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Benjamin Balthaser

Indiana University South Bend, English, Faculty Member

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I'm Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic U.S. literature, Post 1900, at Indiana University-South Bend. My 2016 book from University of Michigan Press, _Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War_, explores connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century. Articles and essays of mine have appeared or are forthcoming in journals or collections such as American Quarterly, Boston Review, PMLA, Jacobin, Historical Materialism, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Cambridge History of Native American Literature, American Literature in Transition, Tablet, Reconstruction, The Baffler, The Hill, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Public Seminar, New Politics, Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature and elsewhere. I have also published a collection of poems about Jewish victims of the blacklist entitled Dedication, from Partisan Press, in the fall of 2011 (this site for now only lists my academic writing, public and peer reviewed). My poems have also appeared in journals such as Minnesota Review, Massachusetts Review, Laurel Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Chiron Review, Potomac Review, 14 Hills, Quarterly West, Slope, Pemmican, Poetry International, South Dakota Review and elsewhere.

My current project, tentatively titled "Citizens of the Whole World: The Jewish Radical Left and the U.S. Cultures of Anti-Zionism" is on contract with Verso, and is due in print summer of 2025

I joined the editorial team of American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, as associate editor July of 2024.

The courses I currently teach range in topics from African-American literature, interdisciplinary surveys of U.S. multi-ethnic literature, transnational cultures of U.S. modernism and post-modernism, labor and literature, creative and expository writing, literary theory, and U.S. empire and literature. I currently also serve as secretary-treasurer of our campus AAUP advocacy chapter.

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Books by Benjamin Balthaser

Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War

https://www.press.umich.edu/7381040/anti_imperialist_modernism

Book Reviews of Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Book Reviews of Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Reviews by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Wendy Kozol, Sarah Ehlers, Františka Zezuláková Schormová, Patric... more

peer reviewed essays by Benjamin Balthaser

Not Your Good Germans: Holocaust Memory, Anti-Fascism, and the anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

Historial Materialism: Issue 32 (1&2): Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism, 2024

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of Black Power engendered a ... more It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of Black Power engendered a split between Jews and the New Left. Some understand the rise of Holocaust memory in the late 1960s an expression of Jewish nationalism, while others
locate increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival. Either way, both narratives assume the tension between leftwing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism, and locate a new American Jewish
commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home. Yet most prominent Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – from Abbie Hoffman to David Gilbert – did not agree. Not only did much of the Jewish
New Left in organizations such as SDS and SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist BPP, many deployed Holocaust and Red Scare memory to formulate their
revolutionary global politics.

Article:
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/not-your-good-germans

Special Issue:
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/special-issue/issue-32-12-marxism-and-critique-antisemitism

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews t... more It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism, " as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left' s anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S. ' s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged

"Workers" Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature

Cultural representations of the working classes are often caught between a central contradiction:... more Cultural representations of the working classes are often caught between a central contradiction: on the one hand, labor is purchased by capital as a commodity, and forced into a uniform and objective labor process. On the other hand, both this labor process and the workers themselves are anything but uniform, historically static, or evenly exploited across single regions and whole markets. Beginning with the first attempt to represent a global working class in print, this essay starts with a reading of Karl Marx's Capital as a contradictory representation of workers: they are at once presented as in a social relationship with capital mediated through the impersonal wage, and at other times, subject to racialization, violence, and other contingent and historically specific modes of domination. These shifting modes of representation also correspond with radical stylistic shifts in Capital, from an ironic mode of immanent critique, to the gritty realism of the final section, in which Marx describes the process by which peasants, slaves and indigenous people are wrested from their lands and subject to sensational forms of violence. Rather than suggest that this is a contradiction solved temporally - capitalism will mature into formal wage labor - I suggest it is an inherent problem in the representation of labor through literature. Asking how this contradiction manifests for U.S. novelists, I pose that Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, attempts to imagine capitalism as a universal form of wage relations. As the formal beginning of proletarian literature in the U.S., The Jungle at once captures the horror of industrial production, and yet narrowly defines the working-class as European descended wage workers, racially and politically separating them from African American workers, and at times, more recent immigrants. Contrasting The Jungle with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Native Son begins with the very underemployed, politically unrepresented and informal workers that Sinclair marginalizes. Set on the South Side of Chicago just before World War II, Wrights' Bigger Thomas is as one critic describes, "lumpenproletariat," apolitical, violent, and unpredictable, and yet is also seen as having a powerful will to resist his own objectification and to insist on his own agency. The novel concludes much as Marx does, with an ambiguous if future-oriented vision of workers uniting across differences of race and region, and yet also offers no illusions about how difficult this may be to accomplish. The working class for Wright is represented as a contradiction, both an objective form of exploitation and domination, and a subjective entry-point that by definition cannot construct itself on its own as a universal subject.

