| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Caren Irr. The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. (New Americanists.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 293. Cloth $54.95, paper $18.95.

Caren Irr offers a post-Cold War reassessment of 1930s radical literary cultures in the United States and Canada. Arguing that "America" and "Communism" were both internally riven and mutually constituted in heretofore unacknowledged ways, Irr proposes that Depression-era leftism produced a "subculture" that was a complex and diverse "hybrid" of nationalism, proletarianism, and mass culture (p. 5). Playing on W. H. Auden's famously self-deprecating description of the leftist intellectual's habitation of the "suburb of dissent," Irr proposes an "ethnography" of this suburb "liminally" situated "on the margins of the larger culture of labor" (p. 6). This zone was, moreover, "transnational," providing a "contact zone" (p. 9) between the related but hardly identical experiences of the left in Canada and the United States. Understanding the 1930s in their complexity, she concludes, demonstrates the absurdity of proclaiming their isolation within the larger arc of cultural history. . . .

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