Robert Genter . Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America . (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 375. $49.95.

2011 ◽  
Vol 116 (4) ◽  
pp. 1159-1160
Author(s):  
Tyrus Miller
Author(s):  
Robyn Creswell

This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet anomalous place in the intellectual life of the Arab world, but also for its nodal position in the global history of modernism during the early Cold War. It focuses on the antagonistic nature of intellectual exchanges during the period, particularly as seen in literary magazines and journals of opinion. If, as Robert Scholes and others have argued for the European case, “modernism begins in the magazines,” then the same is profoundly true of the Arabic movement. Intellectual life in Beirut was not so much a playground as a battleground, and this war of position extended beyond the borders of Lebanon. The debates between local intellectuals—nationalist, Marxist, and liberal—reflect the global agon between the main ideological camps of the early Cold War.


Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.


For more than six decades, Billy Graham played a prominent role in shaping Americans’ outlook on the critical religious, political, and cultural issues of the day. By drawing on new sources and by asking new questions of old sources, Billy Graham: American Pilgrim offers groundbreaking accounts of Graham’s storied career. The distinguished contributors offer fresh perspectives on the major changes Graham brought to American Christianity, World Christianity, church and state, the Cold War, race relations, American manhood and family, intellectual life, religious media, Christian relief work, and Christian music. Charting his titanic career provides a many-paned window for viewing the history and character of our present and recent past while also attending to Graham’s personal evolution and complexity on these issues. Yet Graham stayed true to evangelical precepts, as he addressed contemporary questions of religion, politics, and culture, as well as perennial questions of spiritual and daily life, that stretched his tradition to its limits. The volume presents this interplay of change and continuity in the life of Graham as a pilgrimage. But Graham lived his journey on an international stage, influencing the world around him in ways large and small—ways that still echo in today’s religious, political, and cultural arenas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.


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