During the years I was researching and writing this book, struggles against economic, racial, and gender oppression achieved a new level of visibility in the national news, social media discussions, and everyday political debates. First, the Occupy Wall Street movement brought national attention to the structural inequalities of capitalism and finance. Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, triggering mass protests against racist policing and ultimately helping make visible the frequency of police brutality nationwide. Many more African American individuals lost their lives at the hands of the police, overwhelming us with evidence and examples of the violent racism of the state. In response, the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the prevalence of racial oppression in an era of American history that, not many years ago, had been dubbed “postracial.” At the same time, the social recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality has been a major site of national struggle: efforts to restrict the reproductive rights of women, to deny constitutional rights to gays and lesbians, and to dehumanize transgender subjects, have been asserted and contested. As I write now, the 2016 presidential election has introduced both reactionary and socialist rhetoric into the mainstream of American politics. This election season has furnished complicated, and at times farcical, demonstrations of how white privilege and xenophobia can both obstruct and be intertwined with commitments to economic justice or working-class interests.
In short, as I’ve been writing about the African American Depression-era literary left, contemporary events have foregrounded present concerns that also weighed on radical writers in the 1930s: the complexity of American social relations and the brutality underwriting capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The anticapitalist and antiracist activism that, in both moments, attempts to counteract that brutality, speaks to the perpetual desire for and necessity of revolution. In no small part, this book grew out of the conviction that Marxism, for all of its European and nineteenth-century limitations, can, when appropriated and reworked, teach us about racial, economic, and gender oppression in America—both in the 1930s and now—and how to overcome it.
The general origins of that conviction go back to my academic training in Marxist theory, but the specific moment I now recognize as galvanizing the theoretical and political assumptions informing this book came when, as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I read Ralph Ellison’s 1977 essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” in an American literature class. In this piece, Ellison depicts American life as full of unexpected opportunities that complicate the distribution of cultural expertise according to racial, class, and gender rule. For example, African American workers can have advanced knowledge of classical opera; or Hazel Harrison, Ellison’s music teacher at Tuskegee, can be at once marginalized as an African American woman in the Jim Crow South and privileged as an associate and peer of multiple European composers and musicians. There’s a crucial lesson here for anyone thinking about power and resistance in America: namely, that the disenfranchised possess resources for both cultural creativity and personal self-invention. This point obviously has political ramifications. Working as an activist on the Depression-era left, the young Ellison encounters workers with advanced knowledge of classical opera. The fact that they appreciate high culture while being racially and economically exploited challenges Ellison’s orthodox Marxist assumptions about race and class.
Reading Ellison’s essay was a watershed moment in my intellectual development. At the time, I was committed to Marxism as the best discourse for understanding power and exploitation, oppression and transformation. I was initially tempted to disregard Ellison’s essay as a patriotic defense of the status quo, but the lesson it offered soon seemed one that radical and Marxist intellectuals should embrace and consider rather than dismiss as “liberalism” or Cold War apologetics. Ellison’s insistence that the form of American life equipped the marginalized with the possibility of resisting the full extent of their marginalization came to be, for me, a generative starting point for research. A Marxist understanding of American conditions, I decided, should be one that is informed and strengthened by the claims Ellison puts forth in the essay.
While studying the literary and political radicalism of the Great Depression, I came to feel that the writers of the Depression left who best grasped the basic insights described in “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” were certain African American Communists, including the young Ellison himself, whose entryway into Marxism during the 1930s was not the proletariat, but the transients, criminals, underworld operators, and outlaws of modern society. Marxism has a specific designation for such types: the lumpenproletariat, or “proletariat in rags.” This book explores the strange fact that, for twentieth-century black writers and activists, this clunky German term and minor Marxist concept actually named Marxism’s ability to spark revolutionary consciousness in the United States. The social outsiders of the lumpenproletariat inspired committed Depression-era African American writers to confront a complication later suggested by Ellison’s essay: it’s ignorant to assert that the marginalized are mere victims unable to work against their marginalization, and that doesn’t change the fact that it’s equally ignorant to mistake the inventiveness and resourcefulness of the marginalized as a sign that structural oppression and exclusion don’t exist or are ultimately ineffective. How the young Ellison, along with his comrades Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, wrote about that complication led me on a journey of archival discovery and critical reading that eventually resulted in this book.
This project was made possible by multiple sources of support and guidance. I’m grateful first and foremost to Alan Wald, under whose mentorship and influence this project was conceived and developed, and whose enthusiasm for the study of the American left has been both instructive and inspiring. Marjorie Levinson, Megan Sweeney, and the late Patricia Yaeger were all instrumental in shaping this book’s disciplinary and theoretical interventions. Harvey Teres introduced me to the Depression literary left and thus planted the first seeds of this project. As I researched and wrote this book, the support and critical acumen of Corinne Martin were invaluable. Staff members at the Library of Congress, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University all assisted with my research in the archives. Alice Birney at the Library of Congress, and Robert Luckett and Angela Stewart at the Margaret Walker Center were especially helpful. John Callahan, the literary executor of the Ralph Ellison estate, provided helpful suggestions and permission to quote from the Ellison archive. My ideas were enriched at various points by conversations with Alex Beringer, Anthony Dawahare, Sarah Ehlers, Cheryl Higashida, Lawrence Jackson, Konstantina Karageorgos, Chung-Hao Ku, Megan Levad, Brian Matzke, Timothy Parrish, Paula Rabinowitz, Danielle Spratt, Steven Wexler, and John S. Wright. California State University, Northridge and the University of Minnesota provided support. Amanda Harrison and J. C. Lee were vital allies. My editor, Brian Halley, was both patient and enthusiastic as he helped me navigate the publishing process; his expertise and guidance made this book better than it otherwise would have been. Finally, I’d like to thank various friends and family members, human and feline, for their generosity, assistance, and distraction.