Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism

Black & White & Noir explores America's pulp modernism through penetrating readings of the noir sensibility lurking in an eclectic array of media: Office of War Information photography, women's experimental films, and African-American novels, among others. It traces the dark edges of cultural detritus blowing across the postwar landscape, finding in pulp a political theory that helps explain America's fascination with lurid spectacles of crime.We are accustomed to thinking of noir as a film form popularized in movies like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep,