Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War

by Benjamin Balthaser

Overview

Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression.  The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity.


Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.-Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472119714
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	12/15/2015
Series:	Class : Culture
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Balthaser is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Ami-Imperialist Modernism: Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War 1

1 This Land Is My Land: Cuba and the Anti-Imperialist Critique of a National-Popular Culture in the United States 38

2 Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia: Native American Modernity and the Popular Front 85

3 The Other Revolution: Haiti and the Aesthetics of Anti-Imperialist Modernism 118

4 The Strike and the Terror: The Transnational Critique of the New Deal in the California Popular Front 150

5 An Inland Empire: Fascism, Farm Labor, and the Memory of 1848 182

6 Cold War Re-Visions: Red Scare Nationalism and the Unmade Salt of the Earth 224

Notes 253

Bibliography 287

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

Wonderfully innovative and refreshing explorations of U.S. literary radicalism, covering little-known fiction, drama, film, journalism, and more . . . Balthaser combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis as well as moments of elegant and lucid prose.  His insights can be surprising and disconcerting. With sobering observations, he demonstrates compelling new ways of understanding the Left and U.S culture.  There is simply no book like this.”
— Alan Wald, University of Michigan

From the Publisher