Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (July 2, 2017)

(July 2, 2017)

http://kdvs.ucdavis.edu/archives/2017-07-02_4530_320kbps.mp3

This afternoon in the 5 o'clock hour, I am joined by Vaughn Rasberry for a discussion of his book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination

Vaughn Rasberry studies African American and twenteth-century American literature, literature of the African Diaspora, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. In 2016, Harvard University Press published his first book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination, recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2017 Ralph Bunche Award ("awarded annually for the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year on ethnic and cultural pluralism.") His book questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, a defining discourse of the twentieth century.

During World War II and the Cold War, his book shows, 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 anti-totalitarian 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, Race and the Totalitarian Centurycontends, allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the anti-fascist, anti-communist 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.

His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. In 2015, he published a book chapter, "JFK and the Global Anticolonial Movement," in The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy. He has another book chapter, "The 'Lost' Years or a 'Decade of Progress'? African American Writers and the Second World War," published in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).  

For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English. 

An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. 

Sunday 7/02/2017 @ 3:00PM - 6:00PM

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Artist	Song	Album	Label	Comments
Sonny Stitt	The String	Only the Blues	Verve	October 11, 1957
Ben Webster	Jive at Six	King of the Tenors	Verve	December 8, 1953
Bud Powell	Bud's Bubble	Bud Powell Trio	Royal Roost	January 10, 1947
Bud Powell	Off Minor	Bud Powell Trio	Royal Roost	January 10, 1947
AIRBREAK
Gigi Gryce	Nica's Tempo	Gigi Gryce Quartet And Orchestra	Savoy	October 15, 1955
Miles Davis	Swing Spring	Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants	Prestige	December 24, 1954
Thelonious Monk	Skippy (alternate take)	More Genius Of Thelonious Monk	Blue Note - Japan	May 30, 1952
Thelonious Monk	Hornin' In (alternate take)	More Genius Of Thelonious Monk	Blue Note - Japan	May 30, 1952
AIRBREAK
Sarah Vaughan	I'm Glad There Is You	Sarah Vaughan	EmArcy	December 16, 1954
Sarah Vaughan	You're Not the Kind	Sarah Vaughan	EmArcy	December 16, 1954
Sonny Clark	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Sonny Clark Trio	Blue Note	October 13, 1957
Sonny Clark	Little Sonny	Sonny Clark Quintets	Blue Note - Japan	December 8, 1957
Betty Carter	I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire	The Modern Sound of Betty Carter	ABC-Paramount	August 1960
Betty Carter	Remember	The Modern Sound of Betty Carter	ABC-Paramount	August 1960
AIRBREAK
Barry Harris	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Newer Than New	Riverside	September 28, 1961
Barry Harris	Make Haste	Newer Than New	Riverside	September 28, 1961
Kenny Dorham	Beautiful Love	Matador	United Artists	April 15, 1962
Kenny Dorham	Prelude	Matador	United Artists	April 15, 1962
Carmen McRae	If You Could See Me Now	Bittersweet	Focus	c. 1964
Carmen McRae	Here's That Rainy Day	Bittersweet	Focus	c. 1964
AIRBREAK
Ted Curson	Antibes	Plenty of Horn	Old Town	April 11, 1961
Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles	Vaughn Rasberry in Conversation with Justin Desmangles
Pierre Dørge and Walt Dickerson	Tai-Gong	Landscape With Open Door	SteepleChase	c. 1979