“Ethnic Literatures, Anti-Racism, and the Continuing Cold War” spotlights the intersection of politics and literature by evaluating the long Cold War (1945-1991) and post-Cold War impacts on U.S. writers of color with anti-racist literary agendas contesting the swelling tides of conservative culture and policies that hinder social equality and human rights. In doing so, this panel advances what Alan Wald, one of the foremost scholars of the Literary Left and Cold War era cultural studies, states about Cold War literary resistance. Wald writes, “Cold War literary resistance is not a literary theme or practice limited to the so-called McCarthy era itself. It is an ongoing one up to the present ...” (2006). Wald’s statement stems from a score of literary studies in the earlier twenty-first century aiming to shift Cold War literary scholarship that, as Mary Helen Washington, scholar of African American literature, best puts it, “routinely resegregated ... with white history and black absence” (2003). A body of work centralizing race, Cold War global politics and the national and transnational responses by writers of color includes Dudziak (2000), Borstelmann (2001), Mullen and Smethurst (2003), Hammond (2006) and Brick, Lieberman and Rabinowitz (2015).

However, much critical work remains to recover more Black writers, and equally imperative, to recover more Latinx writers. The aforementioned scholarship exposes the dearth of Latinx writers in Cold War and U.S. leftist literary study. Additionally, continuing impacts of post-Cold War tensions on the political lives and literature by writers of color have yet to be fully considered in a scope that accounts for the present global phenomena described by Hal Brands, Bloomberg opinion columnist and Professor of Global Affairs at John Hopkins. Brands surmises, “... pundits such as Fareed Zakaria have all warned of a ‘new Red Scare.’ The implication is that geopolitical dangers could again cause a narrowing of political expression, a feverish search for internal enemies and a corrosion of the liberties U.S. foreign policy is supposed to defend” (2020).

Therefore, the rationale for organizing this session is founded on contributing new critical insights about Black and Latinx writers that further the earlier twenty-first century turn toward recovering ethnic writers in Cold War literary studies, and it is founded on the historical and political urgency of current times, as anti-racist movements by people of color respond to rising racial tensions in this era of “new Red Scare.”

“Ethnic Literatures, Anti-Racism, and the Continuing Cold War” is a collective of accomplished assistant, associate and distinguished full professors who each, with innovation, engage in the critical recovery of Black or Latinx writers as they respond to the question – How do Black and Latinx writers seek anti-racist reformation, or revolution, for writers on the far-left of the political/literary spectrum, under the impactful duress of Cold War sociopolitical conditions?

Addressing this panel’s attention to high Cold War writers of color, Yang’s “The Korean War in Lloyd Brown’s Prison Literature” recovers Black writer Lloyd Brown’s novel Iron City (1951) in the context of Black antiracist activism during the Korean War, the first “hot war” of the Cold War. Her work on Brown in this transnational, politicized context adds a new voice to Black left-influenced writers that has only been given scant attention until now. Complementing Yang, Greenwell’s “The Counter-surveillant Child in Cold War Literature: Jesse C. Jackson’s Call Me Charley” (1945), reframes her earlier reading of this breakthrough Black writer of children’s fiction to address subtle narratological cues in the novel, what she calls “the counter-surveillant child’s gaze,” which function as a safe, but subversive, anti-racist technique used to protest against institutional and social racism.

Advancing this session’s focus on recovering Latinx writers and addressing late-twentieth and twenty-first century Cold War concerns, Orchard’s “Gilbert Hernandez’s Central America: Cold War Ideologies and the Limits of Latinx Solidarities” evaluates the long-running comic book Love and Rockets (1982-present) as a critique of Bush-Reagan, Central American, Cold War foreign policy. Complementing Orchard and concluding the session, Olguín’s “Cold War Lumpen/Proletarian Cholo Synthesis” on Chicano writer Luis Rodriguez, recovers Rodriguez’s “Marxist politics and poetics” concerning Chicano barrio youth and incorporates Rodriguez’s newly acquired archival material and an interview with Rodriguez in Cuba.

This session will operate within the allotted time while allowing for 15 minutes discussion. The organizer will inform the panelists that papers must be 7.5 pages double-spaced. The organizer will also advise any panelists using technology to arrive, day of presentation, 15 minutes early to set-up and test their A/V media to avoid time-consuming glitches during the panel.