Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature

Synopsis

A Study Of Race And Sexuality And Their Interdependencies In American Literature From 1945 To 1955, Desegregating Desire Examines The Varied Strategies Used By Eight American Poets And Novelists To Integrate Sexuality Into Their Respective Depictions Of Desegregated Places And Emergent Identities In The Aftermath Of World War Ii. Focusing On Both Progressive And Conventional Forms Of Cross-race Writing And Interracial Intimacy, The Book Is Organized Around Four Pairs Of Writers. ... Aligning Close Textual Readings With The Segregated Histories And Interracial Artistic Circles That Informed These Cold War Writers, This Project Defines Desegregation As Both A Racial And Sexual Phenomenon, One Both Public And Private. In Analyzing More Intimate Spaces Of Desegregation Shaped By Regional, Familial, And Psychological Upheavals After World War Ii, Tyler T. Schmidt Argues That Queer Desire--understood As Same-sex And Interracial Desire--redirected American Writing And Helped Shape The Cold War Era's Integrationist Politics. -- Introduction: The Half-told Histories Of Desegregation -- Ambivalent Desires: Elizabeth Bishop, Zora Neale Hurston, And Domestic Desegregation -- War City: Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwin Denby, And The Private Poetics Of Public Space -- White Pervert: William Demby, Ann Petry, And The Queer Desires Of Racial Belonging -- Damaged Desires: Jo Sinclair, Carl Offord, And The Traumas Of Integration -- Conclusion: Intimate Failures. Tyler T. Schmidt. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.