America Through Foreign Eyes by Schwarzenbach, Sibyl Ann; Radosh, Laura;

Long description:

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This book collects over 20 original essays and a selection of photographs by Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, from her time spent travelling in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Schwarzenbach’s work was rediscovered in Europe almost 50 years after her early death in 1942. Since then, she has become a cultural icon and an emerging heroine of the early LGBT movement.

Schwarzenbach’s photojournalist work was produced against a European background of interwar economic uncertainty, political turmoil and burgeoning fascism. She carefully studied America’s underbelly during the late Depression, at a time of Jim Crow and the height of the US labor movement. Schwarzenbach traveled across the U.S., reporting on its cities and people, visiting factories and steel mills and speaking with union leaders. She interviewed well-known writers like Dorothy Thompson and Carson McCullers, but equally focused her attention on textile workers and African Americans.

Schwarzenbach’s work revealed ambivalence regarding what she saw during her travels, her horror, but also her begrudging admiration for, and even hope in, America and its peculiar brand of democracy. This book carefully records and translates her observations in English for the first time, also providing a critical introduction to her life and work.

Table of Contents:

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Part 1. Introduction.- 1. American Dream and Nightmare: Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the U.S.- Part 2. Method: On Writing and Photography.- 2. “Interview without a Reporter” (March 1939).- 3. “Photographs as Documents” (Nov. 1937).- Part 3. First Impressions: The Industrial Northeast (USA, 1936-1937).- 4. “On the American Legend” (June 1938).- 5. “America – Land of Optimists? (Nov. 1936).- 6. “Paper Mills & Small Farms in Maine” (Oct. 1936).- 7. “Father Coughlin: The Radio Priest” (Nov. 1936).- 8. “Is Roosevelt a Dictator?” (Dec. 1936).- 9. “Beyond New York” (Feb. 1937).- 10. “Unknown Washington” (Nov. 1936).- 11. “The Journey to Pittsburg: America’s Iron City” (March/April 1937).- 12. “American Ski Vacation without Snow” (April 1937).- 13. “The Question of Democracy American Style” (April 1937).- Part 4. Heading South: Labor and Race Relations (USA, 1937-1938).- 14. “In the Shadows of Knoxville” (Dec. 1937).- 15. “Lumberjacks, Workers & Farmers in the Mountains of Tennessee” (Dec. 1937).- 16. “Aline Bryant: Struggles of a Southern Textile Worker” (March 1937).- 17. “In the Cumberland Mountains” (Dec.1937).- 18. “Strike in Lumberton, North Carolina” (Feb. 1938).- 19. “The Cotton Belt” (Jan. 1938).- 20. “...in the Name of Southern Honor” (April 1938).- Part 5. War and the Final Visit (USA, 1940-1941).- 21. “Westwards” (May 1940).- 22. “The World’s Fair” (June/July 1940).- 23. “Carson McCullers: Hope for America” (July 1940).- 24. “An American Personality: Dorothy Thompson” (Feb. 1941).- 25. “The Great Dictator”: Charlie Chaplin’s new Film” (April 1941).- 26. “White Plains” (April 1941).