Reviews
"In the canon of African American culture Stacy Morgan's Rethinking Social Realism is an important analysis of the 1930s as a significant period of development in African American art and literature—a period in which the artists and writers moved away from a focus on the evolving black middle class as a subject to a more sympathetic focus of visualizing and writing about the common man. This focus was a component in the search for a wholly 'American Art.' . . . This book is a precursor to explaining the significant focus on realism in the African American art of the sixties, seventies, and eighties."
—Deborah Willis, Professor of Photography and Imaging, New York University
Description
The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era—far longer than a majority of their white counterparts.
Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social realist atmosphere in which certain African American artists and writers were immersed and shows how black social realism served alternately to question the existing order, instill race pride, and build interracial, working-class coalitions. Morgan discusses, among others, such figures as Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff.
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Paper List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-2579-8 2/26/2004 |