The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

Historical Materialism, 29(2), 119-142 (May 2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341956

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality... more As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

New Deal Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and 1930s Literary Left PMLA

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/new-deal-settler-colonialism-indigeneity-and... more

When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War

American Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 2, June, 2020

In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator trav... more In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator travels with his parents to the then suburbs of Brooklyn with a “Zionist leader” to consider the real estate speculator’s offer to buy into racially segregated housing tracts. Observing the isolation of the neighborhood and the ostentatious whiteness of the Zionist developer, Gold forces implicit connections among whiteness, Zionism, and speculation in land. Reinforced by the narrator’s positive identification with a working-class Jew who proudly identifies as racially marked, the young Mikey contrasts working-class antiracism with the class pretentions and racism of Zionism. This essay explores the Jewish world in which Gold’s novel was written, looking at the ways in which Jewish writers and journalists in the Communist Party and other left-wing organizations articulated an anti-Zionist politics as part of a global critique of capitalism and imperialism. This essay argues that left-wing anti-Zionism articulated an ontologically different concept of Jewish being-in-the-world up to and after the Holocaust, one that centered solidarity and diasporic anti-imperialism in the face of fascist violence. Linking anti-Zionism with a Jewish left critique of whiteness, this essay provides a counternarrative to the assumption that assimilation, bourgeois liberalism, and support for Zionism were teleological certainties for the Jewish Left, or that nationalism was the default response to the European Judeocide.

"Class" Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory

Class is not a term like style that refers to a quality inherent in the literature itself, or gen... more Class is not a term like style that refers to a quality inherent in the literature itself, or genre, that while historically produced, nonetheless is imagined to have formal properties. Class is rather a way of seeing, an analysis of how literature has been constituted by capitalist social relations and also has responded to—and been seized by— working class movements, from the abolition of slavery to the archipelago of movements against neoliberalism in our post-Fordist age. “Class” understands working class literature in a US context, as literature that was once about working class people, from the mediated publication of slave narratives, to the middle class gaze of realism, to its transformation in the 20th century into literature about the subjectivity of working class people themselves. As Hungarian Marxist theorist Georg Lukacs notes, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are both reified as alienated commodities while at the same time perceives their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labor power. Or as Marx put it, “abstract labor” is always in conflict and in contradiction with “living labor,” the real embodied lives of workers whose persons are part of the commodity circulation process. Thus the novels that arose out of the working class revolutions of the 20th century often focus on the first person process of subjectivization, as the working class protagonist realizes their own alienation and strives to transform it in the process of personal and often social struggle. Of particular interest in the US context is the way in which race and class often function as double and mutually reinforcing forms of alienation. At the height of the working class literary movement in the mid-20th century, novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is the Heart and Richard Wright’s Native Son offered engagements with this double question, with Ann Petry’s The Street and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio furthered this question with the gendering of labor. In the post-Fordist era, the question of class and subjectivity has fragmented even further, without working class parties and large industrial unions to offer a totalized countervision of working subjectivity. Novels such as Helena Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange offer a fragmented and transnational vision of new working class

From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity

‘From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2020, pp. 39-58

Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushe... more Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushered in a new era of governmentality for indigenous people in the United States. The IRA has been debated since its inauguration, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which it is part of an ongoing theorization of Native American modernity. Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé intellectual and activist who studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and then later in Leningrad, became one of the few indigenous intellectuals at the time to fuse a Marxist analysis of capitalism and modernity with an indigenous epistemology of sovereignty. In a series of essays, op-eds, seminar papers, and notes, Phinney’s position is that Native Americans have been forcibly conscripted into capitalist modernity and that their question is less whether they can revive the “old ways” than whether they can alter the conditions of domination by capitalism and settler colonialism. Phinney does not reject modernity but instead asks how indigenous people can find a way to remain “alert modern communities” and autonomous democratic subjects. By analyzing Soviet forms of minority nationalism, Marxian theories of history, and modern theories of race, Phinney prefigures what Kevin Bryuneel calls the “third space of sovereignty” by arguing that Native Americans need to find modes of collective economic independence, while also forming alliances with other oppressed groups through autonomous organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which Phinney helped found. Working within the Bureau of Indian Affairs while at the same time, as an NCAI founder, fiercely criticizing the state, Phinney both lived and theorized a dialectical sense of modernity in his life and writings.

