scholarly journals The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
Black Transnationalism

The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows

F.B. Eyes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
The Mind

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

Pan African spaces – essays on black transnationalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (13) ◽  
pp. 2510-2512
Author(s):  
Yvette Twumasi-Ankrah
Keyword(s):  
Pan African ◽  
Black Transnationalism

scholarly journals The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
Social Improvement

While the transnational dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance are widely acknowledged, scholarly accounts often suggest that the Great Depression narrowed the scope of African American writing to localized concerns such as social improvement and folk expression. The chapter complicates this assumption by drawing attention to the little-known sonnets Claude McKay and Countee Cullen wrote in the 1930s, some of which remained unpublished until the early twenty-first century. These sonnets show that African American poetry sustained a range of transnational conversations throughout the 1930s. The chapter examines two such conversations: the negotiation of black travel around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and the Pan-Africanism incited by the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935/36. Besides McKay and Cullen, the chapter considers sonnets by the neglected poets J. Harvey L. Baxter, Alpheus Butler, and Marcus Bruce Christian.

Black Land

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Nurhussein
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
African Nation ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
American Media ◽  
Star Order

This is the first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. The book delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. It navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1935, the book illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, the book presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia's presence in African American culture was at its height.

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