1930s Black activism
A01=Nathaniel Mills
African American leftist writers
African American literary Marxism
African American literature and politics
African American Marxism
African American proletarian fiction
African American socialist history
African American studies book
and resistance
Author_Nathaniel Mills
Black cultural resistance
Black history and socialism
Black leftist movements
Black literature and ideology
Black Marxist literary study
Black modernist literature
Black radical literature
Black radical thinkers
Black radical tradition
Black writers and revolution
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
class
class struggle in Black writing
Communism and Black Americans
Communist-affiliated Black writers
cultural studies and class
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Great Depression Black politics
Great Depression Black writers
interdisciplinary Black studies
intersectionality in Black Marxism
Jim Crow
leftist literature of the 1930s
literary representations of outcasts
lumpenproletariat and racial identity
Marxism and racial justice
Marxist literary criticism
Marxist theory in Black writing
modernism and Black politics
new book on Black Marxism
political theory in Black writing
race
race and class in American history
race and resistance in literature
radical aesthetics in Black literature
radical resistance
resistance in fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781625342799
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 154 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2017
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Marxism, the concept of the lumpenproletariat refers to the masses in rags, outsiders on the edge of society, drifters and criminals, of little or no use politically. But in Ragged Revolutionaries, Nathaniel Mills argues that the lumpenproletariat was central to an overlooked yet vibrant mode of African American Marxism formulated during the Great Depression by black writers on the Communist left.
By analyzing multiple published and unpublished works from the period, Mills shows how Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker used the lumpenproletariat to imagine new forms of revolutionary knowledge and agency. In their writings, hobos riding the rails, criminals hustling to make ends meet, heroic black folk- outlaws, and individuals who fall out of the proletariat into the social margins all furnish material for thinking through resistance to the exploitations of capitalism, patriarchy, and Jim Crow. Ragged Revolutionaries introduces the lumpenproletariat into literary study, offers a new account of the place of Marxism in African American literature and politics, and clarifies the political and aesthetic commitments of three major modern black writers.
By analyzing multiple published and unpublished works from the period, Mills shows how Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker used the lumpenproletariat to imagine new forms of revolutionary knowledge and agency. In their writings, hobos riding the rails, criminals hustling to make ends meet, heroic black folk- outlaws, and individuals who fall out of the proletariat into the social margins all furnish material for thinking through resistance to the exploitations of capitalism, patriarchy, and Jim Crow. Ragged Revolutionaries introduces the lumpenproletariat into literary study, offers a new account of the place of Marxism in African American literature and politics, and clarifies the political and aesthetic commitments of three major modern black writers.
Nathaniel Mills is assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota.