Horror Cities: Contesting the Ruins of Capitalism in Contemporary Genre Cinema

Camera Obscura Volume 35, Number 1 (103) 1 May 2020 In both art and politics, the deindustrializ... more Camera Obscura Volume 35, Number 1 (103) 1 May 2020

In both art and politics, the deindustrialized city would seem to have taken on the qualities of the “unrepresentable,” a traumatic experience that can only be recorded by its attendant silence, or of depoliticized representation in genres such as “ruin porn.” Despite or perhaps because of this, the postindustrial city is ubiquitous within the genres of scifi/speculative, fantasy, and horror cinema, appearing consistently as backdrop, symbol, animus, and even in some cases, character. Given the wide literature on horror film, haunting, and traumatic memory, this article suggests we read the emergence of the “horror city” as a representation of the political unconscious of this historical conjuncture. Many films refer back to older mythologies of imperial and racial conquest, but also by doing so represent the symbol of modernity—the city—as travel back to a traumatic past. Yet within this return to history, there is a contest over allegory. Contrasting neoconservative narratives of films like The Road (dir. John Hillcoat, US, 2009) and the slasher film Hostel (dir. Eli Roth, US/Germany/Czech Republic/Slovakia/Iceland, 2005) suggests that the future has not vanished but rather has been spatially dislocated to the peripheries, as the modern site of production returns to inflict pain only on those unaware of its existence. And perhaps more radical still, two independent films, Vampz (dir. Steve Lustgarten, US, 2004) and Hood of the Living Dead (dir. Eduardo and Jose Quiroz, US, 2005), suggest that the abandoned city is still a site for the basic labor of human reproduction even as the infrastructure of full employment has vanished. As a counternarrative to both “ruin porn” and the “horror city,” these low-budget films offer the deindustrialized city as a site of mutuality and political contestation rather than a mystified object of horror and abjection.

The Fatal Machine: The Post War Imperial State and the Radical Novel, 1940-1950

American Literature in Transition 1940-1950, Cambridge University Press

Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and international Perspectives

by Magnus Nilsson, Kati Launis, Benjamin Balthaser, and Eugenio Di Stefano

The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, ... more The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s).
These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico. Together they give a complex and comparative – albeit far from comprehensive – picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities.
By capturing a wide range of definitions and literatures, this collection gives a broad and rich picture of the many-facetted phenomenon of working-class literature(s), disrupts narrow understandings of the concept and phenomenon, as well as identifies and discusses some of the most important theoretical and historical questions brought to the fore by the study of this literature.
If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an overview of the history and research of a particular nation’s working-class literature. If read as an edited collection (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s).

"Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia": Rethinking Indigenous Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D'Arcy McNickle

American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 2, June 2014, pp. 385-416 (Article)

Cold War Re-visions: Negotiating Representation and Resistance in the Unseen Salt of the Earth

American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 2, June 2008, pp. 347-371 (Article)

S alt of the Earth is often remembered as the primary counternarrative of the cold war. A film ma... more S alt of the Earth is often remembered as the primary counternarrative of the cold war. A film made by blacklisted artists, it presents a miners' strike in which a largely Mexican American and Native American union overcomes a Taft-Hartley injunction after the ladies' auxiliary takes over the picket line. 1 Against this backdrop, mine worker Ramón Quintero and his wife, Esperanza, negotiate their new roles, as Esperanza struggles for equality as strike captain and Ramón chafes against the perceived threat to his masculinity. These two narratives, of a strike by a minority union with a long history of racial consciousness and the story of the miners' wives' empowerment as they take over the picket line, challenge central cultural and institutional doctrines of the postwar order: maintenance of the color line, the cold war cult of domesticity, and more than anything, the notion of labor-management "peace" as key to the prosperity of working-class Americans.

Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity

Criticism Summer 2013, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 357–390. ISSN 0011-1589

Re-Staging the Great Depression: Genre as Social Memory in Darren Aronofsky’s _The Wrestler_

Mass Culture, the Novel, and the American Left

Oxford History of the Novel in English, V6: The American Novel, edited by Priscilla Wald and Mic... more

Fantasies of Empire

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/09/11/fantasies-of-empire/

From Slacker to Revolutionary: Generation X and the Rise of the American Global Justice Movement / Benjamin Balthaser

Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War

https://www.press.umich.edu/7381040/anti_imperialist_modernism

Book Reviews of Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Book Reviews of Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Reviews by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Wendy Kozol, Sarah Ehlers, Františka Zezuláková Schormová, Patric... more

Not Your Good Germans: Holocaust Memory, Anti-Fascism, and the anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

Historial Materialism: Issue 32 (1&2): Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism, 2024

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of Black Power engendered a ... more It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of Black Power engendered a split between Jews and the New Left. Some understand the rise of Holocaust memory in the late 1960s an expression of Jewish nationalism, while others
locate increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival. Either way, both narratives assume the tension between leftwing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism, and locate a new American Jewish
commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home. Yet most prominent Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – from Abbie Hoffman to David Gilbert – did not agree. Not only did much of the Jewish
New Left in organizations such as SDS and SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist BPP, many deployed Holocaust and Red Scare memory to formulate their
revolutionary global politics.

Article:
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/not-your-good-germans

Special Issue:
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/special-issue/issue-32-12-marxism-and-critique-antisemitism

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews t... more It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism, " as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left' s anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S. ' s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged

"Workers" Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature

Cultural representations of the working classes are often caught between a central contradiction:... more Cultural representations of the working classes are often caught between a central contradiction: on the one hand, labor is purchased by capital as a commodity, and forced into a uniform and objective labor process. On the other hand, both this labor process and the workers themselves are anything but uniform, historically static, or evenly exploited across single regions and whole markets. Beginning with the first attempt to represent a global working class in print, this essay starts with a reading of Karl Marx's Capital as a contradictory representation of workers: they are at once presented as in a social relationship with capital mediated through the impersonal wage, and at other times, subject to racialization, violence, and other contingent and historically specific modes of domination. These shifting modes of representation also correspond with radical stylistic shifts in Capital, from an ironic mode of immanent critique, to the gritty realism of the final section, in which Marx describes the process by which peasants, slaves and indigenous people are wrested from their lands and subject to sensational forms of violence. Rather than suggest that this is a contradiction solved temporally - capitalism will mature into formal wage labor - I suggest it is an inherent problem in the representation of labor through literature. Asking how this contradiction manifests for U.S. novelists, I pose that Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, attempts to imagine capitalism as a universal form of wage relations. As the formal beginning of proletarian literature in the U.S., The Jungle at once captures the horror of industrial production, and yet narrowly defines the working-class as European descended wage workers, racially and politically separating them from African American workers, and at times, more recent immigrants. Contrasting The Jungle with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Native Son begins with the very underemployed, politically unrepresented and informal workers that Sinclair marginalizes. Set on the South Side of Chicago just before World War II, Wrights' Bigger Thomas is as one critic describes, "lumpenproletariat," apolitical, violent, and unpredictable, and yet is also seen as having a powerful will to resist his own objectification and to insist on his own agency. The novel concludes much as Marx does, with an ambiguous if future-oriented vision of workers uniting across differences of race and region, and yet also offers no illusions about how difficult this may be to accomplish. The working class for Wright is represented as a contradiction, both an objective form of exploitation and domination, and a subjective entry-point that by definition cannot construct itself on its own as a universal subject.

