Visions of Belonging : Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960

by Smith, Judith E.

• ISBN13: 9780231121712
• ISBN10: 0231121717
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Visions of Belongingexplores how beloved and still-remembered family stories -- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty,and A Raisin in the Sun-- entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging.The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide a point of entry into an extraordinary time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless. But changes were also fiercely contested, especially as the war's culture of unity receded in the resurgence of cold war anticommunism, and demands for racial equality were met with intensifying white resistance. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories, as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television.Visions of Belongingprovides unusually close access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. Would the new appearance of white working class ethnic characters expand Americans'understanding of democracy? Would these stories challenge the color line? How could these stories simultaneously show that black families belonged to the larger "family" of the nation while also representing the forms of danger and discriminations that excluded them from full citizenship? In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of "normal." But by the end of the 1950s, the cold war cultural atmosphere discouraged probing of racial and social inequality and ultimately turned family stories into a comforting retreat from politics.The book crosses disciplinary boundaries, suggesting a novel method for cultural history by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Smith's innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception to show how both contribute to shaping the contested meanings of American belonging.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
1 ORDINARY FAMILIES, POPULAR CULTURE, AND POPULAR DEMOCRACY, 1935-1945
Radio's Formula Drama	7	(3)
Popular Theater and Popular Democracy	10	(4)
Popular Democracy on the Radio	14	(7)
Popular Democracy in Wartime: Multiethnic and Multiracial?	21	(3)
Representing the Soldier	24	(4)
The New World of the Home Front	28	(5)
Soldiers as Veterans: Imagining the Postwar World	33	(11)
LOOKING BACK STORIES
2 MAKING THE WORKING-CLASS FAMILY ORDINARY: A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
From Working-Class Daughter to Working-Class Writer	44	(3)
Revising 1930's Radical Visions	47	(2)
Remembering a Working-Class Past	49	(3)
Instructing the Middle Class	52	(2)
The Ethnic and Racial Boundaries of the Ordinary	54	(5)
Making Womanhood Ordinary	59	(3)
Hollywood Revises A Tree Grows in Brooklyn	62	(9)
The Declining Appeal of Tree's Social Terrain	71	(7)
3 HOME FRONT HARMONY AND REMEMBERING MAMA
"Mama's Bank Account" and Other Ethnic Working-Class Fictions	78	(6)
Remembering Mama on the Stage	84	(5)
The Mother Next Door on Film, 1947-1948	89	(8)
Mama on CBS, 1949-1956	97	(7)
The Appeal of TV Mama's Ordinary Family	104	(7)
TRADING PLACES STORIES
4 LOVING ACROSS PREWAR RACIAL AND SEXUAL BOUNDARIES
Lillian Smith and Strange Fruit	111	(6)
Quality Reinstates the Color Line	117	(6)
Strange Fruit as Failed Social Drama	123	(5)
The Returning Negro Soldier, Interracial Romance, and Deep Are the Roots	128	(6)
Interracial Male Homosociability in Home of the Brave	134	(8)
5 SEEING THROUGH JEWISHNESS
Perception and Racial Boundaries in Focus	142	(3)
Policing Racial and Gender Boundaries in The Brick Foxhole	145	(5)
Recasting the Victim in Crossfire	150	(6)
Deracializing Jewishness in Gentleman's Agreement	156	(14)
6 HOLLYWOOD MAKES RACE (IN)VISIBLE
"A Great Step Forward": The Film Horne of the Brave	170	(4)
Lost Boundaries: Racial Indeterminacy as Whiteness	174	(10)
Pinky: Racial Indeterminacy as Blackness	184	(14)
Trading Places or No Way Out?	198	(10)
EVERYMAN STORIES
7 COMPETING POSTWAR REPRESENTATIONS OF UNIVERSALISM
The "Truly Universal People": Richard Durham's Destination Freedom	208	(7)
The Evolution of Arthur Miller's Ordinary Family	215	(5)
Miller's Search for "the People," 1947-1948	220	(3)
The Creation of an Ordinary American Tragedy: Death of a Salesman	223	(10)
The Rising Tide of Anticommunism	233	(11)
8 MARITAL REALISM AND EVERYMAN LOVE STORIES
Marital Realism Before and After the Blacklist	244	(11)
The Promise of Live Television Drama	255	(4)
Paddy Chayefsky's Everyman Ethnicity	259	(8)
Conservative and Corporate Constraints on Representing the Ordinary	267	(7)
Filming Television's Ordinary: Marty's Everyman Romance	274	(10)
9 RERACIALIZING THE ORDINARY AMERICAN FAMILY:RAISIN IN THE SUN
Lorraine Hansberry's South Side Childhood	284	(6)
Leaving Home, Stepping "Deliberately Against the Beat"	290	(3)
The Freedom Family and the Black Left	293	(11)
"I Am a Writer": Hansberry in Greenwich Village	304	(6)
Raisin in the Sun: Hansberry's Conception, Audience Reception	310	(12)
Frozen in the Frame: The Film of Raisin	322	(3)
Visions of Belonging	325	(4)
Notes	329	(96)
Index	425