OF VAGABONDS AND FELLOW TRAVELERS:
AFRICAN DIASPORA LITERARY CULTURE AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers recovers the history of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the African diaspora who, witnessing a transition to an American-dominated capitalist world-system during the Cold War, offered searing critiques of burgeoning U.S. hegemony. The book traces this history through an analysis of signal events and texts where African diaspora literary culture intersects with the wider cultural Cold War, from the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists organized by Francophone intellectuals in September 1956 to the reverberations among African American writers and activists to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Covering an array of topics, the work includes insight into Caribbean writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, George Lamming, and Aimé Césaire, the black press writing of Alice Childress and Langston Hughes, and the ordeal of Paul Robeson, among others. The book’s final chapter highlights the international and domestic consequences of the cultural Cold War and discusses their lingering effects on our contemporary critical predicament,

The manuscript for this book received the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award (2016), and The American Library Association designated the book a 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

RECEPTION

"Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers is everything I look for in a book of academic literary criticism. It is literary history in the best sense, grounded so deeply in archival research that every chapter yields truly original facts and insights. ...The analysis is methodical and persuasive, the writing lucid and incisive. ...Tolliver’s book must now be considered a mandatory read for anyone seeking to understand the pressures that came to bear on Black writers in the mid-twentieth century."
–Shane Graham, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

"Tolliver's thick (re)description of the history of Black cultural expression in the Cold War political context is both forceful and eloquent. . . Tolliver’s intervention insists on the significance of economics to the production and interpretation of Black literature during the Cold War, but also challenges the field’s upholding of elite liberal racial values."
—Samantha Pinto, African American Review

"In truth, Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers departs from now-standard accounts of race and culture in the Cold War by treating the transatlantic, multilingual character of Black literary radicalism as a whole way of seeing. When it speaks with genuine freshness, it speaks in War, cosmopolitan stereo ad simultaneous translation”
—Willian J. Maxwell, American Literary History Online Review

SPOOK(ED):
AFRICAN LITERATURE, NATIONAL SECURITY, AND THE FICTIONS OF STATECRAFT

For most of its nearly two hundred and fifty years of existence the U.S. state has  viewed African Americans almost exclusively as an internal subversive threat. Spook(ed), THEN, approaches the tension generated when individual African Americans were incorporated into the state apparatus through a conjunctive reading of African American travel narratives and spy thrillers, texts published in the period from the early Cold War to our contemporary moment. These texts, concerned as they are with actual and fictional African Americans brought into the national security state apparatus, provide a unique, if rarely considered, angle on race as a matter of national security and the production of fictions about racial progress as matter of statecraft. Spook(ed) is primarily concerned with African American figures occupying positions whose propaganda value served to convince a skeptical global audience of America’s improved racial climate and provide evidence to a domestic audience of African Americans’ new role as strategic partners in securing American interests. Spook(ed) examines this last necessary fiction as a glue that both binds and blinds, defining racial progress and yoking African Americans’ political aspirations to US national security interests.