The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

Historical Materialism, 29(2), 119-142 (May 2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341956

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality... more As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

New Deal Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and 1930s Literary Left PMLA

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/new-deal-settler-colonialism-indigeneity-and... more

When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War

American Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 2, June, 2020

In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator trav... more In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator travels with his parents to the then suburbs of Brooklyn with a “Zionist leader” to consider the real estate speculator’s offer to buy into racially segregated housing tracts. Observing the isolation of the neighborhood and the ostentatious whiteness of the Zionist developer, Gold forces implicit connections among whiteness, Zionism, and speculation in land. Reinforced by the narrator’s positive identification with a working-class Jew who proudly identifies as racially marked, the young Mikey contrasts working-class antiracism with the class pretentions and racism of Zionism. This essay explores the Jewish world in which Gold’s novel was written, looking at the ways in which Jewish writers and journalists in the Communist Party and other left-wing organizations articulated an anti-Zionist politics as part of a global critique of capitalism and imperialism. This essay argues that left-wing anti-Zionism articulated an ontologically different concept of Jewish being-in-the-world up to and after the Holocaust, one that centered solidarity and diasporic anti-imperialism in the face of fascist violence. Linking anti-Zionism with a Jewish left critique of whiteness, this essay provides a counternarrative to the assumption that assimilation, bourgeois liberalism, and support for Zionism were teleological certainties for the Jewish Left, or that nationalism was the default response to the European Judeocide.

"Class" Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory

Class is not a term like style that refers to a quality inherent in the literature itself, or gen... more Class is not a term like style that refers to a quality inherent in the literature itself, or genre, that while historically produced, nonetheless is imagined to have formal properties. Class is rather a way of seeing, an analysis of how literature has been constituted by capitalist social relations and also has responded to—and been seized by— working class movements, from the abolition of slavery to the archipelago of movements against neoliberalism in our post-Fordist age. “Class” understands working class literature in a US context, as literature that was once about working class people, from the mediated publication of slave narratives, to the middle class gaze of realism, to its transformation in the 20th century into literature about the subjectivity of working class people themselves. As Hungarian Marxist theorist Georg Lukacs notes, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are both reified as alienated commodities while at the same time perceives their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labor power. Or as Marx put it, “abstract labor” is always in conflict and in contradiction with “living labor,” the real embodied lives of workers whose persons are part of the commodity circulation process. Thus the novels that arose out of the working class revolutions of the 20th century often focus on the first person process of subjectivization, as the working class protagonist realizes their own alienation and strives to transform it in the process of personal and often social struggle. Of particular interest in the US context is the way in which race and class often function as double and mutually reinforcing forms of alienation. At the height of the working class literary movement in the mid-20th century, novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is the Heart and Richard Wright’s Native Son offered engagements with this double question, with Ann Petry’s The Street and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio furthered this question with the gendering of labor. In the post-Fordist era, the question of class and subjectivity has fragmented even further, without working class parties and large industrial unions to offer a totalized countervision of working subjectivity. Novels such as Helena Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange offer a fragmented and transnational vision of new working class

From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity

‘From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2020, pp. 39-58

Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushe... more Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushered in a new era of governmentality for indigenous people in the United States. The IRA has been debated since its inauguration, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which it is part of an ongoing theorization of Native American modernity. Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé intellectual and activist who studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and then later in Leningrad, became one of the few indigenous intellectuals at the time to fuse a Marxist analysis of capitalism and modernity with an indigenous epistemology of sovereignty. In a series of essays, op-eds, seminar papers, and notes, Phinney’s position is that Native Americans have been forcibly conscripted into capitalist modernity and that their question is less whether they can revive the “old ways” than whether they can alter the conditions of domination by capitalism and settler colonialism. Phinney does not reject modernity but instead asks how indigenous people can find a way to remain “alert modern communities” and autonomous democratic subjects. By analyzing Soviet forms of minority nationalism, Marxian theories of history, and modern theories of race, Phinney prefigures what Kevin Bryuneel calls the “third space of sovereignty” by arguing that Native Americans need to find modes of collective economic independence, while also forming alliances with other oppressed groups through autonomous organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which Phinney helped found. Working within the Bureau of Indian Affairs while at the same time, as an NCAI founder, fiercely criticizing the state, Phinney both lived and theorized a dialectical sense of modernity in his life and writings.

