The Other Blacklist

Superbly woven together... A must-read book for those who study and teach literature, women's studies, history, African American studies, American studies, and cultural studies.

Well-researched, informative, illuminating... By challenging the standard Cold War narrative of Communist Party irrelevance and isolation, The Other Blacklist not only promotes radical African American cultural production in the 1950's, it also highlights the very real internal and external pressures faced by communists and their allies.

As literary and cultural history, Washington's book offers a vast resource... Readers who are eager to place the postwar period in the context of 1930s and '40s historiography of the left as well as the period of black nationalism that followed in the 1960s will rejoice in these pages.

Washington's excellent book contributes powerfully to a strand of scholarship that is transforming our understanding of post-World War II American intellectual and cultural history... Deeply researched, persuasively argued, and much-needed.

Washington's brilliant, intimate and highly readable new book capstones an important era of post-Cold War scholarship of the legacy of American Communism and African American literature… no book in recent memory more boldly confronts and dismantles the political apparatus of literary commemoration.

Insightful, densely researched, and engaging… Washington resoundingly demonstrates the importance of the Black Popular Front to the postwar black literary tradition.

Washington builds a strong and much-needed case against purely aesthetic interpretations of 1950s African American literature. Highly recommended.

Well-thought, highly readable and timely.

Groundbreaking...thought-provoking.

[A] compelling look at artists and writers who became part of the vanguard of the progressive politics and civil rights movement of the 1960s.

James Smethurst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s:
A wonderful combination of careful research, adept historicizing, and insightful close reading. Mary Helen Washington's book brings needed critical attention to understudied figures and helps readers rethink the careers of others whom they believe they already know.