Winner, 2020 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association
Honorable Mention, MSA First Book Prize
In Thinking Through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes during the 1930s in order to articulate a materialist theory of trauma. Ford highlights the dark proletariats emergence from the multitude apposite to white supremacist agendas. In these works, Ford argues, proletarian, modernist, and surrealist aesthetics transform fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, leased convicts, levee workers, and activist intellectuals into protagonists of anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements in the United States.
Thinking Through Crisis intervenes in debates on the 1930s, radical subjectivity, and states of emergency. It will be of interest to scholars of American literature, African American literature, proletarian literature, black studies, trauma theory, and political theory.
Daugiau informacijos
Winner of William Sanders Scarborough Prize 2020. Short-listed for Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize 2021.
| Acknowledgments |
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ix | |
| Introduction: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion |
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1 | (34) |
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Notebook 1 Down by the Riverside: Richard Wright, the 1927 Flood, and the Citizen-Refugee |
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35 | (39) |
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Notebook 2 "Crusade for Justice": Ida B. Wells and the Power of the Multitude |
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74 | (49) |
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Notebook 3 W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction: Theorizing Divine Violence |
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123 | (70) |
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Notebook 4 Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain: An Anthropology of Power |
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193 | (51) |
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Notebook 5 The New Day: Notes on Education and the Dark Proletariat |
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244 | (47) |
| Conclusion: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion---A Race for Theory |
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291 | (8) |
| Notes |
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299 | (34) |
| Index |
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333 | |
James Edward Ford III is Associate Professor of English at Occidental College. His writings on the aesthetics of black radicalism, black popular culture, and political theory have appeared in the journals Novel, Biography, Cultural Critique, College Literature, New Centennial Review, ASAP Journal, and multiple edited collections. He is currently working on "Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins" and "Hip-Hop's Late Style: Disheveling the Origins," two projects that rethink the origins and ends of black American cultural production.
