Real Folks
Race and Genre in the Great Depression
Download Url(s)
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/48498/1/external_content.pdf---
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/48498/1/external_content.pdf
Author(s)
Retman, Sonnet
Collection
Knowledge Unlatched (KU)Language
EnglishAbstract
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals—including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.
Keywords
Literary Criticism; American; Social Science; Ethnic Studies; American; African American & Black Studies; Social Science; Popular CultureISBN
9781478090861Publisher
Duke University PressPublisher website
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Publication date and place
2011Imprint
Duke University PressClassification
Literature: history and criticism
Ethnic studies
Popular culture