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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Garcia, Jay. "Psychology Comes to Harlem: Race, Intellectuals, and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century U.S.," American Studies, Yale University, August 2003.
Psychological discourses attained considerable explanatory power and cultural momentum within discussions of racism in the U.S. during the 1940s and 1950s. Prompted in part by social scientists’ repudiation of racist theories in the 1930s, the conceptualization of racism largely in terms of its psychological dimensions achieved substantial currency in American cultural and intellectual life. Psychological explanation provided a discursive basis from which several writers, filmmakers, radical activists, and liberals sought to advance different kinds of anti-racist politics. This study argues that through novels, films, and popular social science, psychological understandings of racism became one of the distinguishing features of mid-century American culture. The dissertation explores disparate but related sites of intellectual and cultural production in which psychological languages were devised or appropriated to rethink U.S. racism. These sites include Richard Wright s engagement with psychological thought in the 1940s, social problem dramas produced by Hollywood studios in 1949-1950, the anti-racist activism of social scientists, and the writings of James Baldwin in the immediate postwar decade. This study maintains that the psychological reworking of racism was a complex and contradictory part of mid-century cultural and intellectual history, engendering significant social critiques even as it evinced political limitations.
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