Horror Cities: Contesting the Ruins of Capitalism in Contemporary Genre Cinema

Camera Obscura Volume 35, Number 1 (103) 1 May 2020 In both art and politics, the deindustrializ... more Camera Obscura Volume 35, Number 1 (103) 1 May 2020

In both art and politics, the deindustrialized city would seem to have taken on the qualities of the “unrepresentable,” a traumatic experience that can only be recorded by its attendant silence, or of depoliticized representation in genres such as “ruin porn.” Despite or perhaps because of this, the postindustrial city is ubiquitous within the genres of scifi/speculative, fantasy, and horror cinema, appearing consistently as backdrop, symbol, animus, and even in some cases, character. Given the wide literature on horror film, haunting, and traumatic memory, this article suggests we read the emergence of the “horror city” as a representation of the political unconscious of this historical conjuncture. Many films refer back to older mythologies of imperial and racial conquest, but also by doing so represent the symbol of modernity—the city—as travel back to a traumatic past. Yet within this return to history, there is a contest over allegory. Contrasting neoconservative narratives of films like The Road (dir. John Hillcoat, US, 2009) and the slasher film Hostel (dir. Eli Roth, US/Germany/Czech Republic/Slovakia/Iceland, 2005) suggests that the future has not vanished but rather has been spatially dislocated to the peripheries, as the modern site of production returns to inflict pain only on those unaware of its existence. And perhaps more radical still, two independent films, Vampz (dir. Steve Lustgarten, US, 2004) and Hood of the Living Dead (dir. Eduardo and Jose Quiroz, US, 2005), suggest that the abandoned city is still a site for the basic labor of human reproduction even as the infrastructure of full employment has vanished. As a counternarrative to both “ruin porn” and the “horror city,” these low-budget films offer the deindustrialized city as a site of mutuality and political contestation rather than a mystified object of horror and abjection.

The Fatal Machine: The Post War Imperial State and the Radical Novel, 1940-1950

American Literature in Transition 1940-1950, Cambridge University Press

Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and international Perspectives

by Magnus Nilsson, Kati Launis, Benjamin Balthaser, and Eugenio Di Stefano

The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, ... more The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s).
These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico. Together they give a complex and comparative – albeit far from comprehensive – picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities.
By capturing a wide range of definitions and literatures, this collection gives a broad and rich picture of the many-facetted phenomenon of working-class literature(s), disrupts narrow understandings of the concept and phenomenon, as well as identifies and discusses some of the most important theoretical and historical questions brought to the fore by the study of this literature.
If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an overview of the history and research of a particular nation’s working-class literature. If read as an edited collection (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s).

"Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia": Rethinking Indigenous Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D'Arcy McNickle

American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 2, June 2014, pp. 385-416 (Article)

Cold War Re-visions: Negotiating Representation and Resistance in the Unseen Salt of the Earth

American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 2, June 2008, pp. 347-371 (Article)

S alt of the Earth is often remembered as the primary counternarrative of the cold war. A film ma... more S alt of the Earth is often remembered as the primary counternarrative of the cold war. A film made by blacklisted artists, it presents a miners' strike in which a largely Mexican American and Native American union overcomes a Taft-Hartley injunction after the ladies' auxiliary takes over the picket line. 1 Against this backdrop, mine worker Ramón Quintero and his wife, Esperanza, negotiate their new roles, as Esperanza struggles for equality as strike captain and Ramón chafes against the perceived threat to his masculinity. These two narratives, of a strike by a minority union with a long history of racial consciousness and the story of the miners' wives' empowerment as they take over the picket line, challenge central cultural and institutional doctrines of the postwar order: maintenance of the color line, the cold war cult of domesticity, and more than anything, the notion of labor-management "peace" as key to the prosperity of working-class Americans.

Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity

Criticism Summer 2013, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 357–390. ISSN 0011-1589

Re-Staging the Great Depression: Genre as Social Memory in Darren Aronofsky’s _The Wrestler_

Mass Culture, the Novel, and the American Left

Oxford History of the Novel in English, V6: The American Novel, edited by Priscilla Wald and Mic... more

Fantasies of Empire

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/09/11/fantasies-of-empire/

From Slacker to Revolutionary: Generation X and the Rise of the American Global Justice Movement / Benjamin Balthaser

Maurice Isserman’s Red Scare The Baffler

https://thebaffler.com/latest/maurice-issermans-red-scare-balthaser

Breaking With Formation: The Jew as Reactionary in American Media (Contending Modernities)

Zionism's Jewish Nostalgia Trap: A Rebuttal of Franklin Foer · Jewschool

Zionism's Jewish Nostalgia Trap: A Rebuttal of Franklin Foer

https://jewschool.com/zionisms-jewish-nostalgia-trap-a-rebuttal-of-franklin-foer-174146

