Bill Mullen

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture.As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights.Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Living in Fire

James Baldwin

Ashley Dawson

Ali Abunimah

The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities

Against Apartheid

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay "The World Problem of the Color Line," W. E. B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois's challenge.

Afro-Orientalism

In a stunning revision of radical politics during the Popular Front period, Bill Mullen redefines the cultural renaissance of the 1930s and early 1940s as the fruit of an extraordinary rapprochement between African-American and white members of the U.S. Left struggling to create a new American Negro culture. A dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history, Popular Fronts includes a major reassessment of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation, a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, and in-depth examinations of the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: The Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about black Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.

Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46

Popular Fronts

Includes works by such writers as Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Terry McMillan

African American Women's Short Stories, from the First Story to the Present

Revolutionary Tales

Sherry Lee Linkon

Sherry Linkon

'Many of the essays in this volume are brilliant, and all reveal the richness of the 1930s as a subject for renewed study. The diverse critical approaches in Radical Revisions add substantially to the growing body of work on depression-era U.S. culture. Given the increasingly haunting similarities between the 1930s and the 1990s, this book should spark interest in both academic and general reader.'

Rereading 1930s Culture

Radical Revisions

On the 27th August, 1963, the day before Martin Luther King electrified the world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the immortal words, 'I Have a Dream', the life of another giant of the Civil Rights movement quietly drew to a close in Accra, Ghana: W.E.B. Du Bois. In this new biography, Bill V. Mullen interprets the seismic political developments of the Twentieth Century through Du Bois's revolutionary life.Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just three years after formal emancipation of America's slaves. In his extraordinarily long and active political life, he would emerge as the first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard; surpass Booker T. Washington as the leading advocate for African American rights; co-found the NAACP, and involve himself in anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. Beyond his Civil Rights work, Mullen also examines Du Bois's attitudes towards socialism, the USSR, China's Communist Revolution, and the intersectional relationship between capitalism, poverty and racism.An accessible introduction to a towering figure of American Civil Rights, perfect for anyone wanting to engage with Du Bois's life and work.

Bill Mullen

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