• 1.: Known Rivers / New Forms


• 2.: Remembering the Family: The Cold War and Black Cultural Politics


• 3.: Nation Time and the Black Ironic: Temporality and Its Discontents


• 4.: Let Them Only See Us: The Politics of Representation and the Black Superpublic


• 5.: Variations on the Solidarity Blues: Welfare Policy and the Low End Theory


• 6.: Round Trips on the Black Star Line: Making Foreign Policy in the American Century


• 7.: Not as Others: Colored Discourse and the Levittican Rhythm


• 8.: After the Dance: Adventures in Land of the Bittersweet


• Notes


• Acknowledgements


• Index

Richard Iton is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the winner of the 2009 Ralph Bunche Award for In Search of the Black Fantastic, and the 2001 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book award and 2000 Best Book Award on the Social, Cultural, and Ideological Construction of Race from the American Political Science Association for Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left .

In Search of the Black Fantastic is the most authoritative work available on black culture in the post-Civil Rights era. Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, popular culture functioned as a highly visible and important means of political expression. From Billie Holiday to Ralph Ellison, African American art was often explicitly political. Unexpectedly, though, despite the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960sthat opened up the world of formal politics, black artists in film, literature, and music continue to have an outsized voice in black institutional politics. Marvin Gaye, George Clinton, Toni Morrison, Chuck D, Spike Lee, Tina Turner, Bill Jones, Lauren Hill, and many others speak to the power of thistradition. Richard Iton offers a comprehensive and novel portrait of this powerful and durable relationship, locating its modern roots in the Jazz Age and taking readers through the Hip Hop era.