christin Marie, 1982- author.

Series:

Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans in literature.

African Americans--Fiction.

African Americans.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xii, 219 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Summary:

"From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Popular Front produced a significant era in African American literary radicalism. While scholars have long associated the black radicalism of the Popular Front with the literary left and the working class, Christin Marie Taylor considers how black radicalism influenced southern fiction about black workers, offering a new view of work and labor. At the height of the New Deal era and its legacies, Taylor examines how southern literature of the Popular Front not only addressed the familiar stakes of race and labor but also called upon an imagined black folk to explore questions of feeling and desire. By poring over tropes of black workers across genres of southern literature in the works of George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright, Taylor reveals the broad reach of black radicalism into experiments with portraying human feelings. These writers grounded interrelationships and stoked emotions to present the social issues of their times in deeply human terms. Taylor emphasizes the multidimensional use of the sensual and the sexual, which many protest writers of the period, such as Richard Wright, avoided. She suggests Henderson and company used feeling to touch readers while also questioning and reimagining the political contexts and apparent victories of their times. Taylor shows how these fictions adopted the aesthetics and politics of feeling as a response to New Deal-era policy reforms, both in their successes and their failures. In effect, these writers, some who are not considered a part of an African American protest tradition, illuminated an alternative form of protest through poignant paradigms."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction. Black folk work: New Deal era feeling and desire

Cultivating feeling: Black women's work and desire in George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss

Steel feeling: Black masculinity under pressure in William Attaway's Blood on the forge

Feeling in the light: race, fear, and desire in Eudora Welty's popular front fiction

Feeling rejected: national denial of Black working mothers in Sarah E. Wright's This child's gonna live

Conclusion. feeling shame: Black southern workers and popular culture.

Notes:

"First printing 2019."

"Portions of chapter 1 previously appeared as 'Cultivated desire: Black women's work in George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss,'Southern Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2014)."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Taylor, Christin Marie, 1982- author. Labor pains

ISBN:

9781496821775

1496821777

9781496824073

1496824075

OCLC:

1061091758

Publisher Number:

40029110098