Continuities of Racial Fascism: Louis Till and Black Marxism in the Pisan Cantos

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 080-093
Author(s):  
Andrew Haas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
Pisan Cantos

In Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Pound mourns the unjust execution of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. This essay argues that the unusually sympathetic representation of Till in the poem was made possible by Pound’s engagement with the ideas of activists for black liberation like Nancy Cunard and Langston Hughes; hence Pound, an avowed fascist, ultimately voices a critique of the “racial fascism” of the United States typical of discourses of black anti-imperialism. The essay concludes with exploring the antinomical racial logic of the Pisan Cantos, for which black political radicalism—the “Black Leninism” of Langston Hughes in particular—is revealed to be a constitutive, but repressed, ideological interlocutor.

scholarly journals Italianness in the United States between migrants’ informal gardening practices and agricultural diplomacy (1880–1912)

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Gilberto Mazzoli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Food Production ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Us Cities ◽  
Political Radicalism

During the Age of Mass Migration more than four million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in US cities has been widely explored: however, the study of how migrants adjusted in relation to nature and food production is a relatively recent concern. Due to a mixture of racism and fear of political radicalism, Italians were deemed to be undesirable immigrants in East Coast cities and American authorities had long perceived Italian immigrants as unclean, unhealthy and carriers of diseases. As a flipside to this narrative, Italians were also believed to possess a ‘natural’ talent for agriculture, which encouraged Italian diplomats and politicians to propose the establishment of agricultural colonies in the southern United States. In rural areas Italians could profit from their agricultural skills and finally turn into ‘desirable immigrants’. The aim of this paper is to explore this ‘emigrant colonialism’ through the lens of environmental history, comparing the Italian and US diplomatic and public discourses on the potential and limits of Italians’ agricultural skills.

Lyric Internationalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-178
Author(s):  
Sarah Ehlers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Jacques Roumain ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers Haitian communist poet Jacques Roumain and his reception in the United States. Analyzing the production, circulation, and reception of Roumain’s writings and his authorial persona, the chapter explores several connected variants of a communist internationalism that is imagined through the idea of “lyric,” or “lyricism,” and it demonstrates how such international imaginaries are tied to different conceptions of history. The chapter begins by sketching the import of Roumain as a figure for U.S. radicals. It then turns to Roumain’s friendship with Langston Hughes, showing how the exchange of poems between the two allows critics to move beyond straightforward historical accounts that show how radical African American artists and intellectuals referred to Haiti’s revolutionary past in their protests against Jim Crow policies, colonial occupations, and the rise of fascism in Europe. I argue that Roumain and Hughes harness and experiment with the unique temporality of the poetic lyric in order to present black radicalism as a formation unbounded by spatial and temporal borders. The final sections turn to the prose and poetry Roumain composed during his exile in the United States, using it to rearticulate ideas about the relationship of the poetic lyric to historical praxis.

Montreal 1968 and the Last Colonial Generation

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-205
Author(s):  
Peter James Hudson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
Global Consciousness ◽  
Mcgill University

Held at Montreal’s McGill University from 11 to 14 October 1968, the “Congress of Black Writers: Toward the Second Emancipation—the Dynamics of Black Liberation” was dubbed the largest Black Power conference ever held outside the United States. In Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, David Austin has compiled the surviving transcripts of this historic gathering, including the speeches by Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Stokely Carmichael, and Richard B. Moore, and he provides an extended introduction locating Montreal within the global politics of the late 1960s. This essay considers Moving Against the System as an archive of black and Caribbean history, examining both the debates that occurred among the participants of the conference and Austin’s role as an archivist and interpreter of Montreal’s radical past.

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