| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction. Ed. by Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst. (New York: Palgrave, 2006. viii, 274 pp. $69.95, ISBN 978-1-4039-7409-9.)

The editors of this volume, professors of English, American studies, and Afro-American studies, are academics whose concerns link culture and arts (poetry and music primarily), ethnicity and race issues, and leftist activism. They have compiled a collection of nine essays and three interviews that offer a far-reaching and searching insight into activism in the South. The collection is terrific. The essays, including those by Chris Green and James Smethurst, and two interviews by Rachel Rubin, move chronologically rather than thematically—a satisfying decision as it allows readers to assess the ways that earlier activism is similar to and diverges from the more recent. The carefully composed introduction situates the collection geographically and politically—their South includes Appalachia, Texas, Chicana/o activists, Communists, and black power. Their aim is to refute restrictive definitions of "the South" as a cultural and politically uniform zone. I admire both the aims and achievements of this project. I have one reservation, however: Nowhere do the authors/editors make reference to the Left's reaction to Joseph Stalin. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) plays a large role in the first seven essays, and surely the recoil against the cpusa that rocked the Left starting in the late 1930s and reaching a crisis in the 1950s would have had some effect on the organizing in the South. The lack of references to those shifts and the rather comfortable references to "red-baiting" or anticommunism leave a layer of complexity unexamined.

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