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Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse among zombies in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, migrants, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to explore the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She examines how racial capitalism persists through the proliferation of diverse forms of racial domination and non-European imperialism in the neoliberal era. Racial hierarchies are supplemented by other typologies, ones that are racialized but contain different symbolic capacities, particularly that between migrant or refugee or displaced person and citizen and global North and global South. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers shows how racial capitalism creates new tributaries of oppression in its neoliberal imperial form.

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or “White Negroes,” who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. This book claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. The book analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past failures to establish cross-racial empathy, the book focuses on examples that show avenues for future progress and change. Its study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how engagement with African American culture and pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a book that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.