How did Black writers in the US use literature to participate in the
economic and racial political activism that characterized the Great
Depression? Associate Professor of English Nathaniel Mills, author of Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature,
describes the activity of the cultural networks of the Communist
left and the new forms of social transformation and radical imagination
the period’s leftist writers generated. Presented by the Department of English through its Literature in a Time of Crisis series in summer 2020.