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Abstract:
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Testing the Seams of the American Dream : Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War delineates the concept of the liberal tolerance agenda in early Cold War . The liberal tolerance message of the U .S . government , the Democratic Party , and others endorsed racial tolerance and envisioned the possibility of a future free from racism and inequality . Filmmakers in often disseminated a liberal message similar to that of the politicians in the form of “race problem” films . My shows how these films and the liberal tolerance agenda as a whole promises racial equality to the racial minority in exchange for hard work , patriotism , education , and a belief in the majority culture . My first chapter , “Washing White the Racial Subject : Hollywood’s First Black Problem Film ,” performs a close reading of Arthur Laurents 1946 play Home of the Brave , which features a Jewish American protagonist , in conjunction with a reading of the 1949 film version , which has an African American protagonist . The differences between the two texts reveal the slippages in the liberal tolerance agenda and signal the inability of filmmakers to envision racial equality on the big screen . “The American Institution and the Racial Subject ,” my second chapter , discusses the 1949 film Pinky as well as Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter . All of these works suggests that the attainment of education promises entry into the mainstream by racial minorities , yet Paredes and Sone question this process by interpreting it as resulting in the dual segregation of their protagonists . My third chapter , “Earning and Cultural Capital : The Work that Determines Place ,” looks at the promise that with hard work anyone can attain the American Dream . I show how the 1951 film Go for Broke! , Ann Petry’s The Street , and José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho work to dispel this American myth . My final chapter , “The Regrets of Dissent : Blacklists and the Race Question ,” examines the 1954 film Salt of the Earth alongside Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and John Okada’s No -No Boy to reveal the dangerous mixture of race and dissent in this era . |