Retman Sonnet Retman

Real Folks (eBook, PDF)

Race and Genre in the Great Depression

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of "e;the folk."e; At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals-including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston-illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. September 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822393894
• Artikelnr.: 54818692

Autorenporträt

Sonnet H. Retman

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I: The Folklore of Racial Capitalism
1. "A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island": The Color
Question in George Schuyler's Black No More 33
2. "Inantimate Hideosities": The Burlesque of Racial Capitalism in
Nathanael West's A Cool Million 72
Part II: Performing the Folk
3. "The Last American Frontier": Mapping the Folk in The Federal Writers'
Project's Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State 113
4. "Ah Gives Myself de Privilege to Go": Navigating the Field and the Folk
in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men 152
Part III: Populist Masquerade
5. "Am I Laughing?": Burlesque Incongruities of Genre, Gender, and Audience
in Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels 191
Afterpiece: The Coen Brothers' Ol'-Timey Blues in O Brother, Where Art
Thou? 240
Notes 251
Bibliography 287
Index 311