Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics(Commonalities)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
This is an excellent study of the exigencies of black politics during the Depression era. Highly recommended.-- "Choice" Thinking through Crisis. . . is a first-rate scholarly contribution to the ongoing effort to think the resistance of Blackness to its objectification.-- "Cultural Critique" James Edward Ford's erudition is critical and compositional. Thinking Through Crisis teaches us to reread texts that are, now, in his placement of them alongside one another, emanations of a larger, refolded, unfolding topography of twentieth century radical thought. This is a welcome and unique accomplishment. Ford is a sharp and adventurous thinker and Thinking Through Crisis expresses his gifts with profound, difficult beauty.---Fred Moten, New York University