Psychology comes to Harlem : rethinking the race question in twentieth-century America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Psychology comes to Harlem : rethinking the race question in twentieth-century America
(New studies in American intellectual and cultural history)
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In the years preceding the modern civil rights era, cultural critics profoundly affected American letters through psychologically informed explorations of racial ideology and segregationist practice. Jay Garcia's probing look at how and why these critiques arose and the changes they wrought demonstrates the central role Richard Wright and his contemporaries played in devising modern antiracist cultural analysis. Departing from the largely accepted existence of a "Negro Problem", Wright and such literary luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Lillian Smith, and James Baldwin described and challenged a racist social order whose psychological undercurrents implicated all Americans and had yet to be adequately studied. Motivated by the elastic possibilities of clinical and academic inquiry, writers and critics undertook a rethinking of "race" and assessed the value of psychotherapy and psychological theory as antiracist strategies. Garcia examines how this new criticism brought together black and white writers and became a common idiom through fiction and nonfiction that attracted wide readerships.
An illuminating picture of mid-twentieth-century American literary culture and learned life, "Psychology Comes to Harlem" reveals the critical and intellectual innovation of literary artists who bridged psychology and antiracism to challenge segregation.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Richard Wright Writing: The Unconscious Machinery of Race Relations
2. Richard Wright Reading: The Promise of Social Psychiatry
3. Race and Minorities from Below: The Wartime Cultural Criticism of Chester Himes, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison, and C. L. R. James
4. Strange Fruit: Lillian Smith and the Making of Whiteness
5. Notes on a Native Son: James Baldwin in Postwar America
Conclusion
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"