If you want to know what we are: United States Third World literature, gender, and national liberation.

Abstract

In <italic>The Souls of Black Folk</italic>, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,---the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.<super>1</super> This dissertation explores the ways in which DuBois' international vision of solidarity between racialized Others within the United States and Third World subalterns (Asia and Africa) is dramatized and rearticulated by writers of color (cultural workers) through the very process of negotiating the gendered contradictions of U.S. Third World nationalisms emerging from within the internal colonies of the U.S. nation-state. Through an exploration of how politically progressive Asian American and African American writers from the 1930s through the Cold War period generated a U.S. Third World literary radicalism, this project re-grounds a theoretical concept central to an early phase of U.S. Ethnic Studies: internal colonialism. Chinese American proletarian writer H.T. Tsiang, working class Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan, and African American playwright Lorraine Hansberry have produced literatures that lean upon the theory of internal colonialism in a way that generated an immanent feminist critique of gender inequality within movements for racial and economic justice in the U.S. Third World and for national sovereignty in the Global South. By laying the groundwork for a U.S. Third World feminism, Tsiang, Bulosan and Hansberry anticipate the heterogeneous political formations of the New Left (Asian American movement, Black Power, Women's movement, Gay and Lesbian Liberation, Third World national sovereignty) without abandoning the invaluable lessons of class struggle from an earlier generation of cultural workers and activists (U.S. Old Left). <super>1</super>W.E.B. DuBois, <italic>The Souls of Black Folk</italic> (A.C. McClurg and Co. of Chicago, 1903; USA: First Vintage Books, 1990).