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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Description: ‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s Th...