The Irish Voice in America : Irish-American Fiction from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Samuels Beckett's largest single publication was the nineteen translations he did for Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology (1934). Beckett has traditionally been viewed as an apolitical (post)modernist rather than as a willing and major participant in Negro's racial, political, and aesthetic agenda. But, as Alan Friedman demonstrates, Beckett's participation i Negro resulted from his deep and abiding friendship with Cunard believed racial justice and equality could be achieved only through communism, "black" and "red" were inextricably linked in her vision. Beckett in Black and Red radically revalues both Cunard and Negro and reconceives Beckett as profoundly engaged with major historical and intellectual concerns of the twentieth century.