The Initiative on Race and Resilience and Department of English invite for the book launch: Political Disappointment: A cultural History from Reconstruction to the Aids Crisis by Sara Marcus.
Political Disappointment shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world.
Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also affiliated with the Initiative on Race and Resilience and Gender Studies program. Marcus specializes in American and African American literature, popular music, sound, and performance from the 19th century through the present. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
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Originally published at raceandresilience.nd.edu.