"This volume collects Langston Hughes's correspondence with Nancy Cunard and Louise Thompson during the Spanish Civil War. In addition, the final section presents unpublished and uncollected poems by Hughes, including "A Note from Spain," an unpublished poem from the series of epistolary "Johnny" poems, and "Mother and Child," an undated poem by Hughes that narrates an aerial bombing."--Publisher's website.
When the United States and other powers declined to help fight fascist power at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, forty thousand private citizens from fifty-two countries rallied to join the International Brigade's defense of the Spanish Republic. Born out of the struggle between fascism and democracy and considered the first battle of World War II, the Spanish Civil War holds tremendous ideological significance and has inspired a remarkable range of American poetry. The Wound and the Dream represents the sixty-year tradition of American poetic responses to the Spanish Civil War and provides an overview of progressive American poetry as a whole. Four of the featured poets--Alvah Bessie, William Lindsay Gresham, James Neugass, and Edwin Rolfe--were members of the International Brigade. Their poetry appears alongside lesser-known works by some of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, including Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, and Philip Levine. Cary Nelson's introduction discusses the collective nature of the poems, puts them in their international context, and provides a sturdy framework for interpreting the Spanish Civil War as a historical conjecture that has dramatically altered the ways we read and write poetry. The book also includes a brief biography of each poet and a glossary of related terms.
An extraordinary account of the women artists and activists whose determination to live—and to create—with courage and conviction took them as far as the Spanish Civil War “Now, as certainly as never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides.” —Nancy Cunard An attempted insurrection, a country divided, a democracy threatened. It was the Spanish Civil War of 1936, surprisingly, that Sarah Watling found herself drawn to when confounded by the tumultuous politics of our present day. This was a conflict that galvanized tens of thousands of volunteers from around the world to join the fight. For them, the choice seemed clear: either you were for fascism or you were against it. Seeking to understand how they knew that the moment to act had arrived, Watling sifts through archives for lost journals, letters, and manifestos, discovering a trove of work by writers and outsiders who had often been relegated to the shadows of famous men like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. She encounters the rookie journalist Martha Gellhorn coming into her own in Spain and the radical writer Josephine Herbst questioning her political allegiances. She finds the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner embracing a freedom in Barcelona that was impossible for queer women back at home in England and, by contrast, Virginia Woolf struggling to keep the war out of her life, honing her intellectual position as she did so. She tracks down the stories of Gerda Taro, a Jewish photographer whose work had long been misattributed, and Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem who saw the war as a chance to combat the prejudice she experienced as a woman of color. Here were individuals seizing an opportunity to oppose the forces that frightened them. From a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, these women saw history coming, and they went out to meet it. Yet the reality was far from simple. When does tolerance become apathy? Where is the line between solidarity and appropriation? Is writing about the revolution the same as actively participating in it? With profound, personal insight, Watling reveals that their answers are as relevant today as they were then.
Born in 1901, Louise Thompson Patterson was a leading and transformative figure in radical African American politics. Throughout most of the twentieth century she embodied a dedicated resistance to racial, economic, and gender exploitation. In this, the first biography of Patterson, Keith Gilyard tells her compelling story, from her childhood on the West Coast, where she suffered isolation and persecution, to her participation in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. In the 1930s and 1940s she became central, along with Paul Robeson, to the labor movement, and later, in the 1950s, she steered proto-black-feminist activities. Patterson was also crucial to the efforts in the 1970s to free political prisoners, most notably Angela Davis. In the 1980s and 1990s she continued to work as a progressive activist and public intellectual. To read her story is to witness the courage, sacrifice, vision, and discipline of someone who spent decades working to achieve justice and liberation for all.
Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles. Contributors: Nicole Anae, Keisha N. Blain, Brandon R. Byrd, Stephanie Beck Cohen, Anne Donlon, Tiffany N. Florvil, Kim Gallon, Dayo F. Gore, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Grace V. Leslie, Michael O. West, and Julia Erin Wood
Jane Duran's father fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Republican army and went into exile after its defeat. This poem-sequence takes as its point of departure her father's silence about the war: 'He lays down his arms. / He raises his arms over his head. / He will not tell.' In a constant search for 'the breath of the unknown', the poems move between the present and the past. Professor Paul Preston's introduction offers a broad outline of the course and significance of the war and places the poems within their historical context.
During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco’s dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.
Mosaic Fictions is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Exploring published and archival writings, the book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in the language of a nascent North American multiculturalism. Placing Jewish Canadian writers within overlapping North American networks of Jewish, Black, immigrant, female, and queer writers challenges the national distinctions that dominate current critical approaches to Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature. Reframing the narrative of Spain’s noble but tragic struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own. Mosaic Fictions examines texts composed between the war’s outbreak and the present to illuminate the integral connections between Canada’s developing national identity and global leftist action.
Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.
