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Chapter 5 - New Deal Discourses

from Part II - New Deal, New Methodologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2022

By
J. J. Butts
Edited by
Eve Dunbar  and
Ayesha K. Hardison
Eve Dunbar
Affiliation:
Vassar College, New York
Ayesha K. Hardison
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
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Summary

The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.

Keywords

New DealFederal Writersʼ ProjectdocumentarymodernizationfolkRoi OttleyArna BontempsJack ConroyHenry Lee MoonRichard Wright
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 , pp. 139 - 169
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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