This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American, Chicano/Chicana, and Asian American literature and culture. By placing the Left at the center of their examination, the authors reposition the interpretive framework of American cultural studies.

Tracing the development of the Left over the course of the last century, the essays...

This book broadly frames the scholarly conversation about southern radicalism, putting essays covering a range of historical periods and topics in dialogue with each other so as to get a sense of the range of southern politics and history.

This book broadly frames the scholarly conversation about southern radicalism, putting essays covering a range of historical periods and topics in dialogue with each other so as to get a sense of the range of southern politics and history.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity.

In identifying the Jim Crow...

A reassessment of long-held paradigms about modern southern culture and politics and the relation of the South to political and cultural life of the United States