No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America

by Waldo E. Martin Jr.

Book Overview

In a vibrant and passionate exploration of the twentieth-century civil rights and black power eras in American history, Waldo Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle.

In black culture, argues Martin, we see the debate over the profound tension at the core of black identity: the duality of being at once both American and African. And in the transformative postwar period, the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067401507X
• ISBN13: 9780674015074
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

History Drawn Through The Eye Of Culture

No Coward Soldiers would be worth buying and savoring if it only inclided Martin's extended discussion of the art of Elizabeth Catlett, a painter and multimedia artist whose work is comparatively little known, most pointedly in comparison to her male colleagues Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. Martin astutely pins the disparity in critical reception (itself a matter of "cultural politics" at their most palpable) to the fact that Catlett is an overtly political artists whereas Bearden and Lawrence were "transcendent," to quote Professor Martin. That is, their themes and executions ran beyond the reality-based limitations of the moment and sought out the eternals. When it comes to the case of Roy De Carava, he falls somewhere in the middle, perhaps due to his status as a photographer, so that reality is always somewhere hovering about. Martin is also good at showing how young Cassius Clay became a bellwether for his age and how he (as both Clay and Ali) brought politics openly into the ring, whereas previous heavweight champions had merely let the simmer, boxing in a ring of unspoken racial assumptions. Martin has a nice easygoing style and, I imagine, is a marvelous lecturer. Professor Martin knows a lot about pop, jazz, blues, writing, and many kinds of cultural discourse, but in this slim book he tries to cram in too many topics. Hopefully the print edition will avoid the errors of the Advanced Reading Copy they sent me, mis-spelling Allen Ginsberg's first name AND last name, and adding an extra "n" to the name of the poet Bob Kaufman (thus three typos in one sentence).