Regionalists on the left
Subtitle: radical voices from the American West
By: edited by Michael C. Steiner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 399
ISBN-13: 9780806143408
Subjects: Politics and government; Biography; Intellectual life; History; Right and left (Political science); Regionalism
Description: ""Nothing is more anathema to a serious radical than regionalism," Berkeley English professor Henry Nash Smith asserted in 1980. Although regionalism in the American West has often been characterized as an inherently conservative, backward-looking force, regionalist impulses have in fact taken various forms throughout U.S. history. The essays collected in Regionalists on the Left uncover the tradition of left-leaning western regionalism during the 1930s and 1940s.Editor Michael C. Steiner has assembled a group of distinguished scholars who explore the lives and works of sixteen progressive western intellectuals, authors, and artists, ranging from nationally prominent figures such as John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams to equally influential, though less well known, figures such as Angie Debo and Americo Paredes. Although they never constituted a unified movement complete with manifestos or specific goals, the thinkers and leaders examined in this volume raised voices of protest against racial, environmental, and working-class injustices during the Depression era that reverberate in the twenty-first century. Sharing a deep affection for their native and adopted places within the West, these individuals felt a strong sense of avoidable and remediable wrong done to the land and the people who lived upon it, motivating them to seek the root causes of social problems and demand change. Regionalists on the Left shows also that this radical regionalism in the West often took urban, working-class, and multicultural forms.Other books have dealt with western regionalism in general, but this volume is unique in its focus on left-leaning regionalists, including such lesser-known writers as B. A. Botkin, Carlos Bulosan, Sanora Babb, and Joe Jones. Tracing the relationship between politics and place across the West, Regionalists on the Left highlights a significant but neglected strain of western thought and expression"--

"Each of the book's fifteen essays will treat regionalists and their thinking in a biographical context. Organized into four parts (Midwest, Great Plains, Northern West, and California), the book will focus on such regional writers as Sanora Babb, B.A. Botkin, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, D'Arcy McNickle, Carey McWilliams, J. Frank Dobie, and others. Regionalism often has a reactionary outlook based in nostalgia for a bygone time. By contrast, these writer-intellectuals have, as one reader puts it, "offered a powerful critique" of historical and contemporary inequalities and social shortcomings even as they express a "deep affection for place.""--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : varieties of western American regionalism / Michael C. Steiner; title: Revolution can spring up from the windy prairie as naturally as wheat : Meridel Le Sueur and the making of a radical regional tradition / Julia Mickenberg; title: Feet in the grassroots : Josephine Herbst's Midwest / Sara Kosiba; title: Radical regionalism in American art : the case of Joe Jones / Bryna R. Campbell; title: Blowout grass : Mari Sandoz, historical pessimism, and Great Plains regionalism / Robert L. Dorman; title: Radical by nature : Sanora Babb and ecological disaster on the High Plains, 1900-1940 / Douglas Wixson; title: Theorizing regionalism and folklore from the left : B.A. Botkin, the Oklahoma Years, 1921-1939 / Jerrold Hirsch; title: Discover the truth and publish it : Angie Elbertha Debo and the roots of America's real imperialism / Shirley A. Leckie Reed; title: Texas, the transnational, and regionalism : J. Frank Dobie and Americo Paredes / Jose E. Limon; title: Wrong side up : Joseph Kinsey Howard and the wisdom of the dispossessed / Timothy Lehman; title: Bad medicine : D'Arcy McNickle locates liberalism and the left from a tribal perspective / William W. Bevis; title: Robert Cantwell and Northwest left literary labors / T.V. Reed; title: John Sanford's radical regionalism : the universal of the particular / Jack Mearns; title: Toward a transnational liberalism of the left : positive liberties and the West in Carlos Bulosan's America / Stephen J. Mexal; title: Regionalism and social protest during John Steinbeck's years of greatness, 1936-1939 / David Wrobel; title: Carey McWilliams, California, and the education of a radical regionalist / Michael C. Steiner.