I see foundations shaking : transnational modernism from the great depression to the Cold War

"I See Foundations Shaking" explores how African-American, Native American, Chicano/a, and working-class writers and filmmakers during the Great Depression engaged in transnational modernist movement that stretched from the late 1920s to the start of the Cold War. My dissertation suggests that the 1930s witnessed an alternative internationalist moment, replacing an aesthetic of expatriation that focused on Europe with a southward- looking transnational vision of multiethnic solidarity. Writers who embraced this "transnational modernism" viewed the Americas as a new source of inspiration, with Mexico City and Havana as centers of intellectual production and experimentation. As a project of cultural recovery, I rely extensively on archival material, including unpublished work by Clifford Odets; farm labor and literary journals from California such as UCAPAWA News, The Agricultural Worker, Lucha Obrera ; Carlos Bulosan's The New Tide ; and D'Arcy McNickle's papers at the Newberry Center. Posing Depression-era culture as a transnational modernism frames the decade within a larger debate about modernism, rethinking the way basic aesthetic and political categories are implicated within discourses of nationalism. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1938 looking from Republican Spain to the shores of Africa, "foundations were shaking" all over the world at the possibilities of socialism and de-colonization. Considering that transnational moment - an African-American poet reporting on the International Brigades in Spain while metaphorically gazing off to Africa - needs to be reclaimed as a key "foundation" in the history of U.S. cultural and modernist practic