The new red Negro : the literary left and African American poetry, 1930-1946

This text surveys African American poetry between the onset of the Depression and the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African American poets, and organized ideology from "proletarian" early 1930s to the "neo-modernist" late 1940s. Abstract: This text surveys African American poetry between the onset of the Depression and the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African American poets, and organized ideology from "proletarian" early 1930s to the "neo-modernist" late 1940s. Read more... The New Red Negro surveys African-American poetry from the onset of the Depression to the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African-American poets and organized ideology from the proletarian early 1930s to the neo-modernist late 1940s. This study examines poetry by writers across the spectrum: canonical, less well-known, and virtually unknown. The ideology of the Communist Left as particularly expressed through cultural institutions of the literary Left significantly influenced the shape of African-American poetry in the 1930s and 40s, as well as the content. One result of this engagement of African-American writers with the organized Left was a pronounced tendency to regard the re-created folk or street voice as the authentic voice--and subject--of African-American poetry. Furthermore, a masculinist rhetoric was crucial to the re-creation of this folk voice. This unstable yoking of cultural nationalism, integrationism, and internationalism within a construct of class struggle helped to shape a new relationship of African-American poetry to vernacular African-American culture. This relationship included the representation of African-American working class and rural folk life and its cultural products ostensibly from the mass perspective. It also included the dissemination of urban forms of African-American popular culture, often resulting in mixed media high- low hybrids. Content: Introduction: Of the coming of the new red negro -- African-American poetry, ideology, and the left during the 1930s and 1940s from the third period to the popular front and beyond -- "The strong men gittin' stronger": Sterling Brown and the respresentation and re-creation of the southern folk voice -- "Adventures of a social poet": Langston Highes in the 1930s -- "I am black and I have seen black hands": The narratorial consciousness and constructions of the folk in 1930s African-American poetry -- Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem and the rise of popular neomodernism --Hysterical ties: Gwendolyn Brooks and the rise of a "high" neomodernism -- The popular front, World War II, and the rise of neomoderism in African-American poetry of the 1940s -- Conclusion: Sullen bakeries of total recall."