Psychology comes to Harlem
Subtitle: rethinking the race question in twentieth-century America
By: Jay Garcia
Series: New dtudies in American intellectual and cultural history
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781421405193; 9781421405414
Subjects: African American authors; Intellectual life; Criticism and interpretation; History and criticism; American literature; African Americans
Description: Departing from the largely accepted existence of a "Negro Problem," Wright and such literary luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Lillian Smith, and James Baldwin described and challenged a racist social order whose psychological undercurrents implicated all Americans and had yet to be adequately studied. Motivated by the elastic possibilities of clinical and academic inquiry, writers and critics undertook a rethinking of "race" and assessed the value of psychotherapy and psychological theory as antiracist strategies. Garcia examines how this new criticism brought together black and white writers and became a common idiom through fiction and nonfiction that attracted wide readerships.

An illuminating picture of mid-twentieth-century American literary culture and learned life, Psychology Comes to Harlem reveals the critical and intellectual innovation of literary artists who bridged psychology and antiracism to challenge segregation."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Richard Wright and the "the unconscious machinery of race relations"; title: Richard Wright reading: the promise of social psychiatry; title: "The problem of race and minorities from below": the wartime cultural criticism of Chester Himes, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison and C.L.R. James; title: Strange fruit: Lillian Smith and the making of whiteness; title: Notes of a native son: James Baldwin in postwar America.