James Smethurst received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in 1996. He is
Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor
Smethurst is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American
Poetry, 1930-1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Black Arts Movement: Literary
Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and The
African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (University
of North Carolina Press, 2011). He is also the co-editor of Left of the Color Line: Race,
Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (University of North
Carolina Press, 2003) and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006). His scholarly interests include African American literature and
culture; 20th-century poetry in English; 19th- and 20th-century American literature;
ethnic studies; literary modernism; film, music and popular culture; literature of
industrialization and urbanization; cultural history; intellectual history; and gender
studies. He is currently working on a history of the Black Arts Movement in the South and
is co-editing SOS?Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Reader with John Bracey and
Sonia Sanchez.

Articles

The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century, American Literary History (2009)

Black radicalism in the twentieth century was marked by a new emphasis on ideological, intellectual,...

 

Picturing the new negro: Harlem renaissance print culture and modem black identity, American Historical Review (2008)

As Caroline Goeser notes in this valuable new study, though there has been a groundswell...

 

Paul Laurence Dunbar and turn-into-the-20(th)-century African American dualism (W. E. B. Du Bois The 'souls of black folk'), African American Review (2007)
 

History, memory, and the literary left: Modern American poetry, 1935-1968, Modernism-Modernity (2007)

As John Lowney notes in the introduction to his excellent History, Memory, and the Literary...

 

Kitchenette correlatives: African American neo-modernism the popular front, and the emergence of a black literary avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s, Foreign Literature Studies (2007)

Like many of their white peers, post-World War II African American writers and critics strongly...

 

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Books

The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Marlem Renaissance (2011)

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly...

 

Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction (with Chris Green and Rachel Rubin) (2006)

This book broadly frames the scholarly conversation about southern radicalism, putting essays covering a range...

 

The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960's and 1970's (2005)

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African...

 

Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003)

This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist...

 

The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (1999)

The New Red Negro surveys African-American poetry from the onset of the Depression to the...