Kids Library Home

Welcome to the Kids' Library!

Search for books, movies, music, magazines, and more.

     
Available items only
Print Material
Author Spahr, Juliana, author.

Title Du Bois's telegram : literary resistance and state containment / Juliana Spahr.

Publication Info. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.
©2018

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe 2nd Floor Stacks  810.9358739 Sp28d 2018    ---  Available
1 copy being processed for Axe Acquisitions Order.
Description 246 pages ; 22 cm
text txt rdacontent
unmediated n rdamedia
volume nc rdacarrier
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-224) and index.
Contents Introduction -- Turn of the twenty-first century : a possible literature of resistance -- Stubborn nationalism : example one, avant garde modernism -- Stubborn nationalism : example two, movement literatures -- Turn of the twenty-first century : the national tradition -- Conclusion.
Summary "In 1956 W.E.B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. "Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe." Taking seriously Du Bois's allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois's Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts. Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated."--Book jacket.
Subject American literature -- Political aspects.
Politics and literature -- United States.
Nationalism and literature -- United States.
Political correctness in literature.
Liberty in literature.
Political correctness in literature. (OCoLC)fst01069239
Liberty in literature. (OCoLC)fst00997282
American literature -- Political aspects. (OCoLC)fst00807225
Nationalism and literature. (OCoLC)fst01033884
Politics and literature. (OCoLC)fst01069960
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
ISBN 9780674986961 hardcover ; alkaline paper
0674986962 hardcover ; alkaline paper

 
    
Available items only