Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The legacy of the relationship between African American writers and Communism in the US is a contested one. Bergin argues that in three novels, by seminal mid-century authors (Wright, Himes and Ellison) Communism is not dismissed as incapable of meeting the demands of black political identity but is castigated for its refusal to do so. A detailed focus on the political milieu in which these texts operate challenges many of the presumptions about the ‘inability’ of Communism to comprehend racial oppression, which dominate literary critical approaches to these novels. She draws on the complex formations black political agency presumed and reproduced by American Communism during the Depression.

American fiction --- Communism and literature --- African American authors --- History and criticism. --- History --- Wright, Richard, --- Criticism and interpretation.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels - that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation. -- from dust jacket.

Blancs dans la littérature --- Blanken in de literatuur --- Petry, Ann Lane, 1911-1997. Country Place --- Whites in literature --- Wright, Richard, 1908-1960. The Outsider --- American literature --- Littérature américaine --- Blancs --- Whites in literature. --- African American authors --- History and criticism. --- Auteurs noirs américains --- Histoire et crtitique --- Dans la littérature --- History and criticism --- Hurston, Zora Neale --- Wright, Richard --- Kelley, William Melvin --- Histoire et crtitique. --- Dans la littérature. --- White people in literature. --- Littérature américaine --- Auteurs noirs américains --- Dans la littérature.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of a largely forgotten New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was founded in 1946 as both a practical response to the need for low-cost psychotherapy and counseling for black residents (many of whom were recent migrants to the city) and a model for nationwide efforts to address racial disparities in the provision of mental health care in the United States. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. It proved to be more radical than any other contemporary therapeutic institution, however, by incorporating the psychosocial significance of anti-black racism and class oppression into its approach to diagnosis and therapy. Mendes shows the Lafargue Clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.

Community psychiatry --- Social psychiatry --- African Americans --- Psychiatry, Community --- Community psychology --- Psychiatry --- Psychiatry, Social --- Clinical sociology --- Mental health --- Social medicine --- Social psychology --- Afro-Americans --- Black Americans --- Colored people (United States) --- Negroes --- Africans --- Ethnology --- Blacks --- Mental health services --- Wertham, Fredric, --- Wright, Richard, --- Lafargue Clinic (New York, N.Y.) --- Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic (New York, N.Y.) --- Harlem (New York, N.Y.) --- Harlem, New York (City) --- Wertheimer, Frederick Ignace, --- Wertheimer, F. I. --- Wertham, Frederic, --- Wertheimer, Friedrich Ignatz, --- Raĭt, Richard, --- Raiṭ, Rits'ard, --- רייט, ריצ׳רד --- רייט, ריצ׳רד, --- رتشارد رايت --- رايت، رتشارد --- Rāyt, Rīchārd, --- راىت، رىچارد --- Black people --- Brown v. Board of Education and social science, healthcare and civil rights, black mental health, Richard wrigth,.