Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Lavishly illustrated, this first collaborative work of two curators at the Baltimore and the Mississippi Museums of Art combines vintage materials and photographs of newly commissioned art works by 12 practitioners, interspersed with reflective essays by six authors explaining the ongoing influence of the Great Migration (1915-70). During this period six million African Americans left the South for the North, Midwest, and West to escape the racism and violence of Jim Crow and gain greater economic and educational opportunities. The volume challenges the traditional notion that the movement was linear--often it was serial or circular--and finite--it still takes place today, especially in flight from environmental dangers caused by climate change. In addition to geographical migration, the movement is also occupational, social, ideological, and attitudinal. This voluntary population transfer without defined leaders was the largest of any group in the 20th century in the US; it propelled the Harlem Renaissance, the spread of blues and jazz, and civil rights campaigns, and resulted in more extensive Black political engagement at all levels. It also energized those left behind, whose transformations of the South encouraged many former residents to return. Intergenerational, multilayered, and transdisciplinary, this volume fosters rumination and ranks with more textual works, e.g., Isabel Wilkerson's Warmth of Other Suns (CH, Aug'11, 48-7129).Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Kalliney (Univ. of Kentucky) argues that in the African and diaspora world, the Cold War and its aesthetic debates were coextensive with the global literary field during the mid-20th century, especially in Anglophone regions. In addition to the aesthetic debates between state-sanctioned literature and modernism, the literature of African decolonization should be read as "tightly conjoined" (p. 5) and not separated contextually or otherwise. Like Cedric Tolliver's Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers (CH, Jul'20, 57-3570), this work offers an objective view of the literary activities of the time with surprising results: writers of the South remained nonaligned while enjoying the benefits of so-called cultural diplomacy. The author suggests that censorship, intimidation, and surveillance as a counter to cultural diplomacy proved ineffective in the main. In part 1 (of three), Kalliney offers a brief introduction and a chapter on the intellectual history of the time period. Part 2 comprises three chapters on cultural diplomacy, and part 3 explores programs of state surveillance and ways nonconforming intellectuals were disciplined. In the excellent conclusion, the author reiterates his main assertions. The volume's debt to archivists and librarians is well acknowledged and in keeping with recent trends in African diaspora scholarship. A wonderful addition to the reevaluation of mid-century literary products.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.