The Ne Red Negro The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 [Hardcover]

The New Red Negrosurveys 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.

Introduction: Of the Coming of the New Red Negro
1. African-American Poetry, Ideology, and the Left during the 1930s and 1940s from the Third Period to the Popular Front and Beyond
2. The Strong Men Gittin' Stronger : Sterling Brown and the Representation and Re-creation of the Southern Folk Voice
3. Adventures of a Social Poet : Langston Hughes in the 1930s
4. I Am Black and I Have Seen Black Hands : The Narratorial Consciousness and Constructions of the Folk in 1930s Afrl£