000 03661cam a2200349 i 4500
999 _c190922
_d190882
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003 OSt
005 20201113101929.0
008 160224s2016 mau b 001 0 eng c
010 _a 2016009529
020 _a9780674971080
_q(hardcover : alk. paper)
040 _aMH/DLC
_beng
_cMH
_erda
_dDLC
042 _apcc
050 0 0 _aE185.6
_b.R36 2016
082 0 0 _a323.1196/073
_223
100 1 _aRasberry, Vaughn,
_eauthor.
245 1 0 _aRace and the totalitarian century :
_bgeopolitics in the Black literary imagination /
_cVaughn Rasberry.
260 _aLondon :
_bHarvard University Press.
_c2016.
300 _a488 pages ;
_c25 cm
504 _aIncludes bibliographical references (pages 373-467) and index.
505 0 _aPart One. Race and the totalitarian century -- The figure of the Negro soldier: racial democracy and world war -- Our totalitarian critics: desegregation, decolonization, and the Cold War -- In the twilight of empire: the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 and the Black public sphere -- Part Two. How to build socialist modernity in the third world -- The right to fail: the communist hypothesis of W. E. B. Du Bois -- From Nkrumah's Ghana to Nasser's Egypt: Shirley Graham as partisan -- Bandung or barbarism: Richard Wright on terror in freedom -- Conclusion: memory and paranoia: John A. Williams's The man who cried I am.
520 _aFew concepts evoke the twentieth century's record of total war, genocide, repression, and extremism more powerfully than the idea of totalitarianism: the ideological core of narratives of World War II and the Cold War. Yet the totalitarian experience, this book contends, shaped and was shaped by narratives of the rise and fall of the world color line. Extant works continue to confine the study of totalitarianism to Europe's collapse in World War II or to comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Race and the Totalitarian Century parts ways with proponents and detractors of these normative conceptions to tell a strikingly different story. This story crystallizes in midcentury efforts by U.S. state actors to conscript Black Americans and their colonial counterparts into the global antitotalitarian struggle. For some critics, these efforts reoriented Black political actors around U.S. liberalism, or propelled them defiantly and misguidedly into the Communist sphere. By contrast, this book shows how an array of Black writers deflected, reimagined, and manipulated the appeals of liberalism and its antitotalitarian rhetoric in the service of decolonization. This skeptical view of the wartime opposition of totalitarian slavery and democratic freedom, the author argues, enabled writers like Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, and John A. Williams to formulate a powerful independent perspective from which to diagnose the convergence of the Cold War and the color line. Shedding new light on watersheds like the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, this book develops a bird's-eye view of Black culture and politics that is at once an alternative history of the totalitarian century.--
650 0 _aAfrican American authors
_xPolitical activity
_xHistory
_y20th century.
650 0 _aAfrican Americans
_xPolitics and government
_xPhilosophy.
650 0 _aTotalitarianism and literature.
650 0 _aGeopolitics in literature.
650 0 _aRacism
_xHistory
_y20th century.
650 0 _aPolitics and literature
_zUnited States
_xHistory
_y20th century.
906 _a7
_bcbc
_corignew
_d1
_eecip
_f20
_gy-gencatlg
942 _2lcc
_cBK