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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 proletariat’s 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.
Acknowledgments | ix
Introduction: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion | 1
Notebook 1 Down by the Riverside: Richard Wright,
the 1927 Flood, and the Citizen-Refugee | 35
Notebook 2 “Crusade for Justice”: Ida B. Wells and
the Power of the Multitude | 74
Notebook 3 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction:
Theorizing Divine Violence | 123
Notebook 4 Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the
Mountain: An Anthropology of Power | 193
Notebook 5 The New Day: Notes on Education and
the Dark Proletariat | 244
Conclusion: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity
to Motion—A Race for Theory | 291
Notes | 299
Index | 333