Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)

IF 0.3 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN
Maya Hislop
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Abstract

The first part of the title of J. J. Butts’s impressive and exhaustively researched Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project is taken from the conclusion of Richard Wright’s 12,000,000 Black Voices: A Folk History of the United States (1941). It traces the shifting meaning of this image from a prophetic warning calling for the repudiation of American racism, to the need for mutual struggle during World War II in Wright’s work, to the possibilities of a generative national politics shaped by the continuous presence of Black history in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). In the New Deal era, the writers of Black intertexts, whether those of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Negro Units’ social histories or their subsequent texts, used Black history as a rhetorical lens to scrutinize the federal government’s declared commitment to a civic pluralism, which included Black citizens and its associated efforts at modernization and the equitable “redistribution of social goods” (33). Dark Mirror focuses on a group of Black intertexts written by writers “as FWP writers” (165). Their work documented Black urban neighborhoods in the North, with their influx of Southern migrants from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These intertexts used vernacular narrative modes and materials associated with the Black folk as vital records, as vernacular histories, of “difference, inequity or injustice” (16) and as “memories of oppression, struggle, and hope” (19). These forms remained culturally and politically vital in shaping the present. Butts argues that Black intertexts, including Jack Conroy’s collaboration with Arna Bontemps, have been analyzed largely in the context of the influence of the American Communist Party while “the cultural implications of the liberal state as the ascendant state form in the US” (21) have been overlooked. In situating these intertexts primarily in their relationship to the New Deal, and the beginnings of the liberal welfare state, Dark Mirror is a significant contribution to an expanded analysis of the cultural and political complexities and tensions of these works and this era. Chapter 1 examines how the FWP guidebooks, with their federal authority, were largely “propaganda” (52) for the New Deal and its state-directed ......................................................................................................
《暗镜:非裔美国人与联邦作家计划》作者:j·j·巴茨(书评)
j·j·巴茨的《黑暗之镜:非裔美国人和联邦作家项目》令人印象深刻,研究详尽,标题的第一部分取自理查德·赖特的《一千两百万黑人声音:美国民间历史》(1941)的结论。它追溯了这幅图像的变化意义,从呼吁否定美国种族主义的预言警告,到赖特作品中二战期间相互斗争的需要,再到拉尔夫·埃里森(Ralph Ellison)的《看不见的人》(Invisible Man, 1952)中黑人历史的持续存在塑造了一种再生国家政治的可能性。在新政时代,黑人互文的作者,无论是联邦作家项目黑人单位社会历史的作者,还是他们后来的文本的作者,都把黑人历史作为一个修辞的镜头,来审视联邦政府对公民多元化的承诺,其中包括黑人公民及其在现代化和公平的“社会物品再分配”方面的相关努力。《暗镜》关注的是一组“作为FWP作家”的黑人互文(165)。他们的作品记录了20世纪30年代到50年代初南方移民涌入的北方黑人城市社区。这些互文使用了与黑人民间相关的方言叙事模式和材料,作为“差异、不平等或不公正”(16)和“压迫、斗争和希望的记忆”(19)的重要记录和方言历史。这些形式在塑造现在的文化和政治上仍然至关重要。Butts认为,黑人互文,包括Jack Conroy与Arna Bontemps的合作,在很大程度上是在美国共产党影响的背景下进行分析的,而“自由主义国家作为美国崛起的国家形式的文化含义”(21)被忽视了。《暗镜》主要将这些互文置于它们与新政和自由福利国家的开端的关系中,对这些作品和这个时代的文化和政治复杂性和紧张局势的扩展分析做出了重大贡献。第一章探讨如何拨开尘封的指南,联邦权力,主要是“宣传”(52)新政及其政府主导的 ......................................................................................................
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来源期刊
MELUS
MELUS LITERATURE, AMERICAN-
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
50.00%
发文量
59
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