POLITICAL DISAPPOINTMENT : a cultural history from reconstruction to the aids crisis

Marcus shows the ways in which Black activists and writers, in particular, have continued to express their political desires. In doing so, she draws our attention to the centrality of disappointment in American political life. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, New Yorker Political Disappointment is an abundant text, overflowing with Sara Marcuss considerable gifts. She is adept at presenting history and narrative with equal clarity; her writing is urgent but also optimistic. This is a book that is sometimes painful but never sacrifices hope or beauty. Hanif Abdurraqib Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointmentthe unfulfilled desire for changeinto a basis for solidarity. Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities. Political Disappointment shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world. Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcuss unique history of the twentieth century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life. Sara Marcus argues for the emancipatory potential of political disappointment—the unrealized desire for liberation. Exploring literature & sound from Reconstruction to Black Power, from the Popular Front to second-wave feminism & the AIDS crisis, Marcus shows how moments of defeat have inspired new ensembles of art & activism.°°° Sara Marcus is a writer & musician living in Brooklyn, New York. Her prose & poetry have appeared in publications including Time Out New York, The Advocate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate.com, Pos, & Heeb magazine, where she was the politics editor for five years. Marcus received an MFA from Columbia University. Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction. Loss and American Culture 1. Failures of the Reconstruction. History and Disappointment 2. Transcribing Losses. The Popular Front and Its Afterlives 3 “I Stand Mute”. Civil Rights Cacophony and Quiet 4. Senses of Solidarity. Voice, Vision, and Feminism in Crisis 5. The Ancestors’ Breath. AIDS and Aural Coalitions Coda Notes Acknowledgments Index "Sara Marcus argues for the emancipatory potential of political disappointment-the unrealized desire for liberation. Exploring literature and sound from Reconstruction to Black Power, from the Popular Front to second-wave feminism and the AIDS crisis, Marcus shows how moments of defeat have inspired new ensembles of art and activism."