Vaughn Rasberry turns to black culture and politics for an alternative history of the totalitarian century. He shows how black writers reimagined the standard antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the U.S. as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also an agent of Asian and African independence.

Autorentext
Vaughn Rasberry is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

Klappentext

Few concepts evoke the twentieth century s record of war, genocide, repression, and extremism more powerfully than the idea of totalitarianism. Today, studies of the subject are usually confined to discussions of Europe s collapse in World War II or to comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In Race and the Totalitarian Century, Vaughn Rasberry parts ways with both proponents and detractors of these normative conceptions in order to tell the strikingly different story of how black American writers manipulated the geopolitical rhetoric of their time.

During World War II and the Cold War, the United States government conscripted African Americans into the fight against Nazism and Stalinism. An array of black writers, however, deflected the appeals of liberalism and its antitotalitarian propaganda in the service of decolonization. Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, John A. Williams, and others remained skeptical that totalitarian servitude and democratic liberty stood in stark opposition. Their skepticism allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the United States as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence.

Bringing a new interpretation to events such as the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, Rasberry s bird s-eye view of black culture and politics offers an alternative history of the totalitarian century.

Inhalt
Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction: Free Worlds Part One: Race and the Totalitarian Century Chapter 1. The Figure of the Negro Soldier: Racial Democracy and World War Chapter 2. Our Totalitarian Critics: Desegregation, Decolonization, and the Cold War Chapter 3. The Twilight of Empire: The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 and the Black Public Sphere Part Two: How to Build Socialist Modernity in the Third World Chapter 4. The Right to Fail: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Communist Hypothesis Chapter 5. From Nkrumah's Ghana to Nasser's Egypt: Shirley Graham as Partisan Chapter 6. Bandung or Barbarism: Richard Wright on Terror in Freedom Conclusion: Memory and Paranoia Notes Acknowledgments Index