In "Black Empire," Michelle Ann Stephens examines the ideal of transnational blackness that emerged in the work of radical black intellectuals from the British West Indies in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writings of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C. L. R. James, Stephens shows how these thinkers developed ideas of a worldwide racial movement and federated global black political community that transcended the boundaries of nation-states. Stephens highlights key geopolitical and historical events that gave rise to these writers intellectual investment in new modes of black...

Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb--Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara--for their understanding of "the Arab." In "Morocco Bound," Brian T. Edwards examines American representations of the Maghreb during three pivotal decades--from 1942, when the United States entered the North African campaign of World War II, through 1973. He reveals how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the...

A cultural history of the political legitimization of youth rebellion during the Cold War era.

When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, "Male Call "analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves.
Jonathan Auerbach shows that London's personal identity was not a basis of...

National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners," the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions...

Offering a study of American cultural production from the colonial era onwards, this book takes up the loose ends of popular American narratives to craft a theory of narrative closure.

Focusing on both utopian and realist narratives, this book offers a revaluation of American literature and culture at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ranging over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, it aims to contribute to debates about utopian thought, globalisation, and American literature.

Examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. This book will interest scholars and students in the fields of literary criticism, neopragmatism, literary modernism, and American literature.