In a series of incisive readings, Francisco E. Robles provides a literary history of midcentury US multiethnic literature, tracing the shift from coalitional aesthetics to multiculturalism by focusing on how migrancy and labor politics shape literary innovation. Along the way, Robles shows how writers kept the Popular Front's legacy of coalitional aesthetics alive through literary practices of what he calls speaking with, whereby authors undo their authority as scribes, audiences become participatory interpreters, and texts emerge as places of communal and collaborative work. Beginning with significant, unexpected connections between Zora Neale Hurston and Muriel Rukeyser, and delving deeply into the work of Sanora Babb, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, poets of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, Carlos Bulosan, Tomas Rivera, and authors included in This Bridge Called My Back, Robles examines texts whose range of experimental strategies deliberately engage figurations of movement, migration, and coalition. The experimentation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it's overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the astonishing ways these authors conceive of migrancy as neither static nor statistical but as a modality that necessitates writerly innovation. The result is a genealogy of coalitional aesthetics as a significantly important branch of American midcentury multiethnic writing that sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.
Francisco E. Robles is Assistant Professor of English, University of Notre Dame.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Speaking With and the Work of Coalitional Aesthetics 1. Migrating Engagements: Muriel Rukeyser, Zora Neale Hurston, and New Visions for Migrant Voices 2. Movement Politics and the Politics of Movement: Migrant Coalitions and Farm Labor in the 1940s 3. Signs of Protest: The Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike and Gwendolyn Brooks's "Warpland" Poems 4. Coalitional Aesthetics against Allegory: Carlos Bulosan's and Tomas Rivera's Migrant Pizcaresques 5. This Bridge Called My Back and the Shape of Dialectics to Come Notes Index
"Coalition Literature develops a spirited, fascinating, and critically astute account of an eclectic archive of writers. Equally at ease analyzing fiction or nonfiction, esoteric or amateur lyric, chord progression or musical performance, Robles delivers a host of forceful and illuminating interpretations." -Mary Esteve, Concordia University (Montreal) "Robles restores the history of a powerful multiracial expressive politics and offers a compelling new point of departure for American literary history in all its multiplicity." -Harris Feinsod, Johns Hopkins University
