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This dissertation examines the novels, plays, and films written by a group of Hollywood screenwriters who share the political experience of being called to testify at the House un-American Activities Committee hearings starting in the late 1940s. Because of their targeting by HUAC, these writers are typically remembered for their contributions to US cinema, their leftism, and their political repression. Extending the scope of analysis beyond film to include the fiction they wrote throughout the 1930s and 1940s, this dissertation reveals the writers’ multiform strategies for political expression. Intertextual analysis of their literature and pre-HUAC films demonstrates how they engaged in profoundly imaginative terms major ideological issues, in particular the tension between collectivism and individuality that has prevailed in U.S. politics and social life. The first chapter treats Albert Maltz’s first novel, The Underground Stream (1940), and first credited screenplay, This Gun for Hire (1942). These works address the mutually constitutive relationship between individuals and political organizations. Chapter two analyzes Vera Caspary’s Depression-era plays about working-class women, which explore how class relations shape private experience. Chapter three turns to Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes, and its film adaptation. Staging how women dissent from the bourgeois patriarchal family and the racial oppression that underlies it, Hellman’s work probes the ways in which women characters engage with ideals of “individualism.” Chapter four focuses on the historical novels and film westerns of John Sanford and Guy Endore. This chapter takes a comparative approach in order to foreground how these writers pursue radical analysis and promote a collectivist politics through the novel form. Their film westerns similarly situate audiences in the past but dispense with the polemical historicity of their novels in favor of a more studio-friendly view of the transcendent, pre-ideological subject. / 2029-10-31T00:00:00Z

<p>Forwarding a narrative that, in many ways, runs contrary to `official'/sanctioned accounts which designate the body of the black woman as the principal star of nineteenth-century racial science's empirical investigations and sexual exploitations, I propose instead a vision of our nation's 1800s that marks this era as the moment in American history in which Hottentot Venus turned Hot-to-trot-Penis. Remaining indebted to the works of Sander Gilman and his contemporaries, and paying special attention to the ways in which both the erotic vicissitudes and imperialist vagaries of the European empire effected a fairly fluid cross-Atlantic exchange during this time period, I locate the late 1840s and early 1850s as the seminal moment in which, through a collaboration of scientific, social, and popular texts the black male body specifically first becomes installed in this country, on the mainstages of both our early spectacular culture and the American psychic theater, as a `pornographic body': an indigenous site of sexual taboo upon and through which the dark fantasies of the Whites who had imported these bodies might be projected. Recognizing, in this mid-nineteenth century moment, what should be seen as a distinctive, while as yet unremarked, shift in both the discourse and displays offered by America's peculiar brand of ethnography as well as within our national arena--one which turns to and turns on the conception of the black male as sexual subject--my dissertation hopes to offer a better understanding of the compelling forces, both social and salacious, that might be said to account for this distinctly American, and distinctively perverse, representational refocusing.</p> / Dissertation

Using jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991) as its primary example, "Seeing (for) Miles" attempts to build on a growing discourse related to the intersection of jazz, race, and visual / material culture that has heretofore largely ignored the role of consumption. Davis' numerous decisions to spend money on expensive things and/or have them custom made, insisting these things be seen by others, and overseeing his image in advertisements are a reminder that famous musicians often found themselves straddling the line between being consumers and objects of consumption. Following Davis on both sides of that line also necessitates following him on and off the stage, in the eye of his fans as well as the general public. Each of the chapters of this dissertation seek to understand how Davis negotiated this variety of viewpoints as a musician, consumer, and African American via his colored trumpets, tailored suits, sports cars, an expensive home, and instrument advertisements.;The decisions Davis and others made with regard to their positions as consumers and African Americans reflected back on a longer history of black interaction with the marketplace while positioning themselves within existing debates concerning racial equality, jazz's status as high art, and the merits of capitalism as a catalyst for democracy. at the same time, their careers as public performers, status as celebrities, and the increasing presence of the visual mass media ensured that their consumer-related decisions reached bigger and wider audiences than ever before. In such a context, the marketplace can be understood as having constituted a unique venue in which black jazz musicians performed a variety of roles relative to their musical and racial identities. Understanding the ways Davis and others negotiated this process allows us to shed light on a relatively unexplored aspect of jazz culture while also suggesting ways in which racial and musical identities continue to be impacted by visual / material culture in modern society.

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