(CVS 0063) Un-American Activities: Popular Culture and the Left – Joseph Litvak

This course takes its title from the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, which, during the 1950s, attempted to destroy the left in the U.S. entertainment industry. For the Un-American Activities Committee, the concept of the “un-American” included anything that posed a threat to the power of normative white, male, heterosexual, capitalist interests. We will seek to understand the left, therefore, in post-1945 U.S. politics as not just anti-capitalist but also as anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-xenophobic—which is to say, as a wide range of political, social, and cultural positions that sometimes entered into coalition and sometimes into conflict with one another. We will examine the right-wing campaign of destruction and the left’s resistance to it during the Cold War, but we will also look at how both the destruction and the resistance have shaped the politics of more recent popular culture in the Obama, Trump, and Biden years. Works to be studied will include Hollywood films ( Body and Soul , Native Son , On the Waterfront , High Noon , The Manchurian Candidate , Dr. Strangelove , Rustin ), Broadway plays ( The Crucible , Trouble in Mind , Angels in America , Hamilton ), novels ( Invisible Man , The Book of Daniel ), and documentary films ( Point of Order , Heir to an Execution , Scandalize My Name , The Lavender Scare ). We will be interested in calling into question the meanings of “popular” in “popular culture.” This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.