Visions of belonging: family stories, popular culture, and postwar democracy, 1940-1960

Abstract

Acknowledgments Part 1. Ordinary Families, Popular Culture, and Popular Democracy, 1935-1945 Radio's Formula Drama Popular Theater and Popular Democracy Popular Democracy on Radio Popular Democracy in Wartime: Multiethnic and Multiracial? Representing Soldier The New World of Home Front Soldiers as Veterans: Imagining Postwar World Looking Back Stories Part 2. Making Working-Class Family Tree Grows in Brooklyn From Working-Class Daughter to Working-Class Writer Revising 1930s Radical Visions Remembering a Working-Class Past Instructing Middle Class The Ethnic and Racial Boundaries of Ordinary Making Womanhood Ordinary Hollywood Revises Tree Grows in Brooklyn The Declining Appeal of Tree's Social Terrain Part 3. Home Front Harmony and Remembering Mama Bank Account and Other Ethnic Working-Class Fictions Remembering Mama on Stage The Mother Next Door on Film, 1947-1948 Mama on CBS, 1949-1956 The Appeal of TV Mama's Ordinary Family Stories Part 4. Loving Across Prewar Racial and Sexual Boundaries Lillian Smith and Strange Fruit Quality Reinstates Color Line Strange Fruit as Failed Social Drama The Returning Negro Soldier, Interracial Romance, and Deep Are Roots Interracial Male Homosociability in Home of Brave Part 5. Seeing Through Jewishness Perception and Racial Boundaries in Focus Policing Racial and Gender Boundaries in The Brick Foxhole Recasting Victim in Crossfire Deracializing Jewishness in Gentleman's Agreement Part 6. Hollywood Makes Race (In)Visible A Great Step Forward: The Film Home of Brave Lost Boundaries: Racial Indeterminacy as Whiteness Pinky: Racial Indeterminacy as Blackness Trading Places or No Way Out? Everyman Stories Part 7. Competing Postwar Representations of Universalism The Truly Universal People: Richard Durham's Destination Freedom The Evolution of Arthur Miller's Ordinary Family Miller's Search for the People, 1947-1948 The Creation of an Ordinary American Tragedy: Death of a Salesman The Rising Tide of Anticommunism Part 8. Marital Realism and Everyman Love Stories Marital Realism Before and After Blacklist The Promise of Live Television Drama Paddy Chayefsky's Everyman Ethnicity Conservative and Corporate Constraints on Representing Ordinary Filming Television's Ordinary: Marty's Everyman Romance Part 9. Reracializing Ordinary American Family: Raisin in Sun Lorraine Hansberry's South Side Childhood Leaving Home, Stepping Deliberately Against Beat The Freedom Family and Black Left I Am a Writer: Hansberry in Greenwich Village Raisin in Sun: Hansberry's Conception, Audience Reception Frozen in Frame: The Film of Raisin Visions of Belonging Notes Index