Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left [Hardcover]

Cynthia A. Young (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2006

Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms.

Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I read Soul Power with a combination of pleasure and intellectual profit that is rare to come across in academic writing these days. There is so much fresh material here, supported by provocative theses. The result is a welcome challenge to the seasoned reader of postwar American culture and politics.”—Andrew Ross, author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai

“In Soul Power, Cynthia A. Young recovers the important hidden history of internationalism and world-transcending citizenship within the U.S. Black Freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century. This lively, engrossing, and engaging study reveals how commitments to global justice permeated the actions and ideas of Black trade union organizers, armed self-defense groups, community-based nationalists, visionary filmmakers, and radical feminists. Young demonstrates that the ferment and upheaval in Black communities in the mid-twentieth century did not just generate demands for equal rights inside the U.S. nation but raised as well programs aimed at ending imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation around the world.”—George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

About the Author

Cynthia A. Young is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Boston College.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (October 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822336790
• ISBN-13: 978-0822336792
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,726,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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