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Du Bois's Telegram - Literary Resistance and State Containment (Hardcover)
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Du Bois's Telegram - Literary Resistance and State Containment (Hardcover)
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Total price: R664
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In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the
Presence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris.
So he sent the assembled a telegram. "Any Negro-American who
travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the
United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department
wishes the world to believe." Taking seriously Du Bois's
allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions
as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature.
What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can
writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from
nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois's Telegram brings
together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in
literary production, paying special attention to three eras of
writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting
linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early
twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s;
and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language
works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how
these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be
shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department
propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and
Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding
multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation
while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist
efforts. Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically
engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic
resistance is easily domesticated.
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