Circulating Jim Crow : the Saturday Evening Post and the war against black modernity /
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, The Saturday Evening Post was one of the most influential magazines in the United States read in millions of homes. In the popular imagination, the Post is probably best remembered for its cheery, often nostalgic Norman Rockwell covers portraying...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2024].
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| Series: | Modernist latitudes.
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| Summary: | For much of the first half of the twentieth century, The Saturday Evening Post was one of the most influential magazines in the United States read in millions of homes. In the popular imagination, the Post is probably best remembered for its cheery, often nostalgic Norman Rockwell covers portraying American culture as quaint, wholesome and idyllic, but between those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, a liberal but also a lifelong advocate for white superiority and racial purity, The Saturday Evening Post, was filled with poetry, fiction and essays that deployed paternalistic condescension and demeaning humor against Blacks. Writers in the Post used humor and Black dialect fiction to normalize White supremacy and to make the dehumanization of Blacks seem like nothing more than common sense and just good fun. In describing the creation and promulgation of the soft power of Jim Crow ideology in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Adam McKible also discusses the efforts of Black writers to counteract these characterizations. Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and other Harlem Renaissance writers criticized The Saturday Evening Post and fought back against commodified racial caricature popularized by Lorimer. In examining how Black writers responded to The Saturday Evening Post's assault on the idea of Black modernity, McKible provides a new understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and the fight against Jim Crow ideology. |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231212649 023121264X 9780231212656 0231212658 |