Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics
James Edward Ford
Abstract
Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for “European Man” that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of “bearing witness” yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid so ... More
Keywords: 1930s, African American literature, Black studies, crisis, trauma
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 | Print ISBN-13: 9780823286904 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2020 | DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823286904.001.0001 |
