Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis

In her book "Political Disappointment," Sara Marcus explores how Black activists and writers have expressed their political desires and the centrality of disappointment in American political life. She argues that creative minds have observed moments of possibility, taken stock of losses, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities, producing new political meanings and possibilities. Through insightful readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, reclaiming the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2023
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Political Disappointment is a rich and insightful text, overflowing with Sara Marcus's remarkable talents. She excels at presenting history and narrative with equal clarity, and her writing is both urgent and hopeful. This is a book that can be challenging at times, but it never loses sight of hope or beauty.

Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction to the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States explores how artists, intellectuals, and activists transformed political disappointment—the unfulfilled desire for change—into a foundation for solidarity.

Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities.

Political Disappointment demonstrates how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the sound.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780674248656