Hip Figures A Literary History of the Democratic Party [Hardcover]

Hip Figuresdramatically alters our understanding of the postwar American novel by showing how it mobilized fantasies of black style on behalf of the Democratic Party. Fascinated by jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, novelists such as Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Joan Didion turned to hip culture to negotiate the voter realignments then reshaping national politics. Figuratively transporting white professionals and managers into the skins of African Americans, these novelists and many others insisted on their own importance to the ambitions of a party dependent on coalition-building but not fully committed to integration. Arbiters of hip for readers who weren't, they effectively branded and marketed the liberalism of their momentand ours.

Michael Szalay's tandem tale of the post-World War II U.S. novel and Democratic Party radically illuminatesindeed rewritesthe story of both. This is literary history at its finest: densely researched, methodologically allusive, hip to the pith and nerve, and sometimes slag, of writers taking the measure of the republic. A definitive account of how and why novels preoccupied with hip changed the course of the Democratic Party after the Second World War. A persuasively argued treatisewill appeal to students of literature and liberal politics. This bold and ingenious book gives us the hipster's racial background, but also a crucial glimpse into how cultural politics matter to politics in the weightiest and most straightforward sense. [F]ascinating . . . the specters of hip will continue to haunt our politics, and we owe Szalay a debt for laying them out in such critical detail here. A virtue of Szalay's study is that it allows us to think about Democrats and symbolic blackness through a more useful lens than that of either race-baiting Republican demagoguery or self-congratulatory Democratic triumphalism . . . Szalay helps demystify modern progressivism's own complex racial subconscious, lcÀ