This book challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works. Washington shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it.

Tracing the course of Black Power Movements from the 18th century to the present.

During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces—nationalism and Marxism—clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse. Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination. During the period known as the “Red Decade” (1929–1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class. As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the “Negro Question,” the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been concerned with the problem of ideology, and have undertaken a broad reassessment of American literature and culture. This volume brings together some of the best work in this area.

This comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship of black political thought identifies which political ideologies are supported by blacks, then traces their historical roots and examines their effects on black public opinion.

"Satire's real purpose as a literary genre is to criticize through humor, irony, caricature, and parody, and ultimately to defy the status quo. In African American Satire, Darryl Dickson-Carr provides the first book-length study of African-American satire and the vital role it has played. In the process he investigates African American literature, American literature, and the history of satire." --Book Jacket.