Camp Unity: Camp and Popular Front Aesthetics and Reception

Rachel Rubin is professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and chair of the Center for the Study of Humanities, Culture, and Society. She has published widely in a variety of fields with a particular interest in the relationship of Left politics and cultural production. From her first book, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (University of Illinois Press, 2000) to her most recent, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (New York University Press, 2012), Rubin has studied some of the crucial formations of twentieth-century radical culture. Her published work also includes co-edited books on American popular music and the post-Civil War history of Southern radicalism. Currently Rubin is finishing one book project, a collection of “critical interviews” with a variety of artist/activists from Maxine Hong Kingston to Boots Riley of the Coup, and launching next, a study of the Patrice Lumumba Friendship Institute in Moscow—a Cold War-era experiment in Soviet outreach to undergraduate and graduate students from the developing world. Professor Rubin is also a regular media commentator on popular culture and a cohost of the news and public affairs radio show Commonwealth Journal.

James Smethurst is professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), winner of the Organization of American Historians' 2006 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book dealing with the history of US race relations; and The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). He is also the co-editor of Left of the Color Line, Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, and SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. He is working on a history of the Black Arts Movement in the South. He was a Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2014-2015.