Real Folks : Race and Genre in the Great Depression / Sonnet Retman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Retman, Sonnet, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (338 p.)

Place of Publication:

Duke University Press 2011

[s.l.] : Duke University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of "the folk." At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals-including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston-illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: the folklore of racial capitalism

1. ''A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island'': The Color Question in George Schuyler's Black No More

2. ''Inanimate Hideosities'': The Burlesque of Racial Capitalism in Nathanael West's A Cool Million

Part II: performing the folk

3. ''The Last American Frontier'': Mapping the Folk in the Federal Writers' Project's Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State

4. ''Ah Gives Myself de Privilege to Go'': Navigating the Field and the Folk in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

Part III: populist masquerade

5. ''Am I Laughing?'': Burlesque Incongruities of Genre, Gender, and Audience in Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels

Afterpiece: The Coen Brothers' Ol'-Timey Blues in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781478090861

1478090863

OCLC:

757828727

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access