Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism
Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Both of these texts derive their power from theorizations of US black radicalisms based on original close readings of neglected texts, offering new radical canons that contribute to the scholarship that documents an intellectual tradition of black radicalism. While other Cold War analyses often emphasize McCarthyism as a technique of fear, James Ziegler argues that anticommunism became embedded in US culture as a national pedagogy, produced as if it represented “abstract, universal reason” (10) and possessing a kind of “innate rectitude” (6) that cast communism in the political imagination as not only un-American but anathema to common sense, a kind of depraved knowledge that is literally “unthinkable” (17). As the title of Ziegler’s book suggests, the Red Scare witch hunt always had a racist subtext, targeting Cold War black radicalism, which was easily smeared by its associations with the Left. The House Un-American Activities Committee, for example, routinely suggested that...