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

by Benjamin Balthaser

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.

Genres: History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published December 18, 2015

About the author

Benjamin Balthaser’s scholarship, teaching, and creative work investigates the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His book from University of Michigan Press' Class and Culture Series, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War explores the connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century . Balthaser’s critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He also published a collection of poems about Jewish victims of the blacklist titled Dedication, that appeared from Partisan Press in the fall of 2011.

The courses Balthaser currently teaches range in topics from African-American literature, labor and literature, surveys of U.S. multi-ethnic literature, cultures of U.S. modernism and post-modernism, creative writing, the U.S. West in literature, and freshman composition. He currently enjoys living in South Bend, and participates when he can in the St. Joseph Valley Project and helps maintain a bi-weekly reading group on issues of labor, social movements and culture.

Education:
Ph.D. Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California, San Diego
M.F.A. English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
B.A., English, University of Washington, Seattle

Reviews

[Maxy.kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read!