Explores how the family stories entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. This book also provides access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters, and the meanings of race and ethnicity.

Acknowledgments Part 1. Ordinary Families, Popular Culture, and Popular Democracy, 1935-1945 Radio's Formula Drama Popular Theater and Popular Democracy Popular Democracy on the Radio Popular Democracy in Wartime: Multiethnic and Multiracial? Representing the Soldier The New World of the Home Front Soldiers as Veterans: Imagining the Postwar World Looking Back Stories Part 2. Making the Working-Class Family Ordinary: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn From Working-Class Daughter to Working-Class Writer Revising 1930s Radical Visions Remembering a Working-Class Past Instructing the Middle Class The Ethnic and Racial Boundaries of the Ordinary Making Womanhood Ordinary Hollywood Revises A Tree Grows in Brooklyn The Declining Appeal of Tree's Social Terrain Part 3. Home Front Harmony and Remembering Mama "Mama's Bank Account" and Other Ethnic Working-Class Fictions Remembering Mama on the Stage The Mother Next Door on Film, 1947-1948 Mama on CBS, 1949-1956 The Appeal of TV Mama's Ordinary Family "Trading Places" Stories Part 4. Loving Across Prewar Racial and Sexual Boundaries Lillian Smith and Strange Fruit Quality Reinstates the Color Line Strange Fruit as Failed Social Drama The Returning Negro Soldier, Interracial Romance, and Deep Are the Roots Interracial Male Homosociability in Home of the Brave Part 5. "Seeing Through" Jewishness Perception and Racial Boundaries in Focus Policing Racial and Gender Boundaries in The Brick Foxhole Recasting the Victim in Crossfire Deracializing Jewishness in Gentleman's Agreement Part 6. Hollywood Makes Race (In)Visible "A Great Step Forward": The Film Home of the Brave Lost Boundaries: Racial Indeterminacy as Whiteness Pinky: Racial Indeterminacy as Blackness Trading Places or No Way Out? Everyman Stories Part 7. Competing Postwar Representations of Universalism The "Truly Universal People": Richard Durham's Destination Freedom The Evolution of Arthur Miller's Ordinary Family Miller's Search for "the People," 1947-1948 The Creation of an Ordinary American Tragedy: Death of a Salesman The Rising Tide of Anticommunism Part 8. Marital Realism and Everyman Love Stories Marital Realism Before and After the Blacklist The Promise of Live Television Drama Paddy Chayefsky's Everyman Ethnicity Conservative and Corporate Constraints on Representing the Ordinary Filming Television's "Ordinary": Marty's Everyman Romance Part 9. Reracializing the Ordinary American Family: Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry's South Side Childhood Leaving Home, Stepping "Deliberately Against the Beat" The Freedom Family and the Black Left "I Am a Writer": Hansberry in Greenwich Village Raisin in the Sun: Hansberry's Conception, Audience Reception Frozen in the Frame: The Film of Raisin Visions of Belonging Notes Index

Smith's treatment gives readers much to consider...Highly recommended. Choice Visions of Belonging is a monumental work of cultural history... Judith Smith has challenged the common wisdom... And made a powerful contribution. -- Elaine Tyler May Journal of Interdisciplinary History Smith's Visions of Belonging is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship. Research, narrative, and analysis are all exemplary, making the book a 'must read' on the topic of post-war American cultural and social history. Canadian Review of American Studies A powerful & meticulously researched study of fourteen stories that helped to plot the boundaries of cultural citizenship. -- Dara Orenstein Journal of American Ethnic History [It] is full of vitality and is bound to be used, cited, and assigned to generations of students. -- Joseph Hawes Journal of American History Smith has written an important book that will serve as a great resource for historians of American postwar culture and politics. -- Renee Romano American Historical Review A very remarkable and extremely useful book. -- Paul Buhle Film International [This] consistently nuanced and impeccably informed analysis... raises provocative questions. -- Crista DeLuzio H-Net Reviews Highly readable and sensitively written. -- Martin Fradley Film Quarterly [A] rich, fascinating, and important book. -- William Graebner American Studies

Visions of Belonging explores how A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun helped define visions of belonging in America in the postwar years and into the 1950s. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television. She draws on the testimony of authors, directors, readers, and viewers from both sides of the color line to reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide unusually close access to a vibrant conversation about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. They also reacquaint the reader with a time in which the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless but actual change was fiercely resisted. Smith crosses disciplinary boundaries by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Her innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception and shows how both contribute to contested conceptions of American belonging.