The New Anti-Dreyfusards – Spectre Journal

Spectre Journal, 2023

Most European and North American countries define antisemitism in a strange way, conflating criti... more Most European and North American countries define antisemitism in a strange way, conflating criticism of a state with criticism of a people. Perhaps most strange is that antisemitism needs to be codified by statute-there is no other form of racism or bigotry defined the same way, linked to the formation of a single state, or requiring law makers to enforce not only its prohibition but its definition.

https://spectrejournal.com/the-new-anti-dreyfusards/

The Soul of Man Under Fascism: Reading Gramsci's Prison Letters in an Age of Catastrophe - Strange Matters

https://strangematters.coop/antonio-gramsci-letters-from-prison-review/

From Schlemiel to Super Hero – Volodimir Zelensky and the Price of Western Inclusion Spectre Journal

As Russia invades Ukraine, Jews find themselves yet again conscripted into the West's fantasies o... more

"Don't Work" and Other Lessons From the Marxist Feminism of Meridel Le Sueur

https://inthesetimes.com/article/depression-era-marxist-feminist-writer-activist-working-class-la... more

On The Paranoid Style in Jewish American Politics

https://jewschool.com/on-the-paranoid-style-in-jewish-american-politics-173623

The Red Scare Scarred the Left -But Couldn't Kill It

The postwar Second Red Scare successfully smashed the American left. But in the midst of its deva... more

Mark Levin Wants a New Red Scare

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/mark-levin-red-scare-mccarthyism-authoritarianism-anti-communism-a... more

Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves

Jacobin, 2021

Cold War hysteria meant that Communist writer Mike Gold has been universally denounced in life an... more

A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/david-graeber-obituary-judaism

The Necroliberal University

The neoliberal university will kill you with managerial expertise, an expertise it gathered from ... more

Rethinking Socialism From Below in the ... and Black Lives Matter - New Politics

New Politics

https://newpol.org/rethinking-socialism-from-below-in-the-age-of-covid-and-black-lives-matte/

On Thoreau: Staying Behind

ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE, 2020

On Thoreau, the death drives of capitalism, and how traveling and Manifest Destiny may have to do... more

Our American Zion

A review essay of Bari Weiss' How to Fight Anti-Semitism https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/bari... more

A Socialist Horizon: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Promise of a New Party

North Meridian Review, 2019

"The often-criticized "vagueness" of socialism since the rise of DSA is not a weakness of the mov... more

The Death and Life of the Jewish Century - Boston Review

The resurgence of anti-Semitism today is not a quirk of Donald Trump; it has deep roots in powerf... more

Antisemitism and the Crisis of Liberalism

Jacobin, 2019

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/antisemitism-trump-corbyn-deborah-lipstadt

Racial Violence in Black and White - Boston Review

100 years ago, anti-lynching activists re-circulated lynching photos as part of their strategy to... more

Richard Wright in Context ALH

The renewal of attention to Richard Wright is a phenomenon that he himself may have appreciated w... more The renewal of attention to Richard Wright is a phenomenon that he himself may have appreciated with some irony: his critical reception in the US tracks the rise and fall of the Left that both helped produce him and ultimately, he believed, constrained his artistry. And unlike the celebrated rerelease of Native Son in the early 1970s, Wright's recent reemergence has been marked by a certain ambivalence about his legacy. The acclaimed 2019 HBO film by Suzan-Lori Parks and Rashid Johnson updated Chicago's Bigger Thomas, refashioning him as a stylish, green-haired punk-rocker and self-taught intellectual. Such representations accompanied the erasure of many of the unsavory, if dialectical, elements of Wright's Bigger: his rape and murder of Bessie, along with his brief, if transformational cross-racial experience of intrasubjectivity with Jan, and more ambiguously, with Max. Both the film and the 2016 play by Nambi E. Kelley on which it was based excised the final trial as well as the role of a radical Left. Such moves suggest Bigger's moral complications-and the promise of solidarity-are too complicated, or not complicated enough. This restaging of Wright seems a sign of his artistry and continued relevance, while simultaneously reenacting the ossified midcentury debate that his work offers too little nuance for his Black characters and provides far too didactic a political framework to capture Black subjectivity.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution by Steven S. Lee

The Revolutionary Art of Failure: Martín Espada's _Vivas to Those Who Have Failed_

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4764

No Local: Globalization and the Remaking of Americanism.

A review of Sarika Chandra's _Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Am... more