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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - New Deal Discourses

  • from Part II - New Deal, New Methodologies
  • Edited by Eve Dunbar, Vassar College, New York, Ayesha K. Hardison, University of Kansas
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
    Published online:
    25 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022, pp 139-169

  • Summary

    The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.