With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness, artistic creativity, and anticapitalist radicalism. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley examines the turbulent year 1919, viewing it as the political crucible in which the radicalism of the 1920s was forged.
World War I and the Russian Revolution profoundly reshaped the American social landscape, with progressive reforms first halted and then reversed in the name of anti-Bolshevism. Dissent was stifled as labor activists and minority groups came under intense attack, culminating in the racist and antiradical violence of the "Red Summer" of 1919. Foley shows that African Americans had a significant relationship with the organized Left and that the New Negro movement's radical politics of race was also the politics of class.
Spectres of 1919 analyzes how the highly politicized New Negro movement gave way to the culturalism of the Harlem Renaissance, as African American political and literary movements attempted to navigate between U.S. (or "bad") nationalism and self-determinationist (or "good") nationalism.
Spectres of 1919 draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.
"Absorbing and provocative. While other scholars have nibbled around the edges of the radical roots of the New Negro movement, Foley has deeply engaged the subject. Her scholarship is meticulous and impressive, her writing style clear, direct, and forceful.This is ground-breaking scholarship of the highest order." -- James A. Miller, author of Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith
Barbara Foley is a professor of English at Rutgers University and a leading authority on post-World War I American writers of the Left.
<http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f03/foley.html> *****
Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: from 'Blue Veins' to Seventh-street Rebels," _Modern Fiction Studies_ 42.2 (1996) 289-321: <http://newark.rutgers.edu/~bfoley/jean_toomers_washington.html>, <http://victorian.fortunecity.com/holbein/439/bf/jean_toomers_washington.html>, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v042/42.2foley.html>
Barbara Foley, "'In the Land of Cotton': Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's 'Cane,'" _African American Review_ 32.2 (Summer 1998): <http://newark.rutgers.edu/~bfoley/foleyinlandofcotton.html>, <http://victorian.fortunecity.com/holbein/439/bf/foleyinlandofcotton.html>